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[CCBC-Net] Minders of Make-Believe: Taste Makers
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From: leonardsma at aol.com <leonardsma>
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:41:11 -0400
From the beginnings of library service to children at the turn of the last century, public librarians emerged as the leading arbitors of quality in children's literature. Anne Carroll was certainly the best known member of the group, and quite powerful, but she was not all-powerful. She had a rival just across the East River in Clara Whitehill Hunt, who headed children's services at the Brooklyn Public Library system starting in 1903, which was three years before ACM went to New York Public. In fact, Moore left her position at the Pratt demonstration library when she saw that Hunt was about to trump her in Brooklyn. Moore was right to realize that the NYPL, with its proximity to publishers' offices, was the biggest prize of all, and she seized that opportunity when it came her way and made the most of it. From then on Moore was involved in everything: the establishment of Book Week and of the Newbery and Caldecott Medals (though it was Hunt who served as the first Newbery ch
air), the publication of her own annual lists, review work for the Herald Tribune and the Horn Book, and less formally as an advisor to publishers. There are letters from the D'Aulaires both to Moore and Hunt thanking each of them for having been the one librarian to inspire them to begin making picture books. They must have been a very politic pair.
Some publishers listened to Moore and others didn't. May Massee, a former librarian and Booklist editor when she founded Doublday's juveniles dept in the early 1920s, allied herself closely with Moore. Later when Massee moved to Viking she published Ruth Sawyer (winner of the Newbery for ROLLER SKATES), who was a good friend of Moore's and a sometime storyteller at NY Public. It certainly helped the young Robert McCloskey to win the approval of Moore that he was Sawyer's son-in-law, and that his wife was herself a children's librarian.
Louise Bechtel of Macmillan was politic but as often as not scornful Moore's opinions. Bechtel published Lewis Hines' photo essay MEN AT WORK, knowing in advance (one can assume) that Moore would dismiss the book as Bank Street-inspired here and now realism (it's a book of photos that follows the construction of the Empire State Building, and has since won a place as a classic of documentary photography). Ursula Nordstrom, who belonged to the next generation of editors, was more openly contemptuous of Moore.
But Moore as I said was not the only powerful librarian. Alice Jordan, at Boston Public Library, tutored the founder of The Horn Book in children's literature when the latter was just starting out as the proprietor of a children's bookshop built on reformist ideals. And Jordan was far more responsive to the kinds of experimental books that Margaret Wise Brown was writing than Moore was, so there was a range of critical opinon, even at the time when a few powerful voices dominated the scene.
>From the 1920s onward, progressive educators led by Bank Street's Lucy Mitchell put themselves forward as minders with a different philosophy frp, that of Moore, whom they viewed as a sentimentalist and Romantic about childhood. Alice Dalgliesh, who founded the Scribner juvenile department in the mid-1930s, came from Teachers College, Columbia University, which was another center of progressive education thought and practice, and so was not likely to fall into line unquestioning with Moore's pronouncements, either.
In the 1940s the creators of Golden Books found a way to bypass the library system altogether by publishing inexpensive books that parents could buy directly at five and dime stores, drug stores, and later supermarkets. The editors craved the respectibility that library approval could confer on a publishing enterprise, and when they had the chance to persuade a Caldecott winning artist (for instance Elizabeth Orton Jones) to work for them, they did so. But the great success of Golden Books in the middle decades of the 1900s is perhaps the best proof of all of the limits of the librarians' power as "minders."
