THE FUNNIEST PEOPLE IN BOOKS, VOLUME 2: 250 ANECDOTES

By David Bruce

Dedicated to Robert Bruce

Copyright 2007 by Bruce D. Bruce

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© Photographer: Kelliem

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Funniest People in Books, Volume 2

Bibliography

About the Author

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The Funniest People in Books, Volume 2

Chapter 1: Activism to Critics

Activism

• Gay and lesbian activists sometimes have to fight scary battles. In the 1960s, some members of the American Nazi Party wanted to cause trouble at a conference of ECHO (East Coast Homophile Organizations). The gays and lesbians banded together to keep the American Nazis out of the auditorium where the conference was being held by locking arms and forming a human barricade that refused to let the American Nazis through. Among the activists barricading the door was Nancy Garden, lesbian author of Annie on My Mind.

• Many people read and enjoy J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and the good guys’ fight against the evil of Mordor. Some of those who read it in college are activists. One campus cut down a pleasant grove of trees to make room for an ugly “Cultural Center” made of concrete blocks. Students detested the cutting down of trees, and on the ugly building someone wrote, “Another bit of Mordor.”

Advertising

• Advertising copywriters can be very good writers. In 1919, 18-year-old Lillian Eichler was assigned the task of writing advertisements for Eleanor Holt’s book Encyclopedia of Etiquette. Ms. Eichler came through in a big way. Her ad showed a guest spilling a cup of coffee on a tablecloth—the copy read, “Has this ever happened to you?” The ad was very successful, and 1,000 copies of the book were sold quickly. Unfortunately, most of those copies were returned just as quickly, as the book was old fashioned and hopelessly out of date. No problem. The publisher, Doubleday, figured that if Ms. Eichler could write advertising copy as well as she did, then she could rewrite the book well. She did rewrite the book, which was given the new title Book of Etiquette, and the book sold at least 3 million copies over the next 30 years.

• To get a job in advertising, it helps to be creative. Chris, the brother of author Beth Lisick, created a resume that included a photograph of him seated at a baby grand. It also included a photograph of celebrity John Tesh seated at a baby grand. The resume compared the careers and lives of Chris and John Tesh. For example, Mr. Tesh courted celebrity Connie Selleca at the exact same time that Chris was being dumped by a girlfriend. And when John Tesh released his album Sax by the Fire, Chris was being heavily criticized for failing to meet the dress code of a restaurant. Chris was hired, and he became a success—he wrote these words that were spoken by a Chihuahua in a series of Taco Bell commercials: “Drop the chalupa.”

• An effective advertisement need not be long or even have an illustration. When Sir Ernest Shackleton needed men to go with him on a trip to the South Pole, he placed this ad in London newspapers in 1900: “MEN WANTED for Hazardous Journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success—Sir Ernest Shackleton.” The copy of the ad was frank, and the response to the ad showed that it was effective. Sir Ernest said, “It seemed as though all the men in Great Britain were determined to accompany me, the response was so overwhelming.”

Alcohol

• In his sketch “‘Party Cries’ in Ireland,” Mark Twain tells of the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. Commonly, according to Mr. Twain, Irishmen would cry out either “To hell with the Pope” or “To hell with the Protestants,” depending on the religion of the crier. This became so common that a law was passed attempting to stop the custom by imposing a fine and court costs on anyone found guilty of giving a party cry. One day, a drunk was found lying in an alley, shouting, “To hell with! To hell with!” A police officer found the drunk and asked him, “To hell with what?” But the drunk replied, “Ah, bedad ye can finish it yourself—it’s too expinsive for me!”

• When John Holmstrom wanted to start a new magazine, his friend and co-conspirator Legs McNeil didn’t see the point. Mr. Holmstrom explained, “If we have a magazine, people will think we’re cool and stuff and want to hang out with us.” Mr. McNeil still didn’t see the point, so Mr. Holmstrom explained further, “If we have a magazine, people will give us drinks for free.” Mr. McNeil saw the point and even named the new magazine: Punk.

• Mark Twain and Bill Nye journeyed to Nevada, where the frontiersmen tried to drink them under the table. However, after a night of hard drinking, the only people still conscious were Mr. Twain and Mr. Nye. Finally, Mark Twain told his friend, “Well, Bill, what do you say we get out of here and go somewhere for a drink?”

