Email from China

Comment:

I am a Chinese. After my reading the first Shiloh book, the images of Shiloh and Marty happily haunt me in my mind and make me never forget. They are always warm and love pictures I like. Marty told honest-to-God lies to protect Shiloh from returning to its old master, Judd Travers,and being mistreated; Marty and his Dad took the badly bleeding Shiloh to Doc Murphy and Murphy saved its life finally; Marty did a lot of things for Judd just in order to having Shiloh and love it; Shiloh living in the cozy box of Preston’s house…and the other thing I feel mostly interesting about this book is the paw-tograph of Clover, the prototype of Shiloh, and the story about Phyllis and Clover. When I imagine a cute beagle wearing a sunglass and pressing her paws on title pages of new-bought Shiloh books one by one, I can even hear tinkling laugh from some Chinese kids who love Shiloh.I don’t know why I think of the dog wearing sunglass, but I think it is cool. Its paw-print on the page must be the most unique and lovely sign in the book world! Expect the other three Shiloh Stories!

Phyllis replied:

You write English very well, and I was so happy to know that you enjoyed the first book of the Shiloh quartet.   Yes, the friends of ours who adopted the little abused dog I found in West Virginia are responsible for that paw print.  After I won the Newbery Award for the book, so many people drove up in the hills to the community of Shiloh to see the dog that had inspired the book, that they had a rubber stamp made of her paw so they could stamp something  to give to the dog’s fans.  And when they asked if I would like a rubber stamp too, of course I said YES!   Whenever I autograph someone’s book, I also stamp a paw print.