Confession: I never buy my children new books. I was once a man who purchased half a shelf of new picture books for my future children well before my wife and I started making babies. But these days I can't even bring myself to walk into a big-box bookstore and pay retail for a book that only takes a couple minutes to read. In the back of my brain I know that somewhere that same book is just sitting in a pile at a thrift store. Sure, will be sticky from another kid's jelly-smeared fingers or smell like the ceiling of a dive bar, but I CAN BUY A HUNDRED BOOKS AT VALUE WORLD FOR THE COST OF ONE AT BORDERS. Seriously: I was there the other day and kid's books were 10 for a dollar. I bought a garbage bag full of them. That's one of my favorite things about Value World: after you hand over your cash, they hand over your purchases in a generic Hefty Bag, as if to say, Stop trying to kid yourself, dude, you just bought garbage. I found a lot of my Terrifying Nixon-Era Children's Books this way, along with some depressingly-illustrated biblical texts and some awful books from small presses that could only have entered the stream of commerce as pity purchases made by the author's friends.

What the thrift store does not provide, we often make. It's so easy these days to make professional-looking books for your kids. Even if you can't draw, you can always use photos from the internet (as long as you don't try to sell it there's no harm in writing whatever twisted, copyright-infringing book you want: epic, gruesome photoshopped battles between the Backyardigans and The Wonder Pets; the secret diaries of David the Gnome; Or you could even make boardbooks out of classic Beastie Boys or Metallica songs. You really are limited only by your imagination (and photoshop skills)).

I've made alphabet books in the past using photos of graffiti (this was the first, and this was the second). The challenge was finding characters for each letter of the alphabet, but it was also kind of fun. A few months ago, I decided to do another mythological alphabet. I wanted to try to find as many letters as we could in a single outing, so we drove up to the beautiful campus of the Cranbrook Educational Community where we wandered around looking for statues to photograph. The prolific Swedish sculptor Carl Milles worked in residence there for two decades and covered the grounds with his work, many with mythological themes. In the 40 acres of terraced gardens surrounding the 1908 Arts and Crafts-style mansion there are also many traditional sculptures of classical subjects. We had an awesome morning of beautiful weather, and when we got home, I put together a book to teach the Greek alphabet. This will prove important some day in the distant future: if one of my children ever finds themselves wandering around Hanover or New Haven searching for a poetry reading at the Phi Beta Kappa house, they won't accidentally wander into a keg party at the Sigma Phi Epsilon house and follow the inevitable path of debauchery and date rape that a little knowledge of the Greek alphabet could have helped them avoid. See, I did it for the children!

I knew that some of the statues represented different figures than the ones I would assign them, such as Flapper Eve here who makes a fine Aphrodite. The story of the judgment of Paris is way less terrifying than the expulsion from Eden. Added bonus: no fig leafs.

This one is Milles' Rape of Europa. I'm telling you, it's important to start associating Epsilon with rape at an early age.

Hebe was the goddess who brought all the other gods ambrosia. Have you ever explained the concept of ambrosia to a 4-year-old? You will drink it from empty cups at tea parties for weeks.

Cross-eyed Zeus here is the coolest statue at Cranbrook because he CRIES when you step on a certain ground tile. My daughter hates it when anyone cries (but especially all-powerful deities), so seeing Zeus piss water out of his eyeballs sends her into hysterics. We always have to visit Zeus last because she's pretty useless after I've made her watch this:

After Zeus we did manage to head over to the school grounds to see the iron Pegasus gates, after which I fantasized about someday sending the kids to school there (even though, as my friend puts it, "the tuition cost is the same as financing a million-dollar car").

I reminded myself that kids are more likely to become drug addicts at Cranbrook than they are on the streets of Detroit, and we moved on to the Centaurs:

Man, I am totally going to get blacklisted at Cranbrook for letting the kid ride the Centaurs.

And don't get me started about the Sphinxes.

Here's a riddle: how do you get two kids off the sphinxes? Answer: promise to let them ride the centaurs.

