Fun
Facts About
• There
are five ducklings in Little Quack's family. They
are Widdle, Waddle, Piddle, Puddle and Little Quack.
• Little
Quack is not related to Daffy or Donald.
• Derek
and Lauren Thompson, the author of Little Quack, never
met or even talked to each other during the making of the first
two
Little Quack books. They finally met in 2003,
after the paintings for Little Quack's Hide and Seek were
completed.
• Derek
completed the paintings for the first Little Quack in
only 40 days.
•
Each of the other three books, Little Quack's Hide and
Seek,
Little Quack's Bedtime and Little Quack's
New Friend took three months to paint.
•
All four Little Quack books were painted consecutively over
a two year period beginning in early 2002 and ending
in late 2003.
• Ten
different colors of paint were used to paint the pond water
in the Little Quack books.
•
The paintings for the first Little Quack were
shipped out in a snowstorm in March 2002 (Derek lives
in
Minneapolis)
and the paintings
were lost. They were supposed to have arrived the next
day. They finally arrived at Simon & Schuster in New York
City
five days later.
• Derek
no longer ships his paintings out in snowstorms.
•
When Derek was little, he and his friends all owned duck
helmets. There were even five of them (That's Derek on the far
right). He didn't remember this picture
until after he'd illustrated the Little Quack books.
Was it destiny that he would illustrate Little Quack?
•
The original title for Little Quack's Bedtime was supposed
to be Little Quack's Sleepy Time, but Simon & Schuster changed
it.
•
In Little Quack's Bedtime, keep an eye on Waddle.
He likes to sleep with his mouth open. But Widdle and Piddle
think he has bad duckling breath.
•
While Derek was working on the sketches for Little Quack's
Bedtime in the summer of 2003, a terrible thunderstorm
struck Minneapolis and the power was knocked out for three days.
Derek spent an entire day
outside cleaning up debris and by evening it was too dark to
work. The deadline was closing in fast, so Derek set up every
candle he could find on the kitchen
table and worked late into the night. Derek's kitchen was so
bright that when a neighbor arrived home at 1:00am, he thought
Derek's power was back on. The neighbor called Derek
and asked
if he could run an extension cord across the street for
his refrigerator. Derek did end up finishing the sketches on
time, but several sport wax drippings from his candlelit work
sessions.
•
Small "child-sized" copies of Little Quack were given away in
more than a million boxes of Cheerios in 2005. It was a
part of "Spoonfuls
of Stories," a literacy initiative program sponsored by
Cheerios and First
Book.
• Little Quack was a New York Times Bestseller.
•
Little Quack was an IRA/CBC Childrens' Choice Award
Winner.
•
Both Little Quack and Little Quack's Bedtime were
awarded the National Parenting Publication Gold Award.
•
The Little Quack books are available in a number of countries
around the world including Canada, France, Germany, Spain,
the United Kingdom, and South Korea.