Animals

• Children’s book author Marion Dane Bauer once used her son’s dog, which was named Nimue, as a character, also named Nimue, in her novel Face to Face. The dog was due to have a litter, and so she had read about what to do when a dog had a litter. One of the things she read was that when a puppy is born with a cleft palate the best thing to do is to kill it because it can’t nurse and will starve to death. In her novel, Ms. Bauer used a situation in which a puppy had to be killed—and Peter, her son, was furious and forbid her to use his dog in the novel. Eventually, he relented and let her use his dog in the novel after she explained to him the need for conflict in a work of fiction.

• Following World War II, when Gary Paulsen, author of Hatchet, was a child, he lived with his parents in the Philippines. There, he and his dog, Snowball, wandered everywhere and saw many things. Together, they discovered a very poor Philippine family living under an overturned Jeep. Despite the family’s poverty, they offered young Gary and even Snowball a bit of food. Thereafter, Gary took food from home and brought it to them, and they shared meals of sardines and rice. Snowball once saved Gary’s life. Walking barefoot along a trail, Gary came across a pretty—but deadly—snake that was about to bite him. Snowball grabbed the snake, shook it, and broke its neck.

• Cat-owning famous authors have the same problems as other cat owners. The young daughter of the niece of the ex-wife of Walter Tevis, author of the novels The Hustler, The Color of Money, and The Man Who Fell to Earth, all of which were made into movies, remembers this about her famous relative: “The cat pooped in his red sheepskin slippers. He put his foot into it and then threw the shoe out the window.”

• Some creative people have unusual pets. The poet Gérard de Nerval kept a lobster as a pet and took it out for walks. According to Mr. de Nerval, the lobster was a good pet because “it does not bark and it knows the secrets of the deep.”

• One day a woman asked Sydney Smith for a motto for her dog. Because he had never liked dogs, he suggested, “Out, damned Spot!”

Autographs

• Before World War II, Lucy Carrington Wertheimer ran an art gallery that championed the work of then-modern artists. Many famous people visited the gallery and signed the guestbook. One day, Ms. Wertheimer looked at the guestbook and told her employee, “I see you have had Mr. Shaw in, Biddy.” A nearby visitor looked at the guestbook and saw that George Bernard Shaw had signed it. Amazed, he said, “Yes, and you’re jolly lucky to have his autograph. How did you manage to get it?” Biddy, an Irish lass, replied, “Oi just said to him, ‘Put your name in the visitors’ book, Mr. Shaw,’ and he put it in.” Ms. Wertheimer suspects that when Biddy said this to Mr. Shaw, “Biddy’s tone was so authoritative that Mr. Shaw did not dare say her nay.”

• George Bernard Shaw once saw a book of his own plays in a second-hand bookshop. Looking at it, he noticed an inscription in his own handwriting—“With the compliments of George Bernard Shaw”—and recognized the book as a gift from him to a friend. Mr. Shaw purchased the book, wrote this inscription—“With renewed compliments. G.B.S.”—then sent it again to his friend.

• After J.K. Rowling published the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, in the United Kingdom, she went to a bookstore in Edinburgh, Scotland, to see copies of the book displayed. She was tempted to sign the copies, but she decided not to in case she got in trouble with the bookseller.

• In 1988, African-American author Maya Angelou was arrested while participating in an anti-apartheid rally in Berkeley, California. The police officer who arrested her was an African-American woman. After fingerprinting Ms. Angelou, the police officer requested her autograph.

Awards

• When Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon” won the Hugo Award for the Best Story of 1959, award presenter Isaac Asimov praised the story enthusiastically, then asked Mr. Keyes how he had been able to write it. Mr. Keyes replied, “Listen, when you find out how I did it, let me know, will you? I want to do it again.”

• In 1986, Elie Wiesel, author of the Holocaust memoir Night, won the Nobel Peace Prize. His father, mother, and youngest sister all died in the Holocaust, but to show that the Jewish people survive despite such oppression, when giving his acceptance speech, he asked his 14-year-son to come to the podium with him.