I don't know who the following statue was supposed to be, but when I saw this photo there was no way she could be anything but Medusa for the purposes of my alphabet book:

The girl is getting into stories from the Odyssey right now, so this was easy:

I managed to represent every letter of the Greek alphabet except for Xi and Omega (some were a stretch---I used carvings on the helmet in the photo above to represent the Phoenix for Phi and the Lapith for Lambda). What I really loved about making this book was that the kids and I had an adventure making it together. You can't go for a walk like this without stories, and I know the girl already associates the book with the good memory of that morning.

We've done other books (that I won't share here) to help Gram remember the names and faces of his family and friends; my mother has made the kids books that tell stories from my childhood and her own. Next I think we're going to take a hike around the neighborhood and take photos of the different plants the kids find, identify them and make a book to give names to the nature that surrounds them. In the future, someone might scavenge through the detritus of our lives in some thrift store somewhere and find the books we've made and wonder what the hell we were thinking. If there's any justice in this world, he'll have whatever the equivalent of a blog is in 2036 and use it to totally make fun of me for these books: Pretentious Abecedaries from the Turn of the Millennium.

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The on-demand book publisher Shutterfly has bought advertising here on Sweet Juniper, and they let me use their new picture book service to print this one:

She may have been brown-nosing for a Popsicle, but I swear she turned to me and said, "I love this book, pops."

Shutterfly has also given me the codes to let twelve Sweet Juniper readers print their own books for free. All you have to do to enter this random drawing is leave a comment on this post. I'd love to hear any ideas you might have for DIY books. I'm a firm believer in taking the things you're passionate about and sharing them with kids. Even if they don't end up passionate about the same things, I believe the passion itself is contagious. Too often the things that make us excited get sidelined in life. I long ago decided against a career in academia because I knew my interest in the classics would become a life of reading esoteric French journal articles and a constant fear of budget cuts. Like most people, what I really loved were the stories, and having kids has given me every reason to rekindle those old joys. So what are you passionate about that you'd like to share with your kids (or nieces/nephews, etc.) one day? Obscure early 80s hardcore bands? Ectoparasite entomology? Do you have a PhD in Post-romantic French Literature (A is for Absinthe. . .B is for Baudelaire)? Do you want to help a kid differentiate between the hood ornaments of classic American cars? What passions did your parents pass on to you? Leave a comment on those post to win an opportunity to create something for yourself or your kids to help make your passion contagious.

The contest will run through Friday, July 24 at 3:00 p.m. EST, at which point I will immediately announce the winners. I'm not sure the random date/time thing is the most fair, so I will be choosing the winners randomly some other way. Good luck!

Thanks to the mother in law, our shelf of celebrity-penned children's books grows with every visit. We've got Julianne Moore's book about the difficulties of growing up ginger, and Jamie Lee Curtis's book about being 50+ and Fabulous. Did you know John Lithgow writes children's books? I read them in a bad British accent (why couldn't it have been French Stewart who dipped his quill into the world of Children's Literature?) They say Bob Dylan is publishing a children's book version of "Forever Young." I hope it's as good as Will Smith's "Just the Two of Us." That song brings a tear to my eye every time, so you can just imagine what it does to me in illustrated form. "I wanna kiss you all the time/ But I will test that butt when you cut out of line." Gah! Waterworks!

The other day I heard Metallica's "Enter Sandman" during a hockey game. This was the song my high school hockey team used to listen to in the locker room before games to get "pumped up." It's from Metallica's "creepy old man" period, when normal kids started listening to Metallica without their parents worrying they would become satanists, and every video featured a creepy, wrinkled old man. Well, now Metallica is a bunch of creepy, wrinkled old men. Seriously. Balding drummer Lars Ulrich even has a one-year-old baby, which is usually right around the time washed-up celebrities decide to add "author" to their resumes. So, listening to the lyrics of "Enter Sandman" for the first time since I had kids, I thought, "that would make a really good children's book." Get on it, Lars. Those precious moments don't last forever.

