But life, real life, is also a string of accidents. Bertha Mahony was thirty-three and restless after ten years as a good right-hand at Boston’s Women’s Educational and Industrial Union when she came upon the article in the August 1915 Atlantic Monthly that, as she often said, “changed my life.” With a mix of statistics and soft soap, the author extolled bookselling as a new profession for the educated, emancipated woman.

Mahony, a serious, ambitious reader, would have liked to study librarianship years earlier at the new Simmons College, but lack of sufficient funds steered her toward the shorter secretarial course instead. As Assistant Secretary at the Union, a model of privileged progressivism, she had charge of promotional materials, in addition to her regular duties, and on her own initiative she launched a four-year series of children’s plays. Meanwhile, working with the Officers, she learned how people of influence get things done: by going to the top.

The eager bookseller-to-be scouted locations, considered and discarded the Northwest (reputedly like New England but too far away), resolved to remain in Boston despite its abundance of book-shops, and decided that hers would be a children’s bookshop — a new thing and a good thing.

By mid-October she had the backing of the Officers and Board of the Union, and a target date. She arranged a private, Saturday-morning tutorial in children’s literature with Alice Jordan, the Boston Public Library expert, and besides reading the assigned books, she studied the library booklists Jordan gave her, the compilations of Caroline Hewins and Clara Hunt. By spring, she and her newly recruited assistants were ready to place orders and Mahony herself was ready to meet the people who mattered. Bookseller and children’s-book enthusiast Frederic Melcher initiated her into the trade in Indianapolis and into the activities of the American Booksellers Association at its Chicago convention. Back East, she introduced herself to Anne Carroll Moore in New York and took a second, closer look at the Central Children’s Room; braved the elevated subway to see Clara Hunt in Brooklyn; and stopped off in Hartford to get Caroline Hewins’s blessing. “It was on this occasion,” Mahony later wrote, “that Miss Hewins promised to write for our recommended purchase list a preface on John Newbery’s ‘Juvenile Library,’ a first bookshop for children in London of the 1700’s.”

Had she asked? Had she known enough of Newbery’s historical role to ask? Had she already been thinking of her bookshop, five months before its scheduled opening, as another landmark in children’s book history? Or had this ardent young woman, with her plans for promoting books as selectively and creatively as Hewins and other librarians, and her undoubted enthusiasm for Hewins’s own celebrated list, touched a sympathetic chord?

THE BOOKSHOP OPENED on schedule on October 9, 1916, in second-floor quarters adjacent to the Union but remote from the street. There, Mahony and her close associate Elinor Whitney and their staff promoted children’s books brilliantly, with a variety of programs, exhibits, and special services, and a handsome, 110-page booklist, with the Hewins preface, that was free to all comers and all correspondents. But in the aggregate not many books were sold. Was the location solely to blame or was the concept somehow questionable? In 1921, when a larger, street-front space became available next door, adult books were sold on the ground floor and the spacious, wrap-around balcony became the new and better staging-ground for children’s books. The sign over the door now read, cunningly: The Bookshop for Boys and Girls — With Books on Many Subjects for Grown-Ups.

According to Eulalie Steinmetz Ross, Mahony’s biographer, she had decided that “a children’s bookshop per se was not theoretically sound, isolating young readers as it did from the main stream of literature.” Maintaining that children’s books were part of the literary mainstream was an article of faith with Mahony, her contemporaries and successors, so she would probably not have demurred. But offstage, in a letter, her explanation is more acute: “People want to take care of their own book needs while shopping for their children, but more important still, the children themselves like the presence of grown-up books in a nearby space.” Mahony understood and appreciated people.

For the future of children’s books, no less, it mattered. During the Bookshop’s first Christmas, Anne Carroll Moore stopped by with Caroline Hewins to look over the premises before she gave Mahony her support, privately or publicly. She was enthusiastic, Mahony was exultant, and the two struck up a friendship, with professional ramifications, that endured as long as they lived.

For the cause of children’s books to prosper, there needed to be someone to create the kinds of books that Mahony and Moore could wholeheartedly support — good new books to supplement the classics and substitute for the “trashy” series that Moore threw out of her libraries and Mahony refused to stock. On a visit to New York in 1919 Mahony called on Louise Seaman, the newly appointed children’s book editor at Macmillan, when she was still in makeshift quarters. Seaman, a constant traveler, lost no time in visiting the Bookshop. And another lifelong friendship was cemented.

In the children’s book community of New York, Moore and Seaman were bound to be thrown together, but they were not bound to be friends — Moore was considerably older, Seaman considerably more sophisticated. But Moore (b. Limerick, Maine, 1871), the nineteenth-century New England woman, liked nothing better than to take a taxi back and forth across New York’s new bridges, while Seaman (b. Brooklyn, New York, 1894), Vassar graduate and progressive-school teacher, was passionate about old books, ancient civilizations, and growing roses.

To these three partisans, children’s books were vehicles of imagination, and they promoted them in imaginative, enhancing ways — with sundry booklists and other printed ephemera, with a round of exhibits and programs and special events. But it was Mahony who had the most latitude, the greatest resources, and a knack for connecting books to life that amounted to a creative genius. Bookshop exhibits extended from historical French children’s books to child art; programs ranged from poetry afternoons for adolescents to lectures on educational psychology for adults. Among the booklists was a panoramic state-by-state listing of selected titles in the order of the states’ entry into the Union, entitled “All Aboard on the Old 44” and keyed to Hader illustrations for Cornelia Meigs’s Wonderful Locomotive, the “Old 44.” Traveling with books, in Mahony’s company, could take you almost anywhere.