Bathrooms

• Technology columnist and author Annalee Newitz thinks that all single-toilet bathrooms in the workplace ought to be gender-free; after all, why should someone have to walk down the hall or to another floor to go to the bathroom when a nearby single-toilet bathroom is unoccupied? She used to print a “Carbon-based lifeforms only” sign and use it to cover up the gender sign on a single-toilet bathroom near her office at work. Her co-workers thought the sign was funny.

• When he was a child growing up in Australia, in the days before indoor plumbing, critic Clive James enjoyed reading, and he sometimes read in the outdoor lavatory with the door open to admit light. Unfortunately, a neighbor girl saw him with his pants around his ankles, and she told everybody, including far-distant pen pals, about what she had seen. Many years later, and many miles away, a grown-up Mr. James met a stranger at a party who knew all there was to know about the mishap.

• Author Peg Bracken knows a friend who was bothered by someone who enjoyed snooping in other people’s bathroom cabinets. Therefore, before this particular person came to snoop—er, visit—she placed this sign in her bathroom cabinet: “What is it that you’re looking for? Just let me know, and I’ll be glad to help you find it.”

Books

• Isaac Newton once studied a very difficult math book by René Descartes. He read a few pages, then had trouble understanding the material, so he started reading the book again from the beginning. This time, he got a few pages further before he had trouble understanding the material, and once again he started reading the book from the beginning. He kept doing this, each time getting a few pages further into the book, then starting again from the beginning, until he finally understood the entire book. Later, after Mr. Newton published his ground-breaking Principia in 1687, one of his students saw him walking and pointed him out to a friend, saying, “There goes the man that writ a book that neither he nor anybody else understands.”

• The responses author Nancy Garden has received to her book Annie on My Mind, which portrays lesbian characters in a positive manner, have been mostly supportive. For example, she once received a letter from a straight teenage girl who had been asked by her mother, a newspaper reporter, to read the book in order to find out an average teenager’s response to the book. At first, the girl didn’t want to read about “those people,” but she enjoyed the book and wrote Ms. Garden, “Those girls are just like any other girls falling in love.” Ms. Garden says, “That was great, because that’s exactly what I wanted to say in the book.”

• Helene Hanff died on April 9, 1997, at age 80. In her charming book 84, Charing Cross Road, she wrote about a friendship that sprang up during a 20-year correspondence between her and Frank Doel, a secondhand book buyer in London. In one of her letters to Mr. Doel, she wrote, “I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to ‘I hate to read new books’ and I hollered ‘Comrade’ to whoever owned it before me.”

Censorship

• Sometimes the board of education trusts students more than the principal trusts them. In 1974, Priscilla Marco wrote an article for her New York high school newspaper. The article listed instances of censorship of the school newspaper and pointed out that students had not been given copies of a board of education pamphlet describing their rights. However, the principal refused to let her article be printed. Ms. Marco contacted school authorities about the censorship; she also contacted the American Civil Liberties Union. Eventually, the school chancellor ordered that Ms. Marco’s article be published, but even then the school principal refused to allow it to be published. Therefore, the board of education printed a special edition of the student newspaper which contained discussions of the First Amendment and how it affects young people, as well as both Ms. Marco’s original article and an updated, revised version. On June 23, 1975, protected by security guards, members of the board of education entered Ms. Marco’s school—the Long Island City High School—and passed out copies of the newspaper.

• Ralph Nader’s father, Nathra, was a strong believer in free speech. In the small town where he ran a restaurant, people said that a nickel would buy you 10 minutes of talk about politics in addition to a cup of coffee. Sometimes, people advised Nathra that he could make more money if he didn’t talk about politics and his opinions so much. Nathra, who had immigrated to the United States from Lebanon at age 19, always replied, “When I sailed past the Statue of Liberty, I took it seriously.” Occasionally, a customer might take an “America: Love It or Leave It” approach. Nathra would then ask, “Do you love your country?” The answer would come back, “You’re damn right I do.” Nathra would then say, “Well, why don’t you spend time improving it?” Ralph’s mother, Rose, took the same approach with her children. For example, she would ask, “Ralph, do you love your country?” He would reply that he did. She would then say, “Well, I hope when you grow up, you’ll work hard to make it more lovable.”

