From: LeonardSMa at aol.com <LeonardSMa>
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 1998 11:53:19 EDT

UN circulated her letters within the office as a way of keeping everyone in the department abreast of her current activities and also for the sake of sharing with staff her ideas for coping with the various problems and issues that inevitably arose throughout an editor's contacts with authors, artists, booksellers, critics, librarians, and others. She also introduced an element of competition to the mix by having her staff circulate their letters too. Ursula was always watching! And the staff all wanted to compose the smartest letters to impress and please their boss. UN made any number of authors and artists to want to please her in just this same way, and this was one of the means by which she drew out their best work, too. I'm sure the letters also served, as Megan suggests, to impart her values to the younger members of her staff. There's a quality of fearlessness in so many of the letters--a readiness to stick to her standards and her guns, which I think anyone in children's book publishing in particular would have found both reassuring and inspiring. After all, the general view both in and out of publishing was to look down on children's books as kid stuff. Why from that point of view should standards matter at all? UN had to resist that cultural prejudice on every level of her activities. As someone who did not leave her work behind at the end of the day, it probably took a personal toll as well. Leonard
Received on Thu 06 Aug 1998 10:53:19 AM CDT