Generations of former kids who learned their ABCs on PBS will be celebrating today’s 40^th anniversary of the show “Sesame Street.”  (external link)

The Library’s been a fan right along! In April 2000, for example, when the Library of Congress celebrated its bicentennial, Big Bird was named a Living Legend by the Librarian of Congress.

In 2006, Elmo was our guest at the National Book Festival, along with his animator, Kevin Clash.  Elmo was also invited to the White House then.

And “Maria” (Sonia Manzano) appeared at the National Book Festival in 2004.

Of course, the many books, films and music that have come out of the hit series can be found in the Library’s collections.

What will happen next??  Find out in chapter 3, by Kate DiCamillo, on Oct. 23.  And don’t forget our new social media sharing tool, so that you can easily alert friends on your social network of choice.

It’s catching on even halfway around the world!

By the way, if you took any photos of the NBF and put them on Flickr, you might want to consider using the tag 2009nbf to help everyone get a fuller picture of the day’s festivities.  As I said on Saturday, the ground might have been dampened, but not people’s spirits.

Despite the weather, the 2009 National Book Festival still mustered up record attendance of 130,000, likely because of the prominence and star power of this year’s authors.

I hope to post a good selection of photos later today.

1. Attend!  It’s tomorrow (Sept. 26) from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. EDT on the National Mall (between 7th and 14th), rain or shine.  If it’s the former, don’t worry!  We have huge tents for the author pavilions, many of which are even bigger than they have been in previous years.

2.Visit the National Book Festival website and get all the 411 you need.

3. Check the schedule of author pavilion presentations and book signings, along with the site map (PDF link), and make your battle plan ahead of time.

4. Visit our new NBF website that’s optimized for mobile devices, both before you come and on the grounds.  Just type in www.loc.gov/bookfest and it will automatically show you the mobile-ready version.

5. Sign up by tomorrow to receive text alerts.  Just send BOOK to 61399.

6. Listen to our podcast interviews with 2009 NBF authors, and archives from previous years.  (Also available on iTunes.)

7. Watch webcasts of every single author presentation at the National Book Festival.  This year’s webcasts will begin to be posted by mid- to late-afternoon tomorrow.  Archives from previous years are also available, with many also on iTunes U and YouTube.

8. Follow the action on Twitter (@librarycongress).  Use the hashtag #nbf to see what we and everyone else are saying.  All tweets with the #nbf hashtag will be shown in real time on large monitors in the Library of Congress Pavilion.

9. If you’re in D.C. tomorrow and are on Twitter, come be a part of our first-ever “Tweet-Up” at 3:30 p.m. at the Library of Congress Pavilion.  (PDF site map here.)  I’ll be there talking about the Book Festival and some of the things we’re doing with social media, and hopefully scores of fingers will be madly tweeting away.

10. Become a fan of us on Facebook, either the Library’s main page or the new Books and Beyond page, where we’re marking the 2009 NBF by starting a virtual book club.

11. Watch C-SPAN’s coverage tomorrow.  Starting at about 9 a.m. EDT, they will show the authors program from the NBF gala reception.  Slated to speak are David Baldacci, Judy Blume, John Grisham, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Julia Alvarez.  Then at around 10 a.m., they will broadcast live all day from the festival.

12. Check out the NBF website at washingtonpost.com.  Among the highlights are transcripts of three online author chats.

Our folks have been busily working behind the scenes on a revamp of our literacy.gov website, which promotes lifelong literacy and related programs at the Library.  The result, which we have launched to coincide with the Book Festival, is called read.gov, and not to be immodest, but it’s pretty dang fantastic.

Some of the new features include a huge array of classic books that can be read in their entirety with a nifty page-turning technology (I’m in the middle of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz“), author webcasts, writing contests promoted by our Center for the Book (CFB), and even a link to a new online book club that we have begun on Facebook, based on CFB’s Books and Beyond series.  It works like this: Folks can read the books featured in the series and watch the webcasts of the respective authors, and then go online to discuss.  (Paging Oprah … )  Oh, and I almost forgot: Every single page, book or feature of the site is sharable to a dozen of the most popular social-networking sites, a feature you’ll begin to see more and more on our websites.

But what is almost indisputably the coolest thing of all, and which has had many of us around here giddy with excitement, is the curiously named “The Exquisite Corpse Adventure.”  Actually, the full title is “The Exquisite Corpse Adventure: A Very Unusual and Completely Amazing Story Pieced Together Out of So Many Parts That It Is Not Possible To Describe Them All Here So Go Ahead and Just Start Reading.”

