I’m a huge fan of picture books, but I especially love picture books that aren’t necessarily aimed at their usual audience. Or, at the very least, clever books that have plenty of Easter eggs for the older person reading to their teeny tiny audience.

P is for Pterodactyl is the kind of book that a burgeoning reader might throw across the room. But it also might be just the thing for an ESL teacher to read to a graduating class – just to show them that the English language is weird and mean, even to us native speakers. It’s full of all the nonsensical words whose first letter doesn’t make a sound. (Whose idea was that, anyway? And how did it get such traction?)

One of the co-authors of P is for Pterodactyl is Raj Haldar, whose other occupation is: Rapper. a.k.a. Lushlife. Which makes sense, since songwriters are such purveyors of words.

A lot of picture books get written by famous people who aren’t known to be authors, per se. Your Baby’s First Word Will Be Dada (Jimmy Fallon), Outlaw Pete (Bruce Springsteen) and my favorite, which is sort of an anti-picture book, The Book With No Pictures (B. J. Novak) are all celebrity offerings. But it’s not like these people don’t regularly traffic in the currency of words in their primary professions: songwriters and actors and talk show hosts write stuff all the time.

The latest celebrity/picture book writer to hit my radar? The Edmonton Oiler’s new forward, Zach Hyman, who has penned three picture books now. (And only one of them about hockey.)

My favorite part? When I Google him, he shows up as a Canadian author, not a Canadian hockey player. I guess it depends on who’s writing the Wikipedia tags – there is after all, a lot of power in the written (another silent letter!) word.