Leonard S. Marcus
54 Willow Street, #2A
Brooklyn, New York 11201
tel 718 596-1897
e-mail leonardsma at aol.com
web www.leonardmarcus.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Kathleen T. Horning <horning at education.wisc.edu>
To: ccbc-net at lists.education.wisc.edu
Sent: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:32 pm
Subject: Re: [CCBC-Net] Minders of Make-Believe: Taste Makers
Leonard, first of all, thanks so much for being our guest for the next two weeks, while we discuss your book "The Minders of the Make Believe." Bouncing off the last paragraph of your response below, could you please tell us a bit more about the "taste makers" -- who they were and how they influenced the field? How much of an influence did they have on the editors you interviewed? KT Kathleen T. Horning Director Cooperative Children's Book Center 4290 Helen C. White Hall 600 N. Park St Madison, WI 53706 Phone: 608-263-3721 FAX: 608-262-4933 horning at education.wisc.edu http://www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/ leonardsma at aol.com wrote: > Well, that's a large question. > > > > There have been many changes in subject and emotional content, format, and even genre. > > > > Picture books and cloth and board books for the youngest ages were rare before William R. Scott, a small experimental publishing hous
e inspired by progressive education theory, hired Margaret Wise Brown as its first editor in the late 1930s, and published books like Brown and Leonard Weisgard's NOISY BOOK and Brown and Esphyr Slobodkina's FIVE LITTLE FIREMEN. A few years later, Simon and Schuster brought out Dorothy Kunhardt's PAT THE BUNNY, and a new age category for children's books was firmly established. Think of all the more recent books--those by Eric Carle,Tana Hoban and Lois Ehlert, for instance--that have grown out of that beginning. > > > > At Harper, Ursula Nordstrom worked across all age groups to deepen the emotional range and pyschological realism of books for young readers. Think of Brown and Hurd's THE RUNAWAY BUNNY, which may be the most rhapsodic piece of writing for young children in the entire literature; or GOODNIGHT MOON, which, as I have written elsewhere, brought together the librarians' idea that make-believe was what small children want and
need with the opposing idea of the progressive educators of the t
ime, who believed that preschoolers had a natural affinity for "here and now" stories about their own everyday reality. Brown had a great, synthetic vision -- and was able to make a place in the Great Green Room for both points of v > iew. The peacefulness in GOODNIGHT MOON Is not just the sense of peace that a child facing the dark needs at the end of the day; it is also a reconciliation of the warring ideas of the "minders" of children's literature of her day. > > > > Of course books like HARRIET THE SPY and later THE OUTSIDERS and THE CHOCOLATE WAR took the literature into other new terrain. Robert Cormier's agent the late Marilyn Marlow had a very hard time placing THE CHOCOLATE WAR. Even Ursula Nordstrom found it too disturbing, as did Viking's Velma Varner (lots of Vs there!), who had been willing to take a chance of THE OUTSIDERS. Nordstrom also passed on A WRINKLE IN TIME, but she was generally closed to fantasy; tempamentally
, the genre did not appeal to her. But 25 other editors rejected L'Engle's book as well, and the ultimate success of that book was instrumental in bringing about a greater openness among American readers to fantasy literature generally. Prior to that, I think the American tradition was fundamentally realist in orientation, a tendency that can be traced back to Puritan New England and fear of the "sporting lie" that made all fiction suspect. > > > > Louise Seaman Bechtel's essays, which are collected in a book called BOOKS IN SEARCH OF CHILDREN (which Susan Hirschman published during her tenure as head of Macmillan's Dept of Books for Boys and Girls) are well worth reading. Bechtel had one foot in the librarians' camp and the other in that of the progressive educators like Bank Street's=2 > 0founder Lucy Sprague Mitchell. As such she was one of the few figures who bridged the great divide in critical thinking during much of the last c
entury about what was "good" for children to read. > > &g
t; > Having said all this, it's also worth noting at the start that the official taste makers were responsible for relatively few of the children's books that children themselves were most enthusiastic about. When Ursula Nordstrom started in as head of Harper's department in 1940, one of the first things she did was stop at a newsstand and pick up a sampling of the latest comic books. She knew that that's what chidlren were actually reading, and she wanted to learn the secret of those critically shunned publications' great success. > > > > > > > > Leonard S. Marcus > > 54 Willow Street, #2A > > Brooklyn, New York 11201 > > > > tel 718 596-1897 > > e-mail leonardsma at aol.com > > web www.leonardmarcus.com > > > _______________________________________________ CCBC-Net mailing list CCBC-Net at ccbc.education.wisc.edu Visit this link to read archives or to unsubscribe
... http://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/mailman/listinfo/ccbc-net
Received on Thu 17 Jul 2008 01:41:11 PM CDT
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:41:11 -0400
From the beginnings of library service to children at the turn of the last century, public librarians emerged as the leading arbitors of quality in children's literature. Anne Carroll was certainly the best known member of the group, and quite powerful, but she was not all-powerful. She had a rival just across the East River in Clara Whitehill Hunt, who headed children's services at the Brooklyn Public Library system starting in 1903, which was three years before ACM went to New York Public. In fact, Moore left her position at the Pratt demonstration library when she saw that Hunt was about to trump her in Brooklyn. Moore was right to realize that the NYPL, with its proximity to publishers' offices, was the biggest prize of all, and she seized that opportunity when it came her way and made the most of it. From then on Moore was involved in everything: the establishment of Book Week and of the Newbery and Caldecott Medals (though it was Hunt who served as the first Newbery ch
air), the publication of her own annual lists, review work for the Herald Tribune and the Horn Book, and less formally as an advisor to publishers. There are letters from the D'Aulaires both to Moore and Hunt thanking each of them for having been the one librarian to inspire them to begin making picture books. They must have been a very politic pair.