In the process, many of us learned that an “exquisite corpse” is an old parlor game in which people would write a phrase on a piece of paper, fold it over, and then the next person would continue writing from there, and so on, until a whole sentence was completed.  Our “Exquisite Corpse” debuts in at least two senses of the term (and don’t worry, the literal one is family-friendly).

Famed authors of books for young people will contribute 26 successive chapters, which will be released every two weeks on read.gov, with the final chapter coinciding with the 2010 National Book Festival.  (The National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance has been a tremendous partner in this project, and the Ad Council has been an enormous help with the overall read.gov site.)

The first chapter was penned by none other than our National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Jon Scieszka.  It is zany, it is funny (I literally LOL’d several times reading it), and it makes you want to know just where the heck the story can possibly go from there.  I’ve had the pleasure of reading a few more chapters in advance (no spoilers), and so far, it’s a terrific ride.

I wanted to end with a testimonial that I received from Chris of our web development team.  (In many ways, this was his baby.)  Granted, he’s biased, but his kids aren’t:

Tonight I had one of the most memorable and rewarding experiences of my professional career.

Audrey asked me to put the boys to bed (as I had been dragging around the house all day with this cold, and watching her do everything).  Of course, before bedtime, we always read.

I told the boys to lie in our bed and that I had a surprise for them.  I got Audrey’s laptop and went to read.gov.  I sat between Jonah (age 7) and Sam (age 4) and I read the introduction (about content) of the Exquisite Corpse.  I then asked them if I should read it to them.  They were somewhat interested.

Then I launched the book viewer   Both of them perked up.  I began to read and both listened intently.  As I reached the end of the first page I asked Sam to push the button.  He did and the page turned.  They both oohed and awwed, but more importantly, they wanted me to read what was next.  They giggled in anticipation as I read this part of the story:

“If the train makes it over the last treacherous gorge, there is a good chance that you and Nancy and Joe will have to deal with werewolves and mad scientists, real ninjas and fake vampires, one roller-skating baby, a talking pig, creatures from another planet (possibly another dimension), killer poetry, clues from classic children’s books, two easy riddles, several bad knock knock jokes, plenty of explosions, a monkey disguised as a pirate, two meatballs, a blue plastic Star Wars lunch box (missing its matching thermos), three ticking clocks, and not just one bad guy – but a whole army of villains, cads, scalawags, sneaks, rats, varmints and swindlers. Also several desperados, a gang of evildoers, and one just plain bad egg.”

When we reached “To be continued”, Jonah tried to push the button to turn the page.  I told him that we would have to wait two weeks and then the book would magically add pages.   I then told them that Daddy had a team of people at work who created the story and the software.  I think at that moment he thought I was the coolest dad in the world.  He then asked,”Dad, if you are working on this, can’t the new chapters come out every week instead of every two weeks?”

Both boys loved the illustration and asked to see more. They kept making me go back so that they could look at the dynamite.

I told them that I would bring them a poster to hang in their rooms and huge smiles illuminated their faces.

Yes, we will indeed have Exquisite Corpse posters to give away tomorrow at the Library of Congress Pavilion, so get ‘em while they last.  They’re terrific, reminiscent of the cover of a well-worn pulp novel, and using the first illustration from the story as inspiration (see nearby image).

It truly doesn’t matter how old you are: I think you’ll really enjoy “The Exquisite Corpse Adventure”!  And I’ve added it to the long list of reasons why I work at the coolest place in the universe.

The NBF is special to me for more than one reason.  First, it’s something on which a huge team of talented folks including me work intensively for about five or six months every year.  It’s hard to describe the thrill of watching this labor of love be enjoyed by more than 120,000 people. I walk the grounds watching author presentations, working with the media, and listening for comments people make about the great time they’re having.  But my anniversary of coming to work at the Library coincides with the Book Festival, so it’s an extra-special celebration for me.  (Three years and counting.)

But enough about me.

One popular attraction has been a huge vinyl wall in the Library of Congress Pavilion on which people could write about their favorite books or authors.  This year, though, we’re going high-tech.  We want to encourage everyone who’s “tweeting” as they walk the grounds to use the hashtag #nbf.  Your tweets and everyone else’s (including yours truly) will be featured in the LOC Pavilion (link is a PDF map) on a large monitor displaying those messages in real time.  So send your Twitpics, your author encounters, your 12-second videos or any other thoughts to share them with your fellow book-lovers.