This morning Juniper and I were walking around downtown and I thought it would be fun to stop in Greektown, where the signage contains enough mythology to fill another one of those damn books. She saw Pegasus, and Zeus, and then she sang a song about the matchbox car she was clutching in her grubby little palm. There is a cheesy little souvenir shop across from the casino that sells the exact same wares as the shops in the Plaka or any heavily-touristed part of Greece. We stopped in to look at the shelves and shelves of mass-produced gods and goddesses. The first thing we saw was a life size statue of Athena, and when I pointed to the head of Medusa on her Aegis and said, "Look June: Medusa!" the shopkeeper angrily hurled some words at me in a thick Greek accent. "Pardon me?" I said.

"That's not Medusa! That is goddess Athena!"

"Yeah, I know, but she has Medusa on her breastplate."

"No, No, no, that's not Medusa. That is Athena."

"Yeah, but Perseus gave Medusa's head to Athena. She wore it as part of her armor. See: snakes. Medusa."

"I am sold out of Medusa."

"But. . ." I then decided against disputing it any further. After all, you should never argue with a professional.

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I have spent the last six hours trying to get this mythology book on lulu so that I (and anyone else who wants it) can buy one. I added the text as many requested, but it was an incredible pain in the ass to make it all fit in the lulu template. Now that the work is done, I can honestly say I am very excited about this book and I think the end product will be of a much higher quality than the last one. But it may be awhile before I do another one of these.

If you are interested in purchasing a soft cover printed version of the book, click here. Again, I am not making any money on this whatsoever---this project uses artwork that was not created by me, but by generous and anonymous artists who take so many risks to bring beauty to our streets. I will never accept money for any adaptation of their work. If you buy this book, you are only paying for the costs of printing it.

I am also adding the final versions of each individual page, with text, to a flickr set here.

This one is a bit self-indulgent, and reveals more of my nature as a true dork. But as I wrote a few weeks ago, I have been telling Juniper the stories of the Greek myths. And she loves them. Perhaps the greatest thing about staying home with her is that I control what culture she is exposed to. She is not in some daycare watching a Diego video in constant loop or listening to other little girls talk about Disney princesses and all that. There is a limited window where I can tell her what stories I want to tell her, and where she will beg to hear of Icarus, and Medusa, and Athena with her owl. It's not that I believe this will somehow make her smarter than some aficionado of Dora the Explorer, it's that I hate Diego and Dora and I am selfish. And I enjoy these stories myself unencumbered by the pressures of the academy. I don't have to find some deeper meaning, or translate anything. I can just enjoy these stories with her on a purely childlike level, like I did when I was young. That pure enjoyment was the whole reason I went into studying them in the first place (though the truly-geeky classics nerd in me may whip out a version of this book with the original Greek alphabet---finding images for the letters that did not exist then was kind of challenging). This book is designed to be a jumping-off point for the telling of myths.

I went with the graffiti again, not just because I was able to find so many street art images with scenes from classical mythology, but because I liked the idea of seeing myths not only explicitly in the art of modern city streets, but sometimes implied from the context. In ancient Rome, the walls in the city were covered in graffiti, public art, and images from history and mythology. So, it seems, are our cities, if you look for it.

A is for Athena, the goddess of wisdom
B is for Bellerophon, who tamed Pegasus
C is for Cassandra of Troy, the seer
D is for Dionysus, the god of pleasure

E is for Echidna of the Snakes, the mother of all monsters
F is for the Furies, who tormented Orestes
G is for the Griffins of Scythia, who guarded gold
H is for Helen of Sparta, whose face launched a thousand ships

I is for Icarus, who flew too high
J is for Janus, the god of doorways and change
K is for Kalypso, who kept Ulysses too long
L is for Leda, who loved a swan

M is for Medusa, whose hair was made of snakes
N is for Narcissus, who loved his own reflection
O is for Orpheus, the father of songs
P is for Polyphemos, the Cyclops

Q is for Queen Penthesilea of the Amazons, the only match for Achilles
R is for Rage, the rage of Achilles that sent so many Greeks do their doom
S is for Sisyphus, pushing his boulder uphill
T is for Theseus, who slew the Minotaur

U is for Ulysses
V is for Venus, the goddess of love
W is for the Wiles of Ulysses, who designed the Trojan Horse
X is for Sphinx, who told riddles

Y is for the Yearning of Ulysses and Penelope
Z is for Zeus, the king of all gods

If there is any interest, I'll update this later with a link to a lulu site where it will be available at cost just like the last one. I have two more of these graffiti alphabet books (animals and objects) that I am working on, both of which will be far more accessible than this one.

