Mary Osborne: Hi, this Mary Pope Osbourne and I am the author of the Magic Tree House series. I'm going to tell you a bit about how I came to write this series and then I'll read to you from the very first book.

When I decided to do a series almost 20 years ago, I wanted to write about history and time travel and real kids and magic but I didn't know how I would get my two real kids, who I eventually named Jack and Annie, back in time. And the first book I wrote, trying to figure this out, they went down to a magic cellar and it was underneath their house and they didn't know it was magic and, well, as you can guess that didn't really work. The next time I took a stab at it, I tried magic whistles. Nope, that didn't work. I tried a magic artist studio, I tried a magic natural history museum, I kept trying different ideas and I was seriously gonna give up the whole plan. I liked writing other kinds of books, I'd written lots of mythology and fairy tales and novels and picture books and I thought maybe I would get back to that.

But then one day, in Pennsylvania in the woods, I was walking with my husband Will, and we saw an old tree house and it was all falling down. And one of us, I don't know which one even said it, said, "Well what if you put Jack and Annie in a tree house and something about it made it magic and that's what took them back in time." Then they can carry things with them, they can sort of hide out in the top of trees so nobody really notices their tree house coming and going and every kid wants a tree house, I certainly did. So, believe it or not, that night I had my first really solid idea and I started writing the Magic Tree House. The first book I wrote about Magic Tree House was called Dinosaurs Before Dark, and I want to share with you a little passage from that book where Jack and Annie themselves discover the tree house. They're in the woods, Jack wants to go home, Annie's racing alone ahead of him and that's where we'll start.

Annie raced alone into the woods. Jack looked at the sky, the sun was about to set. "Come on Annie, it's time to go home." But Annie had disappeared. Jack waited. No Annie. "Annie!" He shouted again. "Jack, Jack, come here!" Jack groaned. "This better be good," he said. Jack left the road and headed into the woods. The trees were lit with a golden, late-afternoon light. "Come here," called Annie. There she was, standing under a tall oak tree. "Look," she said. She was pointing at a rope ladder, the longest rope ladder Jack had ever seen. "Wow," he whispered. The ladder went all the way up to the top of the tree. There, at the top, was a tree house. It was tucked between two branches. "That must be the highest tree house in the world," said Annie. "Who built it?" Asked Jack. "I've never seen it before." "I don't know, but I'm going up," said Annie.