From: leonardsma at aol.com <leonardsma>
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:56:09 -0400

 I began by reading and gathering all sorts of original source material (letters, diaries, oral history transcripts, etc), and also by considering what books and papers I already had on hand that might be relevent. I built of a collection of publishing memoirs and individual house histories; also more general books about the book industry and library world past and present; taped interviews with retired and working publishing figures, visited or corresponded with archives that I knew had additional letters, diaries, etc. of interest, and began reading general histories of the US that concentrated on specific times in the past. One such book that I read was Ann Douglas' TERRIBLE HONEST: MONGREL MANHATTAN IN THE 1990s--a cultural history of Jazz Age New York, which gave the flavor of the time of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc., which was also the time of Anne Carroll Moore's professional rise&gt; It was interesting and really essential to consider Moore's experience in relation to that of the literary lions who we re her neighbors and contemporaries. Biographies of Nathaniel Hawthorne gave a window onto the New England of Samuel Griswold Goodrich. And so on. I kept letters in source files, then gradually moved the letters that were likely to be quoted into chapter files. I kept subject files in many categories--Editors, Booksellers, Librarians, War, Censorship, Agents, etc--and slowly moved material from those files into chapter files too. I was always on the lookout for journal articles, articles in general interest magazines of the past like LIFE, histories of specialized topics such as Ann Hulbert's RAISING AMERICA, which focuses on the history of expert advice in child-rearing, which gave valuable background information. And on and on.







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 Horning &lt;horning at education.wisc.edu&gt;