• Michael Moore’s book Stupid White Men almost did not become a bestseller. It was ready to hit the bookstores when the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, occurred, and the publisher—Regan Books of HarperCollins—did not feel that a book that attacked President George W. Bush should be sold. The publisher demanded that Mr. Moore rewrite much of the book, which he refused to do. A librarian, Ann Sparanese, heard of the controversy during one of Mr. Moore’s lecture tours, and she send a group email to many, many librarians, altering them of the attempt at censorship. Librarians flooded Regan Books with complaints, and soon the book was published. If not for the librarians, the book would have been pulped, thus robbing Mr. Moore—and Regan Books—of major profits. (Mr. Moore dedicated his next book—Dude, Where’s My Country?—in part to Ms. Sparanese.)

• Paul Zindel’s books for young adults, including The Pigman, have often been censored or challenged by would-be censors. Mr. Zindel responded by keeping track of the ideas of the people he calls the CensorKooks. For example, one woman in Pennsylvania wanted to censor the word “green” in all school textbooks. Why? Green is the color of the Devil. In Cincinnati, a man wanted all vowels to be censored from all library books. Why? “If you can’t say it, you can’t do it.” Mr. Zindel once heard a would-be censor on a talk show scream, “And what are they teaching in our schools? They are teaching Catcher in the Rye! The Pigman! And Lord of the Flies!—three of the filthiest books ever written!” The would-be censor might have been better able to present his case if he had actually read these books—or he might have decided that these books didn’t need to be censored. (I have read these books, and they deserve to be read—and re-read.)

• Marvel Comics maven Stan Lee was once asked by the United States Office of Health, Education, and Welfare to put an anti-illegal drug message into some of the comic books he was creating. Happy to oblige, Mr. Lee wrote a three-part story in which Spider-Man saves the life of a friend who thinks that he can fly because of an illegal drug he took. Unfortunately, the censors at the Comics Code Authority rejected the storyline because it dealt with illegal drugs, even though the message was clearly anti-illegal drugs. Because he believed in the message (and because the United States government had asked him for his help), Mr. Lee had the comics printed without the seal of approval of the Comics Code Authority on the cover. The result: Lots of positive letters from lots of anti-illegal drug organizations.

• In Wichita, Texas, a man discovered the books Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy’s Roommate—books about families in which both parents are homosexual—in the children’s section of his local public library. He checked them out, then he showed them to his pastor. The pastor wrote a check for the books and gave it to the library instead of having the man return the books. Fortunately, publicity about the censorship resulted in a great demand for those two books, and several defenders of the First Amendment donated copies of Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy’s Roommate to the library so it could meet the demand.

• Judy Blume’s many books for young readers have often been censored or challenged by people who don’t want their—and your—children to be exposed to her ideas. Many of these censors or would-be censors have criticized her directly. For example, she once received a telephone call from a woman who asked if she had written Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Ms. Blume acknowledged that she had, and the woman called her a Communist, then hung up. Ms. Blume isn’t sure if the woman called her a Communist because she wrote about menstruation or because she wrote about religion in the book.

• Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is anti-censorship and pro-free speech, and it has frequently been the target of censors. Some students once wrote Mr. Bradbury to tell him that a passage about abortion had been deleted from a textbook version of his novel. Mr. Bradbury examined the textbook version and discovered that the editors had “censored some 75 separate sections from the novel.”

• During his life, Voltaire was often under attack by censors, and he lived close to the border so he could escape to Switzerland if necessary. When the case against Voltaire’s Man With Forty Crowns was called, a magistrate asked, “Is it only his books we shall burn?”

Children

• When she was a young girl, Marion Dane Bauer, author of the 1987 Newbery Honor Book On My Honor, was asked to write essays on such topics as “What I Did on My Summer Vacation.” Unfortunately, when she started to write papers about such things as camping trips, the events that had really happened seemed boring. No problem. Being an imaginative child, she simply embellished the truth and told about the bear that had rampaged through the campsite and ripped open the tent. Fortunately, being a heroic child as well as an imaginative child, she had saved her family by taking a burning stick from the campfire and setting the bear’s tail on fire. She did face a problem, however. What would her parents say if they read those school essays? No problem. On her way home from school were trashcans bearing the message KEEP YOUR CITY CLEAN. Being an obedient child as well as a heroic child, she tore her school essays into pieces and placed them in these trashcans.

