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[CCBC-Net] Minders of Make-Believe: Taste Makers
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From: Mayra Negron <mayra.negron>
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:31:15 -0400
Having just attended tonight a round table with 7 renowned Chilean (IBBY) authors who are writing (and have written) excellent children's books, I am saddened that their work is not as known in the US. Listening to Victor Carvajal, Veronica Uribe, Alicia Morel, and others describe the books they have authored, makes me think of all the Spanish-speaking children that are missing these authors' work because the bridges from the North and South Americas are non-existent right now. How many children that *can* read Carvajal and his ecological stories are not doing so because the adults in their lives don't know that this literature exists? As I told Victor Carvajal tonight, our group, a Fullbright group of teachers and librarians studying Chilean literature, is beginning to build the bridge. I hope others will join us.
Mayra, counting the hours until tomorrow, when we get to listen to 8 more authors, Santiago, Chile
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 5:20 PM, Annette Goldsmith <ayg at comcast.net> wrote:
> Leonard, could you comment on how children's book editors view
> internationalism today? Jella Lepman and the generation that created IBBY
> had the impetus of post-war reconstruction to build bridges of
> understanding
> through children's books; what do you think drives the movement now? I'm
> thinking in particular of books from other countries, especially those
> translated into English for the U.S. market, rather than multicultural
> books
> originating with U.S. houses.
>
> Annette Goldsmith
> Doctoral Candidate
> College of Information
> Florida State University
> Tallahassee, Florida
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ccbc-net-bounces at ccbc.education.wisc.edu
> [mailto:ccbc-net-bounces at ccbc.education.wisc.edu] On Behalf Of
> leonardsma at aol.com
> Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2008 4:03 PM
> To: horning at education.wisc.edu; ccbc-net at lists.education.wisc.edu
> Subject: Re: [CCBC-Net] Minders of Make-Believe: Taste Makers
>
> Moore was many things, and it's important to recognize all of them. I
> agree
> that she is an easy target for satire, and also that her accomplishments
> were great, not least when you consider the resistance she had to overcome
> from publishers, librarian management, just about everyone... As for her
> interest in what we now call multi-culturalism, yes this was important to
> her. She was a realist about the fact that New York City was an
> international crossroads and a magnet for immigrants and her realism
> expressed itself at the library both in the collections she organized,
> which
> included books in many languages and from many "lands," as they said in
> those days, and in the staffing of the library. After World War II, NYPL
> was
> one of the libraries to which Japan sent young women to train as children's
> librarians with a view to returning home to aid in the cultural
> reconstruction of their devastated homeland.
>
>
>
> As I say in MINDERS, May Massee was another internationalist, who published
> many books with foreign settings and about foreign cultures. She did so
> with
> the stated purpose of opening American children's minds to an awareness of
> the rest of the world, and she did so within a few years of America's
> rejection of membership in the League of Nations, and of the Red Scare--so
> it wasn't an easy position for her to be taking.
>
>
>
> Margaret McElderry worked for Anne Carroll Moore in Rm 105, the inner
> sanctum of NYPL, in the years before World War II. When McElderry returned
> from military service in Office of Army Intelligence in Europe, she became
> Harcourt, Brace's children's book editor, and took up the cause of
> internationalism on an even grander scale. Hers was the generation that
> created IBBY and the one that perhaps has believed most fervently that
> children's books could make a difference in the quest of lasting world
> peace. Velma Varner came on to the scene at about the same time, first at
> Putnam and later at other houses, including Viking, and she too was an
> internationalist. Ann Beneduce, who later founded Philomel was her
> protegee.
