One of my big regrets in life is the picture I did not get. One of my favorite photos is of the mummy of an Italian monk, looking quite lifelike and in fairly good condition for someone who has been dead for a couple hundred years. The photo occupies almost all of a page in James Putnam's Mummy, and I have a color transparency of it. I feel I almost know this mummy. One day, while waiting in line in the supermarket before going to work, I perused the tabloid headlines. One was “Moses’ Body Found on Mount Sinai!” The accompanying photograph was none other than that of my mummy! It was the same photograph from the Putnam book, but with a beard and a mustache drawn onto it. The next day I realized what an incredible statement that photo would make to any class I showed it to. I went back to the supermarket, but the tabloid was gone. Keep your mind open and your brain alert when you see such an op­portunity, so you do not blow it the way I did.

Another thing I love to do with booktalks is to personalize them. I always ask myself if I have some information that will make the booktalk more interesting. My grandfather once paid for my father and my aunt to go up in an airplane in the 1920s. They were at a local fair, and pilots were barnstorming and taking passengers up for rides. The pilot who took my aunt on her ride was Charles Lindbergh! Recently, my mother told me that the first time she saw an airplane was at a different fair, when she was a small child. The fair featured a woman who walked on the airplane wings. Mom thought that was so scary, and she always remembered the woman's name: Ruth Law. I immediately sent her a copy of Don Brown's Ruth Law Thrills a Nation.