A little back story – back in the dinosaur year of 1993, I was eleven years old and a huge Gordon Korman fan. My favorite book was “Who is Bugs Potter?” In the back of a library book, I found out he wrote a sequel – “Bugs Potter Live at Nickaninny” – but couldn’t find it anywhere.

So I wrote Gordon Korman to ask how I could order it. Turns out it had only been published in Canada and he sent me an autographed copy. Can you even imagine how excited I was – that one of my favorite authors had read my letter, written me back, and sent me a book that was all but lost to the United States? (Again, this was in the early 1990s, when it was next to impossible to find out-of-print books unless you got super lucky at a used bookstore, and forget ordering overseas editions.)

I still remember getting that package like it was yesterday, and that letter and the book have traveled with me to four cities over this nearly quarter century. Last weekend, I was flipping through Netflix with my daughter and when I saw that there were two Bruno and Boots movies, I was SO excited. Went to pull out my copy of “No Coins Please” to read to her (of course it’s somewhere in a box in my parents’ attic), but found the Bugs Potter book instead – and the letter on blue stationery! I wrote back to Mr. Korman a few times, and each time, he sent me back a lovely personal letter on that blue stationery… but sometime between middle school and middle-age, those letters disappeared (all but the original.) I thought it might be fun to post the image to this forum. Thanks for a memory and a novel that have stuck with me a quarter of a century, Mr. Korman 🙂

Here’s the picture. Not sure how else to post it except on an image sharing site. Promise it isn’t a virus.