Some publishers listened to Moore and others didn't. May Massee, a former librarian and Booklist editor when she founded Doublday's juveniles dept in the early 1920s, allied herself closely with Moore. Later when Massee moved to Viking she published Ruth Sawyer (winner of the Newbery for ROLLER SKATES), who was a good friend of Moore's and a sometime storyteller at NY Public. It certainly helped the young Robert McCloskey to win the approval of Moore that he was Sawyer's son-in-law, and that his wife was herself a children's librarian.
Louise Bechtel of Macmillan was politic but as often as not scornful Moore's opinions. Bechtel published Lewis Hines' photo essay MEN AT WORK, knowing in advance (one can assume) that Moore would dismiss the book as Bank Street-inspired here and now realism (it's a book of photos that follows the construction of the Empire State Building, and has since won a place as a classic of documentary photography). Ursula Nordstrom, who belonged to the next generation of editors, was more openly contemptuous of Moore.
But Moore as I said was not the only powerful librarian. Alice Jordan, at Boston Public Library, tutored the founder of The Horn Book in children's literature when the latter was just starting out as the proprietor of a children's bookshop built on reformist ideals. And Jordan was far more responsive to the kinds of experimental books that Margaret Wise Brown was writing than Moore was, so there was a range of critical opinon, even at the time when a few powerful voices dominated the scene.
>From the 1920s onward, progressive educators led by Bank Street's Lucy Mitchell put themselves forward as minders with a different philosophy frp, that of Moore, whom they viewed as a sentimentalist and Romantic about childhood. Alice Dalgliesh, who founded the Scribner juvenile department in the mid-1930s, came from Teachers College, Columbia University, which was another center of progressive education thought and practice, and so was not likely to fall into line unquestioning with Moore's pronouncements, either.
In the 1940s the creators of Golden Books found a way to bypass the library system altogether by publishing inexpensive books that parents could buy directly at five and dime stores, drug stores, and later supermarkets. The editors craved the respectibility that library approval could confer on a publishing enterprise, and when they had the chance to persuade a Caldecott winning artist (for instance Elizabeth Orton Jones) to work for them, they did so. But the great success of Golden Books in the middle decades of the 1900s is perhaps the best proof of all of the limits of the librarians' power as "minders."