> So, it's possible to trace this line of editors who a commitment to
> internationalist right up to the present day.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 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<lt%3Bhorning at education.wisc.edu>
> >
>
> To: ccbc-net at lists.education.wisc.edu
>
> Sent: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 3:07 pm
>
> Subject: Re: [CCBC-Net] Minders of Make-Believe: Taste Makers
>
>
>
>
> Leonard, thanks for your quick and thoughtful response. I can see why
> Anne Carroll Moore may have been viewed as a sentimentalist and
> romanticist when it cames to children's literature, and people do love to
> talk about her eccentricities, such as her constant companion, a wooden
> doll named Nicholas, whom she treated like a real person. But I do think
> we also have to give credit to ACM for her understanding of the
> importance
> of honoring ethnic diversity, rather than pushing for assimilation. She
> was very well aware of all the different cultural identities represented
> in NYC neighborhoods, and made sure that her children's librarians
> understood and celebrated the communities they served. My children's
> literature professor, Gertrude Herman, worked as a children's librarian
> under ACM in the New York Public Library System, and I loved getting her
> to tell stories about that time. She worked in a Czech neighborhood, and,
> as a result, had to learn ev
> erything she could about Czech culture. She said after a few years at
> NYPL, she knew more about the Czech people than she did about her own
> cultural heritage. I've always wondered if ACM's great affinity for
> cultural diversity is, at least in part, what led to the publication of
> so
> many novels set in other countries during from the late 1920s through the
> 1950s. Did that come up at all in your research? 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: >
> >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 wa
> s not > all-powerful. She had a rival just across the East Rive
>
> r 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
> chair), 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 t
>
> hat 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 19
> 00s is perhaps > the best proof of all of the limits of the lib
>
> rarians' 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 <lt%3Bhorning 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
> <mailto:horning at education.wisc.edu>
> http://www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/ > leonardsma at aol.com
> <mailto: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 house 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 real > >
> ism
> 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 time, 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 a
> t 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
> or
> ientation, a tendency that can be traced back to Puritan New Engla
>
> nd 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 Boo >
> >
> ks 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 century about what was "good" for children to
> read. > > > > 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 departmen
> t 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
> <mailto:leonardsma at aol.com> > > web www.leonardmarcus.com
> <http://www.leonardmarcus.com> > > >
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Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:31:15 -0400
Having just attended tonight a round table with 7 renowned Chilean (IBBY) authors who are writing (and have written) excellent children's books, I am saddened that their work is not as known in the US. Listening to Victor Carvajal, Veronica Uribe, Alicia Morel, and others describe the books they have authored, makes me think of all the Spanish-speaking children that are missing these authors' work because the bridges from the North and South Americas are non-existent right now. How many children that *can* read Carvajal and his ecological stories are not doing so because the adults in their lives don't know that this literature exists? As I told Victor Carvajal tonight, our group, a Fullbright group of teachers and librarians studying Chilean literature, is beginning to build the bridge. I hope others will join us.
Mayra, counting the hours until tomorrow, when we get to listen to 8 more authors, Santiago, Chile
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 5:20 PM, Annette Goldsmith <ayg at comcast.net> wrote:
> Leonard, could you comment on how children's book editors view
> internationalism today? Jella Lepman and the generation that created IBBY
> had the impetus of post-war reconstruction to build bridges of
> understanding
> through children's books; what do you think drives the movement now? I'm
> thinking in particular of books from other countries, especially those
> translated into English for the U.S. market, rather than multicultural
> books
> originating with U.S. houses.
>
> Annette Goldsmith
> Doctoral Candidate
> College of Information
> Florida State University
> Tallahassee, Florida
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ccbc-net-bounces at ccbc.education.wisc.edu
> [mailto:ccbc-net-bounces at ccbc.education.wisc.edu] On Behalf Of
> leonardsma at aol.com
> Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2008 4:03 PM
> To: horning at education.wisc.edu; ccbc-net at lists.education.wisc.edu
> Subject: Re: [CCBC-Net] Minders of Make-Believe: Taste Makers
>
> Moore was many things, and it's important to recognize all of them. I
> agree
> that she is an easy target for satire, and also that her accomplishments
> were great, not least when you consider the resistance she had to overcome
> from publishers, librarian management, just about everyone... As for her
> interest in what we now call multi-culturalism, yes this was important to
> her. She was a realist about the fact that New York City was an
> international crossroads and a magnet for immigrants and her realism
> expressed itself at the library both in the collections she organized,
> which
> included books in many languages and from many "lands," as they said in
> those days, and in the staffing of the library. After World War II, NYPL
> was
> one of the libraries to which Japan sent young women to train as children's
> librarians with a view to returning home to aid in the cultural
> reconstruction of their devastated homeland.