• R.L. Stine, the author of the Goosebumps and Fear Street series of scary books for kids, was kind of a weird kid. He liked staying in his room and writing stories instead of going outside and playing sports. Sometimes, his parents would tell him, “Go out and play! What’s wrong with you!” Of course, occasionally he did go out. For example, each week he would get a trim at a barbershop, a task that often took hours. Why? The barbershop contained lots of comic books that the young R.L. Stine was forbidden to read at home. This early literary training paid off—Mr. Stine’s books have sold over 300 million copies! He writes books quickly, although he has had to pay a price for his prodigal output. He types with only one finger, and he says, “My poor finger is totally bent and crooked and ruined from typing so many books. I figure if the finger ever gives out, there goes the career.”

• On her 15^th birthday, Jean Little—who later became a young people’s author—was reading one of her favorite books: Jane Eyre. She had reached an exciting episode—Jane being run down by Rochester’s horse—when her usual bedtime arrived. Because she wanted to read the episode, she scrunched down in her chair, hoping that her parents would forget that she was still up. Luck was with her. She finished that episode, then kept reading. Just then, her parents got up, and her mother asked her, “You’ll turn off the lights, won’t you?” Jean pointed out, “It’s way past my bedtime. You forgot to send me to bed.” Her mother replied, “You are 15. You should have sense enough by now to go to bed at a reasonable hour. From now on, your bedtime is your responsibility. Good night.” As her parents went to bed, Jean heard them laughing—they had known Jean was still up, and they had already decided that her bedtime was now her responsibility.

• Dreamstime.com is a site where designers can go to buy stock photographs for use in advertisements, flyers, pamphlet and book covers, etc. Of course, the photographers enjoy seeing how their photographs are used—and sometimes the models in the photographs are excited. For example, a photographer who goes by the name Kelliem (her full name is confidential) was excited that a photograph of her 13-year-old daughter appeared on the cover of the young-adult novel Faking Sweet by J.C. Burke. However, another person was even more excited than she. On a message board at dreamstime.com, Kelliem wrote, “I was very excited to find a picture of my daughter on the cover of a teenage novel <http://www.jcburke.com.au/book-faking-sweet.htm> although not quite as excited as my 13-year-old daughter—she wanted to buy all the books!”

• It took an eight-year-old girl to turn Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling into a published (and billionaire) author. Several publishers rejected the first Harry Potter manuscript, and eventually Ms. Rowling’s agent gave a sample to Nigel Newton, chairman of Bloomsbury Publishing. He took the sample home but did not read it himself. Instead, he gave it to Alice, his eight-year-old daughter, who took it to her room and read it. Mr. Newton says, “She came down from her room an hour later glowing, saying, ‘Dad, this is so much better than anything else.’ She nagged and nagged me in the following months, wanting to see what came next.” Because she kept nagging him for more chapters about Harry Potter, he decided that the book was a winner. The rest of the story is publishing history.

• Gary Paulsen, author of Hatchet, once wrote a book about a cousin who had peed on an electric fence—an action that caused him to do a back flip. One day, he saw his son walking funny and asked what had happened. His son replied that he had been doing an experiment, and Mr. Paulsen immediately guessed, “Pee on the electric fence?” His son admitted that that was exactly what had happened, then asked, “Will I ever stop doing things like this?” Because Mr. Paulsen believes that such behavior is genetic, he replied negatively, saying, “It’s the way we are.” His son sighed, then said, “At least I know what that’s like and don’t have to pee on any more fences.”

• When children’s book illustrator Julie Downing was a young girl, she became upset because the Hardy Boys books had written on the back, “These books are perfect for boys from 8 to 14.” A rebellious girl, she read them, and she decided to become a detective like the Hardy Boys. One day, while pretending to be a detective, she decided that a neighbor’s swimming pool had been poisoned, so to decontaminate it she filled a bucket with ketchup, food coloring, salad dressing, and whatever other liquids or semi-liquids she could find. She then dumped it in the neighbor’s swimming pool—this incident ended her career as a detective.

• When Joan Lowery Nixon, who wrote many mysteries for young readers, won her second Edgar Award for outstanding mystery writing, a woman asked her, “You’ve done so well with your books for children—why don’t you try writing a real book?” However, Ms. Nixon felt that children’s books are real books, and that they are harder to write than books for adults. After all, when a child grows bored with a book, the child stops reading it, so Ms. Nixon constantly revised her books until she knew that they would keep a child’s interest.