To: ccbc-net at lists.education.wisc.edu

Sent: Fri, 25 Jul 2008 2:59 pm

Subject: Re: [CCBC-Net] Minders of Make-Believe: Outsider Minders



  
    Leonard, I've really enjoyed both your book and our discussion of it here. I think one of the most fascinating things about your book is all the inter-connections, including both the positive influences and the inter-personal conflict, that occurred in what was a very small world. I know you've responded to previous questions about the various archives you used in your research, and you make references in MINDERS to earlier books you've published on Margaret Wise Brown, Ursula Nordstrom, Little Golden Books, etc., but I'm wondering if you could talk a little more about how you went about your research. For example, did you start out considering the subject decade by decade, or did you focus on specific people and follow the paper trails leading to and from them? How did you know when20to stop? Also, without giving away any trade secrets, did you find any as-yet untapped areas of this world you'd like to explore or that you wish someone else would look at in further depth?
    If you're tired of answering questions, just focus on my first paragraph... Thanks, KT Kathleen T. Horning Director Cooperative Children's Book Center 4290 Helen C. White Hall 600 N. Park Street Madison, WI 53706 Tel: 608-263-3721 Fax: 608-262-4933 horning at education.wisc.edu http://www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/ ----- Original Message ----- From: leonardsma at aol.com Date: Friday, July 25, 2008 4:20 am Subject: Re: [CCBC-Net] Minders of Make-Believe: Outsider Minders To: gmkruse at wisc.edu, ccbc-net at lists.education.wisc.edu &gt; I have discussed the contributions of everyone mentioned in Ginny's &gt; post in MINDERS. The stories I know about them are all there. &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; Leonard S. Marcus &gt; &gt; 54 Willow Street, #2A &gt; &gt; Brooklyn, New York 11201 &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; tel 718 596-1897 &gt; &gt; e-mail leonardsma at aol.com &gt; &gt; web www.leonardmarcus.com &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; ----
-Original Message----- &gt; &gt; From: Ginny Moore Kruse &lt;gmkruse at wisc.edu&gt; &gt; &gt; To: ccbc-net at lists.education.wisc.edu &gt; &gt; Sent: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 8:25 pm &gt; &gt; Subject: Re: [CCBC-Net] Minders of Make-Believe
: Outsider Minders &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; Thank you, Leonard, for remarking about Langston Hughes who &gt; contributed to the FIRST BOOK OF series. I assume that your book &gt; includes considerable commentary about other NYPL "minders" such as &gt; Augusta Baker and Barbara Rollock. Do you have some backstage &gt; anecdotes about them, i.e., material not in your book? And what &gt; about Charlemae Rollins whose distinguished career in the Chicago &gt; Public Library led - among other outcomes - to the publication of &gt; her "Christmas Gif' " (most recently reissued with artwork by Ashley &gt; Bryan)? The ALA Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) &gt; annually offers a program named after Charlemae Rollins, a significant &gt; "minder" on my personal list of saints. Cordially, Ginny &gt; leonardsma at aol.com wrote: &gt; Yes, I have written about this in &gt; MINDERS. Another writer the Council &gt; championed was Mildred D
. &gt; Taylor. And it &gt; was Council founder Franklin &gt; Folsom who earlier in his career &gt; pressured Franklin Watts to hire &gt; Langston Hughes as a &gt; contributing writer for the FIRST BOOK OF series &gt; launched by &gt; Wats in the 1950s, and which made it onto the shelves of &gt; school &gt; libraries around the country. &gt; &gt; Leonard S. Marcus &gt; 54
&gt; Willow Street, #2A &gt; Brooklyn, New York 11201 &gt; &gt; tel 718 &gt; 596-1897 &gt; e-mail leonardsma at aol.com &gt; web &gt; www.leonardmarcus.com &gt; &gt; -----Original Message----- &gt; &gt; From: Ginny Moore Kruse &lt;gmkruse at wisc.edu&gt; &gt; To: &gt; leonardsma at aol.com; ccbc-net at lists.education.wisc.edu &gt; Sent: Wed, &gt; 23 Jul 2008 11:10 am &gt; Subject: Minders of Make-Believe: Outsider &gt; Minders &gt; &gt; Leonard, will you please expand upon your remarks &gt; on July 21 (below) &gt; by adding what you discovered about the &gt; influence of the Council on &gt; Interracial Books for Children &gt; during the 1960s-1980s in particular? &gt; It seems to me that Brad &gt; Chambers, the Council and its publications &gt; exerted considerable &gt; influence as "outsider minders," which is the &gt; term I've coined &gt; for this aspect of the "Minders..." topic. Personally &gt; I learned &gt; so much20from each CIBC newsletter and publ ication, not that &gt; I &gt; always agreed, but there was always something new to think about &gt; &gt; regarding race, ethnicity, gender, exclusion, inclusion, etc. The &gt; &gt; CIBC's influence was critical to the beginnings of many &gt; careers; for &gt; example,=2 &gt; 0writers such as Walter Dean Myers and artists such as Pat &gt; &gt; Cummings won CIBC visibility, and - as the saying goes - the rest is &gt; &gt; h istory. Perhaps this is all covered in your book, but since I'm &gt; &gt; waiting in a virtual line for a reserved public library copy, &gt; it'll be &gt; quite a while before I can settle down with it in my &gt; hands to read it &gt; carefully and use its index. &gt; &gt; &gt; Thank you for making time to respond so promptly and in such depth &gt; &gt; including unpublished anecdotes within this conversation. I &gt; recall the &gt; lively CCBC-Net conversation during the summer of &gt; 1998 shortly after &gt; your "Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula &gt; Nordstrom" was published. &gt; CCBC-Net participants might want to &gt; check that book out of your &gt; libraries, too, as well as checking &gt; the CCBC-Net archives to read &gt; those commentaries. Leonard, you &gt; continue to give us well-documented &gt; information about which to &gt; talk, think and reflect. (And thank you, &gt; Norma Jean, for &gt; commissioning "Minders..." some years ago!!) &g t; &gt; Cordially, &gt; &gt; Ginny &gt; &gt; Ginny Moore Kruse, Director Emeritus &gt; &gt; Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) &gt; gmkruse at wisc.edu &gt; &lt;mailto:leonardsma at aol.com&gt; wrote: &gt; &gt; I think there have &gt; been waves of interest in presenting a & &gt; gt; multi-racial picture of American society in children's books, and &gt; it &gt; has taken a lo ng time for a large enough constituency and &gt; market to &gt; form for the books of that kind to make it in the &gt; market place. In the &gt; years just after World War II (at the end &gt; of which Truman belatedly &gt; integrated the US military), &gt; Elisabeth Hamilton, who headed the &gt; children's bk department at &gt; Morrow, published a few books of this &gt; kind--picture books by &gt; Jerold Beim and a nonfiction history of the &gt; "American Negro" by &gt; Hildegarde Swift. Hamilton felt strongly that such &gt; books were &gt; important but she could not sustain them. Not enough &gt; libraries &gt; and schools, presumably, were interested in buying them. &gt; Then &gt; came the 1960s wave, and the Caldecott Medal to Erza Jack Keats &gt; &gt; must have been taken by many as a validation of the goal of &gt; &gt; integrating the literature, but the fact that the book was the work of &gt; &gt; a white person became a point of controversy with Nancy Larrick &gt; and &gt; others, and I heard John Steptoe say at a public event &gt; toward the end &gt; of his life that he had often felt like the &gt; token black illustrator in &gt; the field. Then there were the ups &gt; and downs of the 1980s, and I heard &gt; Jerry Pinkney say recently &gt; that he feels we're in more of an ebb &gt; period again now. So this =2 0&gt; has been a nd continues to be a struggle. &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; Leonard S &gt; . Marcus &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; 54 Willow Street, #2A &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; Brooklyn, New York 11201 &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; tel 718 596-1897 &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; e-mai &gt; &gt; l &gt; leonardsma at aol.com &lt;mailto:leonardsma at aol.com&gt; wrote: The Reys &gt; &gt; were German Jews who fled Nazi-occupied Paris, and were &gt; politically &gt; progressive; perhaps their political views found &gt; oblique expression in &gt; their books through the irreverent spirit &gt; of George their hero and the &gt; mess age it sent children about &gt; deference to authority. I just read &gt; Margret Rey's picture book &gt; Spotty (Harper & Brothers 1945), &gt; illustrated by H.A. Rey, which &gt; is much less subtly &gt; political/ideological, from the very first &gt; page, in the vein of &gt; post- &gt; war American anti-racist (v internationalist) rhetoric
, which is &gt; &gt; perhaps why it was re-issued in the 1970s and 1990s (by Houghton &gt; &gt; Mifflin, the publisher of the Curious George books, not by &gt; &gt; HarperCollins for some reason). In that way it seems very &gt; American, &gt; which is interesting since Margret Rey was a relative &gt; newcomer in &gt; 1945. It thus came out the same year as Jesse &gt; Jackson's Call
 Me &gt; Charley, a Harper book about racism by an &gt; African American writer &gt; introduced to Ursula Nordstrom by &gt; Margret Rey (Dear Genius xxxii). &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; On a related note... &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; I am really &gt; interested in the relationships of Afric &gt; &gt; an American &gt; authors and their white editors during the mid twentieth &gt; &gt; century (Jesse Jackson is the focus of my research--as you know, &gt; &gt; Leonard!). And I was struck by your quotation of the &gt; fictionalized &gt; retrospective reflections of a white editor-ess &gt; after reading "The All &gt; White World of Children's Books": &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; ?She began to try to find Black authors and &gt; artists; she also &gt; began, painfully, to examine herself and her &gt; WASPish-ness. Why were &gt; there no Black authors on the Dolphin &gt; list? Did good Black writers not &gt; exist, or was she not &gt; recognizing them
 because they wrote in an idiom &gt; she did not &gt; understand and appreciate? Should she publish a book that &gt; se &gt; emed to her poorly written just because the author was Black? Maybe &gt; &gt; it was well written by other than middle-class, white standards? &gt; And &gt; if this were the case, how would she know? How indeed?" &gt; [Ann Durrell &gt; (from a201982 Hornbook article) qtd. in Minders &gt; 237] &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; Presumably, before 1965 most &gt; editors were less or, at least, &gt; differently self-conscious &gt; about the authority they wielded over works &gt; by writers of &gt; color. Do you have any anecdotes or impressions to add &gt; to those &gt; already in Dear Genius and Minders? Nordstrom's rocky &gt; &gt; relationship with John Steptoe is intriguing, as is Massee's with &gt; &gt; Ellen Tarry. ~ Fern &gt; -- Fern Kory Professor of English &gt; Eastern &gt; Illinois Universit &gt; &gt; y &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;
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Received on Fri 25 Jul 2008 03:56:09 PM CDT