This week also marked another first for us, an additional nod to those who access the web by means other than a computer: We launched a version of the National Book Festival website that is optimized for mobile devices (AKA a “Wireless Application Protocol,” or WAP site.)  We think this will be especially helpful on Festival day itself.  When you visit http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/ from your mobile device of choice, the site automatically adjusts to a simple and less bandwidth-intense version.  You can still get all the author presentation and book-signing schedules, maps, directions, and other important information.

And as previously mentioned, you can get up-to-date information by text message by sending the word BOOK to 61399.  (Standard messaging rates may apply.)  You will be able to find out how to get specific information, such as pavilion schedules and schedules for individual authors.

Sprawled on the lawn, curled up on the sofa, sitting on the steps in the piazza — they’re communing with a great author, or a funny author, or an author who’s telling them how to cook or knit or fix something in their life that’s broken. Some of them are reading poetry.  Some of them are reading it on e-book devices.

There are millions of them, all scattered around.  One book to a person, one person to a book.

Saturday, more than 120,000 of them are projected to be on one lawn, in one city, at one time: on the National Mall at the Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.  It’ll happen from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., rain or shine — free of charge.

YES.

More than 70 major authors will speak about their writing before happy crowds in pavilions dedicated to Fiction & Fantasy, History & Biography, Mysteries & Thrillers, Children, Teens & Children, and Poetry & Prose. The authors will also sign books for their fans.

Families can enjoy the literacy-promotion activities of the state and territorial Centers for the Book in the Pavilion of the States; kids can enjoy activities and presentations planned just for them in the “Let’s Read America” pavilions. The “Digital Bookmobile” will be there.  The Library of Congress will showcase its Library of Congress Experience and social-networking activities, including this blog , its Flickr page and its Facebook page. The whole thing will be on Twitter (@librarycongress, hashtag #nbf).  Also, our website for the book festival is a great place to plan for this feast, complete with fresh podcasts from more than a dozen of this year’s authors. There’s a Young Readers’ Toolkit there, too. And the day of the book festival, webcasts of many of the author presentations will be available on the festival website.

Here’s a tip — this “Lollapalooza” of the book world is going to open with a flourish. A team of young people’s authors, fronted by the irrepressible National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jon Scieszka, will launch the new read.gov website that promotes reading and literacy for all ages as the festival opens at 10 a.m., in the Children’s pavilion.  You won’t have to be a kid to get a kick out of this one: The new site will premiere a serial story, with the first (completely zany) chapter to be read by Scieszka from the stage.  It’s titled “The Exquisite Corpse Adventure,” and to find out what happens next — this story will unfold every two weeks for a year — you’ll have to go to read.gov.

But to find out what the coolest event is in Washington D.C. is on September 26, 2009, you’ll have to go to the National Mall between 7th and 14th streets.  Wear comfortable shoes — and prepare to be swept away!

Included in the first round are Junot Diaz, Rickey Minor, James Patterson, George Pelecanos, Nicholas Sparks and David Wroblewski–with more to come.  And they’re all free for the listening!

You can read more about the National Book Festival here, and don’t forget to follow us on on Facebook and on Twitter (@librarycongress), which explains the hashtag at the beginning of this post.  (Digression: Is it a coincidence that hashtags appear to make a hash of the English language?)

In a first for the Library, you can also sign up to receive text/SMS message alerts by texting BOOK to 61399.  (Standard messaging rates apply)

But that’s not all!

Today the Library announced that authors James Patterson, George Pelecanos, Nikki Grimes, Marilynne Robinson, Sharon Creech, Daniel Silva and W. Ralph Eubanks have signed on for the ninth annual festival, to be held on the National Mall from 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. As always, the event is free and open to the public.

In addition to this amazing lineup of more than 70 authors — the full list is available here–this year’s book festival will feature many social-networking features, including updates through Twitter and Facebook. To receive up-to-the-minute information for this year’s event, such as author activities, day-of-event details and much more, follow the library on Twitter (@librarycongress, hashtag #nbf) or become a fan of the Library on Facebook (www.facebook.com/libraryofcongress). There will be new podcasts of interviews with festival authors available free of charge on the Library’s website (www.loc.gov) and on iTunes U (link here, opens in iTunes).

Want your own copy of the National Book Festival Poster, by author/illustrator Charles Santore? It’s here. For more information about this year’s National Book Festival, click here.