You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverbladden.

Welcome to Bookworm. I'm here this week

with Bill Joyce, the author most recently of a day with Wilbur Robinson and the famous

dinosaur Bob, children's books. He's here in town for a show at the gallery. Every picture

tells a story on Libreya, and we have one of the

curators of that gallery, Abby Phillips, with us too. So the subject, I suppose, is children's

books. In a way, being a bookworm, I'm more interested in how they are made and how they come to be the

way they are.

And I thought I'd begin by asking how a day with Wilbur Robinson, which is a kind of genre

book, the genre being the odd family next door.

How did it come to be?

Well, all these books come from a bunch of different things.

I mean, it's never one lightning bolt of inspiration.

It's a lot of things that have been clattering around in my head for a long time.

And I think maybe, well, I loved, you can't take it with you, the George S. Kaufman play.

And I realized when I saw that as a movie, actually, that my family had a lot in common with the family in that play.

And I had never thought of them as odd until I began to see, you know, someone else

presenting odd families.

...