Selby Beeler is the author of Throw Your Tooth on the Roof: Tooth Traditions Around the World, a picture book telling what children do when they lose a baby tooth. Selected as a Children's Choices Selection in 1999 and as part of Minnesota Storytime, Throw Your Tooth on the Roof has also been translated and published in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and Greece.

Her second book How Many Elephants? a Lift-the-Flap Counting Book, is due in Spring 2004 from Candlewick Press.

Selby grew up in Rochester, Minnesota, moved to New York for college and work, on to Alabama with her husband and then back to Rochester, Minnesota where they live with one hand-me-down cat. In addition to raising two above-average children, Selby has, at various times, taught swimming and canoeing, rescued baby birds, worked for a fashion magazine, drawn a weekly cartoon for an Army newspaper, written weekly newspaper articles, and co-owned two children's stores for which she wrote and illustrated all the advertising.

Throw Your Tooth on the Roof:
Tooth Traditions Around the World
Illustrated by G. Brian Karas
Houghton Mifflin, 1998
Ages 4-8, ISBN 978-0-395-89108-7

You'll find a Reading Guide for this book at Minnesota Storytime.

"It happens to everyone, everywhere, all over the world. 'Look! Look! My tooth fell out! My tooth fell out!' But what happens next? What in the world do you do with your tooth?" The answer depends on the traditions of your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. Do you throw your tooth at the sun? Leave it for a mouse? Hide it by a bush? Put in under your pillow? or Feed it to a dog? As Redbook Magazine wrote, this book "... turns a seemingly ordinary custom into a window on the world."