>
>
>
> As I say in MINDERS, May Massee was another internationalist, who published
> many books with foreign settings and about foreign cultures. She did so
> with
> the stated purpose of opening American children's minds to an awareness of
> the rest of the world, and she did so within a few years of America's
> rejection of membership in the League of Nations, and of the Red Scare--so
> it wasn't an easy position for her to be taking.
>
>
>
> Margaret McElderry worked for Anne Carroll Moore in Rm 105, the inner
> sanctum of NYPL, in the years before World War II. When McElderry returned
> from military service in Office of Army Intelligence in Europe, she became
> Harcourt, Brace's children's book editor, and took up the cause of
> internationalism on an even grander scale. Hers was the generation that
> created IBBY and the one that perhaps has believed most fervently that
> children's books could make a difference in the quest of lasting world
> peace. Velma Varner came on to the scene at about the same time, first at
> Putnam and later at other houses, including Viking, and she too was an
> internationalist. Ann Beneduce, who later founded Philomel was her
> protegee.
> So, it's possible to trace this line of editors who a commitment to
> internationalist right up to the present day.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 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<lt%3Bhorning at education.wisc.edu>
> >
>
> To: ccbc-net at lists.education.wisc.edu
>
> Sent: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 3:07 pm
>
> Subject: Re: [CCBC-Net] Minders of Make-Believe: Taste Makers
>
>
>
>
> Leonard, thanks for your quick and thoughtful response. I can see why
> Anne Carroll Moore may have been viewed as a sentimentalist and
> romanticist when it cames to children's literature, and people do love to
> talk about her eccentricities, such as her constant companion, a wooden
> doll named Nicholas, whom she treated like a real person. But I do think
> we also have to give credit to ACM for her understanding of the
> importance
> of honoring ethnic diversity, rather than pushing for assimilation. She
> was very well aware of all the different cultural identities represented
> in NYC neighborhoods, and made sure that her children's librarians
> understood and celebrated the communities they served. My children's
> literature professor, Gertrude Herman, worked as a children's librarian
> under ACM in the New York Public Library System, and I loved getting her
> to tell stories about that time. She worked in a Czech neighborhood, and,
> as a result, had to learn ev
> erything she could about Czech culture. She said after a few years at
> NYPL, she knew more about the Czech people than she did about her own
> cultural heritage. I've always wondered if ACM's great affinity for
> cultural diversity is, at least in part, what led to the publication of
> so
> many novels set in other countries during from the late 1920s through the
> 1950s. Did that come up at all in your research? 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: >
> >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 wa
> s not > all-powerful. She had a rival just across the East Rive
>
> r 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
> chair), 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 t
>
> hat 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 19
> 00s is perhaps > the best proof of all of the limits of the lib
>
> rarians' 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 <lt%3Bhorning 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
> <mailto:horning at education.wisc.edu>
> http://www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/ > leonardsma at aol.com
> <mailto: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 house 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 real > >
> ism
> 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 time, 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 a
> t 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
> or
> ientation, a tendency that can be traced back to Puritan New Engla
>
> nd 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 Boo >
> >
> ks 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 century about what was "good" for children to
> read. > > > > 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 departmen
> t 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
> <mailto:leonardsma at aol.com> > > web www.leonardmarcus.com
> <http://www.leonardmarcus.com> > > >
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-- Mayra in MilwaukeeReceived on Thu 17 Jul 2008 09:31:15 PM CDT
