A secret about
Animalia 

I worked on the stories a long time before I knew what the title of the book would be. Then I began to hear one word in my mind: animalia. It had a good sound. It had a good feeling. But I wondered, “Is it a real word?” I didn’t know.

So I looked it up in a huge old dictionary we got from a garage sale. There it was! Animalia is an old word from Latin. It means, “kingdom of the animals.”

How perfect! The thirteen stories in my book were about animals and people together. Each story told about a moment of kindness or magic between a human being and an animal. So I called the book Animalia, and painted an image of a kingdom for the cover.

Every so often, I do hear a word in my mind, like that. It may or may not be in the dictionary. But if it is, and I have never heard that word before, how did my mind know it? This is called intuition. Thank heavens for intuition. We all have it.

There is another book with the same title, a very famous one by Graham Baese. But mine came out before that, in 1982. Later, his publisher called my publisher and said they had asked him to call his book something else, but he wanted the same title. I don’t blame him, “animalia” is such a fine old word. And that is when I learned you can use a title even if there is already a book by that name.

And anyway, who can really own a word that is already here in the world long before us?