• Stan and Jan Berenstain, creators of the Berenstain Bears, sometimes use things that happen in their lives as part of their books. For example, when Jan was pregnant with Michael, she often held Leo, her small son, on her lap. Of course, as her womb grew more and more crowded, her lap got smaller and smaller. Leo asked why this was happening, and that provided a good opportunity for Jan to tell him that he would get a little brother or sister soon. The disappearing lap appeared in the book The Berenstain Bears’ New Baby.

• Edward Lear, author/illustrator of A Book of Nonsense, grew up in a large family—he was No. 20 in a family of 21 children. (This was during the early 1800s.) His father once bought 12 horses and 12 carriages so that he could take his large family out for a ride on Sundays. As an adult, Mr. Lear devoted himself to art and to writing and to making children happy. He once wrote a friend, “I like to think that if a man ain’t able to do any great service to his fellow critters, it is better (than nothing) to make half a million children laugh innocently.”

• When Madeleine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, was eight years old, her father, who was also a writer, took her to see the opera Madama Butterfly. Unfortunately, the opera had an unhappy ending, shocking the young girl. Shortly afterward, her father took her to see another opera, I Pagliacci, and she asked, “Father, does this opera have an unhappy ending, too?” When he told her that it did, she started crying and kept on crying. Eventually, her father took her home—even though the opera had not yet started.

• Children’s book writer Phyllis Reynolds Naylor did a lot of writing when she was young, and she illustrated the stories she wrote. When she learned to draw lace, suddenly the heroine of her stories began to lose her clothing so young Phyllis could draw her lacy underwear. On another occasion, her mother explained the facts of life to her, and so young Phyllis wrote a “Manual for Pregnant Women,” complete with her own drawings. After she showed the book to her mother, the book turned up missing.

• Katherine Paterson, the author of such children’s books as The Sign of the Chrysanthemum and Bridge to Terabithia, wrote a mystery at the request of her children. One night, a power failure occurred, so to entertain her children, she began to read them the manuscript of her mystery, promising to read them more the following night. The next day, she found her 10-year-old son searching for the manuscript because he didn’t want to wait until evening to find out the next development in the plot.

• When author Leroy Jones, later known as first LeRoi Jones and then as Amiri Baraka, was in grade school, his vivid imagination caused him to invent stories that were believed by other people. For example, some grade-school teachers once showed up at his house because, they said, they wanted “to see the snakes.” Investigation revealed that young Leroy had told people at his school that he had rescued his mother from snakes that had invaded his home.

• Harold Dahl believed in a charming superstition. He believed that children could be educated to appreciate beautiful things—while they were still in the womb! Therefore, whenever his wife became pregnant, they would go on what he called “glorious walks.” He would take her somewhere beautiful, and then they would go for a walk. Harold’s only son, Roald, became the author of such noted children’s books as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

• While waiting in line at a post office, gay author Michael Thomas Ford noticed a young boy about seven years old wearing glittery pink nail polish on his toes and on his fingers. He also noticed that the boy’s mother was totally nonchalant about the glittery pink nail polish. The boy may someday discover that he is gay, or he may be going through a temporary phase, but either way, Mr. Ford says, “You go, girl. Both of you.”

• The son of professional writer Arthur Machen once asked him to write a 200-word article on the French Revolution for his school’s magazine, but he warned him that the magazine’s editorial board—composed of children like himself—would have to find the article worthy before it would be published. Mr. Machen was gratified when the editorial board deemed his article worthy of being published.

• R.L. Stine, the author of the Fear Street and Goosebumps books, has sold millions of copies of his books, and he has millions of young fans throughout the world. One young person who resisted reading Mr. Stine’s books was his only child, Matthew. According to Mr. Stine, “He brags about it. He knows it makes me crazy.” Mr. Stine’s wife, Jane, agrees: “I think he does it to annoy Bob, and it works.”

• J.K. Rowling is the author of the Harry Potter books, so it isn’t surprising that the first words Andrea, her daughter, learned to read were “Harry Potter.” Sometimes, Ms. Rowling would take her young daughter to a bookstore, and Andrea would see some Harry Potter books and yell, “Harry Potter!” Ms. Rowling worried that people might think that she had asked her daughter to do that.