Leonard S. Marcus
54 Willow Street, #2A
Brooklyn, New York 11201
tel 718 596-1897
e-mail leonardsma at aol.com
web www.leonardmarcus.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Kathleen T. Horning <horning at education.wisc.edu>
To: ccbc-net at lists.education.wisc.edu
Sent: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:32 pm
Subject: Re: [CCBC-Net] Minders of Make-Believe: Taste Makers
Leonard, first of all, thanks so much for being our guest for the next two weeks, while we discuss your book "The Minders of the Make Believe." Bouncing off the last paragraph of your response below, could you please tell us a bit more about the "taste makers" -- who they were and how they influenced the field? How much of an influence did they have on the editors you interviewed? KT Kathleen T. Horning Director Cooperative Children's Book Center 4290 Helen C. White Hall 600 N. Park St Madison, WI 53706 Phone: 608-263-3721 FAX: 608-262-4933 horning at education.wisc.edu http://www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/ leonardsma at aol.com wrote: > Well, that's a large question. > > > > There have been many changes in subject and emotional content, format, and even genre. > > > > Picture books and cloth and board books for the youngest ages were rare before William R. Scott, a small experimental publishing hous
e inspired by progressive education theory, hired Margaret Wise Brown as its first editor in the late 1930s, and published books like Brown and Leonard Weisgard's NOISY BOOK and Brown and Esphyr Slobodkina's FIVE LITTLE FIREMEN. A few years later, Simon and Schuster brought out Dorothy Kunhardt's PAT THE BUNNY, and a new age category for children's books was firmly established. Think of all the more recent books--those by Eric Carle,Tana Hoban and Lois Ehlert, for instance--that have grown out of that beginning. > > > > At Harper, Ursula Nordstrom worked across all age groups to deepen the emotional range and pyschological realism of books for young readers. Think of Brown and Hurd's THE RUNAWAY BUNNY, which may be the most rhapsodic piece of writing for young children in the entire literature; or GOODNIGHT MOON, which, as I have written elsewhere, brought together the librarians' idea that make-believe was what small children want and
need with the opposing idea of the progressive educators of the t
ime, who believed that preschoolers had a natural affinity for "here and now" stories about their own everyday reality. Brown had a great, synthetic vision -- and was able to make a place in the Great Green Room for both points of v > iew. The peacefulness in GOODNIGHT MOON Is not just the sense of peace that a child facing the dark needs at the end of the day; it is also a reconciliation of the warring ideas of the "minders" of children's literature of her day. > > > > Of course books like HARRIET THE SPY and later THE OUTSIDERS and THE CHOCOLATE WAR took the literature into other new terrain. Robert Cormier's agent the late Marilyn Marlow had a very hard time placing THE CHOCOLATE WAR. Even Ursula Nordstrom found it too disturbing, as did Viking's Velma Varner (lots of Vs there!), who had been willing to take a chance of THE OUTSIDERS. Nordstrom also passed on A WRINKLE IN TIME, but she was generally closed to fantasy; tempamentally
, the genre did not appeal to her. But 25 other editors rejected L'Engle's book as well, and the ultimate success of that book was instrumental in bringing about a greater openness among American readers to fantasy literature generally. Prior to that, I think the American tradition was fundamentally realist in orientation, a tendency that can be traced back to Puritan New England and fear of the "sporting lie" that made all fiction suspect. > > > > Louise Seaman Bechtel's essays, which are collected in a book called BOOKS IN SEARCH OF CHILDREN (which Susan Hirschman published during her tenure as head of Macmillan's Dept of Books for Boys and Girls) are well worth reading. Bechtel had one foot in the librarians' camp and the other in that of the progressive educators like Bank Street's=2 > 0founder Lucy Sprague Mitchell. As such she was one of the few figures who bridged the great divide in critical thinking during much of the last c
entury about what was "good" for children to read. > > &g
t; > Having said all this, it's also worth noting at the start that the official taste makers were responsible for relatively few of the children's books that children themselves were most enthusiastic about. When Ursula Nordstrom started in as head of Harper's department in 1940, one of the first things she did was stop at a newsstand and pick up a sampling of the latest comic books. She knew that that's what chidlren were actually reading, and she wanted to learn the secret of those critically shunned publications' great success. > > > > > > > > Leonard S. Marcus > > 54 Willow Street, #2A > > Brooklyn, New York 11201 > > > > tel 718 596-1897 > > e-mail leonardsma at aol.com > > web www.leonardmarcus.com > > > _______________________________________________ CCBC-Net mailing list CCBC-Net at ccbc.education.wisc.edu Visit this link to read archives or to unsubscribe
... http://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/mailman/listinfo/ccbc-net
Received on Thu 17 Jul 2008 01:41:11 PM CDT