If anyone really wants a hard copy of the alphabet book I posted about the other day, I've added the images to a lulu book that will be printed and bound on a made-to-order basis for $8.73. That is pure cost---I am not making a red cent from this, and I am only doing it because so many people expressed an interest in owning a copy. I have no experience with lulu or any idea about how good of a job they do. I think there is also a $1.91 media mail shipping charge on top of the manufacturing cost. If anyone knows of a cheaper way to do this where a third-party handles everything and I don't have to make or mail anything, please let me know. Click here or on the image below to order a copy.

I have two other similar books about half finished, and I should be posting them both in the next couple of months. And now I have ideas for about ten more. Thanks for all the positive feedback.

Wood's in trial, so her post this week is delayed. Have a good weekend.

Original comment stream here

As you may have figured from that video Wood posted, we're big on the alphabet around here these days. This week I was really getting sick of all the stupid alphabet books we had been reading, so I decided to make my own. Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of Nikki McClure's Awake to Nap and Michael De Feo's Alphabet City, but despite the latter's lovely urban scenery, the subject verbiage itself is a bit humdrum for my taste. Like most alphabet books, the words tend to be either zoological or agricultural. I wanted to create a book for a kid, like mine, who is growing up in a dirty-ass city and who already knows the names of all the animals in the zoo and in the Big Red Barn. De Feo (who did create the beautiful paste-ups for his book) simply doesn't use very many words that aren't that different from those in all of the other alphabet books I've seen. The letter N, for example, is represented in De Feo's book by a nest. Every alphabet book uses a nest for the letter N. Juniper and I seem to be in agreement that nests are kind of irrelevant. I feel it is much more important for her to identify other things that start with the letter N, such as ninjas:

Now if our home is ever attacked by a group of numb-chuck-wielding, star-throwing ninjas, Juniper can shout out a warning that could save all our lives. The same is true for this one:

You traditionalists can teach your kids about all the zebras all you want, but my kid is going to know how to identify a zombie wearing underwear as soon as she sees one. And anyone who has seen a Romero film knows how important a few seconds of warning can be when fending off zombies. The same theory works for mummies, pirates, robots, economists, vikings, and yeti. You won't find them in any other alphabet books, but you will find them in ours. I also threw in some hard words like Gnome and Knight just to mess with her head.

Now I don't want to hear any bullshit about how my kid is going to need therapy or how I'm so politically incorrect etc. etc. ad nauseam. We get plenty of e-mails about that every week. If you have an inclination to point something like that out, just remember you're not as clever as you think you are. Seriously: yawn.

For the past few months whenever I see a painting or a stencil of something that would make a good subject word in an alphabet book, I have snapped a picture. I have so much gratitude for the amazing artists who are out there creating these beautiful works in our streets for little or no recognition, risking so much just to make our cities a little more colorful and interesting.

In a few days I'll probably post some pictures on flickr to show how I turned these images into an actual book, but for now if you have any interest in making one yourself, using or adapting any of the images, or just getting a closer look, click on the 4-paneled jpegs below for high-res downloadable images.

Juniper and I had a lot of fun making this (I knew which images to choose when she pointed at the screen and said, "who's THAT guy?"). Enjoy.

Original comments here

Juniper is still crazy for her Carl the Dog books, a continued interest fueled perhaps by our failure to buy her a real dog as we once promised. If we're at home, she approaches me with one of these stupid books three or four times an hour. I decided to create another book just to show her what happens in the real world to parents who leave their children unsupervised for extended period of time. And it had to include pruno and shanks.

Next month I am definitely going to do another song-based book. And as always, I love suggestions/requests.