“THE TRASHIEST BOOK you’ll ever read” is how I began my presentation to the Texas Library Association gathering in San Antonio in the spring of 2007.

I had been invited to introduce my new book, Don’t Mess with Texas: The Story Behind the Legend, to some of Texas’ most influential and, dare I say, well-read librarians. My presentation included a selection of video clips from the 26 “Don’t Messages” GSD&M had created in the first 12 years of the most successful antilitter campaign in history. It was, or so I thought, my proverbial 15 Minutes of Fame, with apologies to Andy Warhol.

Following me was another author, unknown to me, by the name of Brian Selznick. Selznick, it turns out, is the illustrator of the Caldecott Honor winner The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins and the New York Times-Best Illustrated Walt Whitman: Words for America, both written by Barbara Kerley, as well as the Sibert Honor winner for When Marian Sang by Pam Muñoz Ryan, and numerous other celebrated picture books and novels.

So what was an illustrator doing crowding my stage and pitching a tome that looked like War & Peace on steroids? I mean, up against my precise 85-page “coffee table book,” Selznick’s overweight 533-pager looked positively pregnant! That is, until this mild-mannered genius began his story:

“The inspiration for my book,” Selznick quietly intoned, “was a book called Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, by Gaby Wood. The book told the true story of a collection of elaborate, mechanical wind-up figures (known as automata), which were donated to a museum in Paris. The collection was neglected in a damp attic and eventually had to be thrown away. I imagined a boy finding those broken, rusted machines, and at that moment Hugo and his story were born.”

By now you may have guessed the rest. Selznick, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and San Diego, California, is the author of none other than The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the inspiration for the blockbuster Martin Scorsese movie Hugo, which many of you have undoubtedly seen and immensely enjoyed. From the inside flap of Selznick’s amazing book one discovers: “ORPHAN, CLOCK KEEPER, AND THIEF. Hugo lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station, where his survival depends on secrets and anonymity. But when his world suddenly interlocks – like the gears of the clocks he keeps – with an eccentric, bookish girl and a bitter old man who runs a toy booth in the train station, Hugo’s undercover life and his most precious secret are put in jeopardy. A cryptic drawing, a treasured notebook, a stolen key, a mechanical man, and a hidden message from Hugo’s dead father form the backbone of this intricate, tender, and spellbinding mystery.”

What the inside flap doesn’t tell you is that many of Selznick’s 533 pages (284 to be exact) are covered with his astonishing illustrations, a “storyboard” of sorts for the movie that was to inevitably follow. The librarians applauded loudly. I brooded silently. Here I was, pitching the “behind the scenes stories” of the making of 26 commercials, while Selznick was mesmerizing the audience with a timeless tale of growing up and growing old. Oh, the humanity!

But the story doesn’t end there, I’m afraid. After the presentations, the librarians were invited to meet the authors and purchase their books. With my compact 85-pager in hand, I meekly walked up to Selznick’s booth and patiently waited in line to offer an autographed copy of my book in exchange for an autographed copy of his book. Apparently a mathematician as well as an illustrator and author, Selznick quipped, “Shouldn’t I actually get six copies of your book, given the obvious disparity in page length?” Before I could answer, he smiled. “Although if you discount the illustrations, I suppose my book is actually only worth three of yours.” (I didn’t have the heart, much less the stomach, to remind him that my book was mostly photographs from the sets of our commercial shoots.)

Long story short, I now have in my possession a first edition of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, signed by the author “For Tim…” It is, as you might imagine, one of my most prized possessions. The End