Introductions

Well, it ended up taking a lot longer than we thought, but here we are. After many months of preparation we are finally ready to present Through the Magic Door™. We have been talking about it for a long, long time and finally got serious enough to actually do something. And after a lot of effort and delays, we're here. So who are we?

Sally and I (Charles) are avid readers with three children who in turn are avid readers. In addition, we all share a love of bookstores in general and used bookstores in particular. A visit to a used bookstore has always been akin in my mind to walking on a beach, never knowing what shiny shell or intriguing object you might turn up.
For some years we have been talking about several different issues that have come together in the form of Through the Magic Door™. Sally's career before becoming a full-time home maker was in banking, responsible for strategic planning. Mine has been in management and systems consulting. One of the things that we frequently observed among our peers was that, for those with children, they obviously devoted much time and energy to the welfare of their family. In education, that encompassed trying to ensure that their children were good readers. In many, many cases though, we witnessed two patterns. One was for reading to become just one more academic skill; a box to be ticked. The other observation was that, unless they in turn were raised in a reading family, many of our friends did not know how to find books likely to be enthralling or of interest to their children.
We have established TTMD as a means to make reading much more than a task and to make it easier to find the right book for a given child at a given point in time, given their interests.
Reading is certainly at its minimum a skill, but it is potentially far more than that and those children that explore the greater frontiers of reading are those that become the best readers. It is not so much the skill that builds the interest but the interest that builds the skill. You build the skill by feeding the interest with those books that have the greatest ability to grip the imagination and attention of the reader.
While there are many wonderful new children's books coming off the press each year, there is an even fantastically greater inventory of books from years past that have already demonstrated the capacity to capture and hold children's interests but have, for many reasons, faded from awareness. The challenge becomes matching the interests of a child with what's available, without having to invest incredible amounts of time reading all the possible candidate books. One of the things that you will find here at TTMD is a focus on quarrying the rich seams of books from past decades that still can hold a child's interests today.
In a world that holds out many opportunities but also many uncertainties, concerns and fears, books and the stories that they contain offer not just a form of entertainment, not only a method to hone one's critical thinking skills, and not only a means to build the furniture in one's mental attic, but also a hawser tying generations of a family together. Books that a child knows you read at their age and were in turn read by grandparents take on a special distinction and weight.
Another idea which underpins this site is that we look on books as a value delivery system. We as parents are unable to completely control all the (mixed) messages to which our children are exposed. By the lessons we teach, our behavior and values that we demonstrate, and the discussions we have with our children, we help inoculate them to some of the corrosive influences in the world about us. Time, circumstance, and the development of our children (and ourselves) sometimes stand in the way of discussing everything we might want to. In those instances, stories can sometimes serve as our ambassadors - the book tells our children something they might not willingly wish to hear from their parents.
What we hope to accomplish with Through the Magic Door is to become a community of parents, teachers, librarians, relatives, etc. that have an interest in children's books and children reading and who share that interest and passion with one another in order to get the best reading materials into the hands of our children, thereby increasing their love of reading.
We have built into our site many features, communication vehicles, and links which we will be introducing in greater detail in the Thing-Finder section in the coming weeks. We encourage you to tell us what you like about what we have created as well as tell us what you would like to see added. As you will note from both About Us and from our Privacy Policy, we do not take any advertising nor do we sell our customer's information, two significant sources of revenue for many e-commerce sites. We intend to earn our keep by providing the services desired by our community of readers and selling children's books.
In order for us to have a strong sense of community we need to have strong conversations. In turn, we believe strong conversations are based on openness, respect, and vehicles for sharing. The initial means for sharing are through the bulletin boards, the book reviews and the blogs. We are open to suggestions for building additional vehicles for dialogue. We invite all in our community of readers to become contributors to the conversation about children's books; through the bulletin boards, through hosted blogs, through book reviews (which follow a structure that in turn makes it much easier for others to find exactly the type of book their child is interested in) and through any other contributions you want to make. Just tell us how to hear your voice.
There are other things we hope you will see on the site. Because of my father's career in the oil industry, I was raised primarily abroad. Fortunately, in my own career, I and the family have had the opportunity to live overseas again. As a consequence, we are making a strong effort to introduce children's authors and illustrators from overseas that may have had little or no exposure in North America.
Finally, we are always seeking those treasures that lie somewhat off the beaten path and which we wish to share. Sometimes this will be a book of which we were unaware, sometimes an author, sometimes stories about the author or the circumstances of how a book came to be. We hope you will find it easier to get good books for your children here, but we hope you will also find a community that you enjoy and the little surprises that brighten a day.