They may be just three feet tall and made of plush, but that’s not keeping Dog and Bear, the eponymous stars of Laura Vaccaro Seeger’s Dog and Bear and Dog and Bear: Two’s Company (Roaring Brook/Porter), from striking out across the U.S. on tour. The Dog and Bear Best Friends Tour got underway last week and will run through the summer.
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| Visiting with Dog and Bear at the Learnéd Owl. |
Four sets of the custom-made plush characters (created by MerryMakers) will crisscross the country over the next few months. Three of the packages will move between 17 bookstores in 14 states that signed up to participate in the tour (via a marketing alert Roaring Brook sent out in February); a fourth box will move between public and school libraries in Texas, starting with a kick-off at the Texas Library Association’s annual conference, currently underway in Houston.
Dog and Bear’s first events were held at Bookin’ It, a mobile bookstore in Belmont, N.C., and the Learnéd Owl Book Shop in Hudson, Ohio. The figures in the third box start their tour with an event this weekend at Wild About Books in Clearlake, Calif. Each of the four tour boxes contains the two plush
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| Another Dog and Bear were spotted at Bookin' It, a mobile bookstore in North Carolina. |
figures, toys relating to the characters (including a dog bowl), suggested activities, recipes, stickers and signage.
Roaring Brook has stores and libraries booked through June, but interested bookstores can still sign on to host a Dog and Bear event by emailing freelancer Susan Hecht, formerly associate director of retail marketing at Roaring Brook, who is managing the tour. A third Dog and Bear adventure, Dog and Bear: Three to Get Ready, is scheduled for September publication.
