That’s what we do.

VI

IN A SPEECH, you are meant to say what you are going to say, and then say it, and then sum up what you have said.

I don’t know what I actually said tonight. I know what I meant to say, though:

Reading is important.

Books are important.

Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)

It is a glorious and unlikely thing to be cool to your children.

Children’s fiction is the most important fiction of all.

There.

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort.

And that is why we write.

This was my acceptance speech for the 2009 Newbery Medal, which was awarded to The Graveyard Book.

Four Bookshops

I

THESE ARE THE bookshops that made me who I am. They are none of them there, not any longer.

The first, the best, the most wonderful, the most magical because it was the most insubstantial, was a traveling bookshop.

From the ages of nine to thirteen I attended a local boarding school, as a day boy. Like all such schools, it was a world in itself, which meant that it had its own “tuck shop,” its own weekly barbering facilities, and, once a term, it had its own bookshop. Up until then my book-buying fortunes would rise or fall with what was for sale in my local W. H. Smith—the Puffin books and Armada paperbacks that I’d save up for, only from the children’s shelves, as I had never thought to explore further. Nor had I the money to explore if I wanted to. School libraries were my friends, as was the local library. But at that age I was limited by my means and by what was on the shelves.

And then, when I was nine, the traveling bookshop came. It set up its shelves and stock in a large empty room in the old music school, and, this was the best bit, you didn’t need any money. If you bought books, it went onto your school bill. It was like magic. I could buy four or five books a term, secure in the knowledge it would wind up in the miscellaneous bit of the school bill, down with the haircuts and the double bass lessons, and I’d never be discovered.

I bought Ray Bradbury’s The Silver Locusts (a collection similar to, although not exactly the same as, The Martian Chronicles). I loved it, especially “Usher II,” Ray’s tribute to Poe. I did not know who Poe was. I bought The Screwtape Letters, because anything the bloke that wrote Narnia did had to be good. I bought Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming, the cover proclaiming that it was soon to be a major motion picture. And I bought The Day of the Triffids, and I, Robot. (The shop was very big on Wyndham and Bradbury and Asimov.)