WITH THE HORN BOOK, she could go further. On a holiday in England in 1924, Mahony and Whitney decided to follow their promptings and start a magazine devoted entirely to children’s books. As an organ of the Bookshop, it would carry a Booklist, called just that, with brief notices of recommended new books. But it would be much more than a guide to good reading — a function Mahony and Whitney’s all-encompassing Realms of Gold soon came to perform. Rather, it would be an expression, and extension, of the Bookshop itself. A grander way, prospectively, to blow the horn for good books.

When the first issue appeared in October 1924, congratulations poured in. “I am so thrilled, excited, entranced, inspired . . . by the Horn Book that I want to send it to everyone I know,” wrote Louise Seaman, enclosing a check for eight subscriptions (at fifty cents each). Anne Carroll Moore carried around a copy and brandished it at meetings, to urge librarians to subscribe. Seaman had further reason to rejoice the following March on publication of her tribute to one of her authors, Padraic Colum, “Stories Out of the Youth of the World,” an article that Mahony had undoubtedly solicited. One hand washed the other, for decades. Mahony liked to have authors and illustrators write about themselves, and especially about the wellsprings of their work. She liked to have their editors, more than anyone else, write personality-pieces or overviews. That there might be a conflict of interest, that this might amount to unpaid advertising, never occurred to her. Everyone concerned had the same interest: the promotion of good books. And when the Horn Book produced its magnificent August 1928 issue celebrating Louise Seaman’s ten years at Macmillan, with articles on her authors and illustrators as well as on Seaman herself, Mahony was surprised and hurt at being criticized, by other publishers, for including fourteen pages from the current Macmillan catalog as a demonstration of the Seaman touch. They suspected her of being bought.

The Seaman issue came in at eighty-five substantial pages. In addition to the Macmillan material, there was a review of Bambi, still interesting today, by a well-known natural scientist; an article on the art of silhouette by John Bennett, whose new book, The Pigtail of Ah Lee Ben Loo, was illustrated with his silhouettes, and a companion-piece on Bennett’s inspired way with children by his editor Bertha Gunterman; a three-page send-off for Realms of Gold by its co-editor Elinor Whitney; and, in conclusion, a dozen pages surveying “Other Children’s Book Departments Since 1918,” their editors, and some of the books on each fall list. Coward-McCann was publishing Millions of Cats, and one of the “unusually interesting” illustrations is on the back cover.

THE MAGAZINE WAS METAMORPHOSING, slowly and then quickly, from an oversize bookshop newsletter into the all-but-official journal of “the new children’s book movement,” as Frederic Melcher called it. The subscription price doubled, to one dollar; the quarterly became a bimonthly, with ads. But the significant changes were internal. In 1932 Bertha Mahony married a wealthy furniture-manufacturer whose home was in Ashburnham, in central Massachusetts, beyond daily commuting range; she began to divide her time between Ashburnham and Boston. In 1934 she and Elinor Whitney resigned from the Bookshop to concentrate on the Horn Book, and it acquired its own good right-hand in the person of Beulah Folmsbee, an all-around professional who ran the office, handled subscriptions and advertising, designed the magazine, and got it out. In 1936 the Union, unable to replace Mahony and Whitney at the Bookshop, sold it into oblivion; Elinor Whitney married prep-school headmaster William Field, and withdrew from month-to-month operations; and Bertha Mahony Miller and Elinor Whitney Field, with their husbands and Horn Book printer Thomas Todd, assumed ownership of the magazine (upon William Miller’s putting its finances to rights).

To Anne Carroll Moore and other old Horn Book friends, this was a new beginning, both a casting off of fetters and an embarkation upon stormy seas. Moore was contributing advice, suggestions, admonishments, and articles right along; she put together an issue honoring Marie Shedlock, the fabled English storyteller, and wrote about Kenneth Grahame and other English personalities she’d known. In 1936, learning that the Horn Book was floating loose, she offered to donate to the cause — “if you think it would strengthen your subscription appeal” — a revived version of her old “Three Owls” column of critical commentary. At sixty-six, Moore was four years short of mandatory retirement, with its loss of entitlements; as a Horn Book fixture, she was sure to get review books and due respect. The magazine, in turn, got a splash of vinegar, a crusty voice.

Louise Seaman had meanwhile married corporate lawyer Edwin DeT. Bechtel; had sustained a horseback-riding injury that hadn’t healed properly; and in 1934 had resigned from Macmillan — all the better, it turned out, to learn about children and books. Especially young children and books. American picture books were in a state of infancy but growing faster than the ability to assess them soundly. The pictures were not traditional illustrations and not to be judged by traditional norms: Bertha Mahony Miller’s most aesthetic friend, Marguerite Mitchell, who had run the Bookshop gallery, could not see anything good in Marjorie Flack’s Angus books, for instance. Picture book texts were a new form of writing altogether.

Among the books by progressive educators that Louise Seaman Bechtel published at Macmillan were two unorthodox geographies by Lucy Sprague Mitchell of the Bank Street School, then called the Bureau of Educational Experiments. Much impressed with Mitchell’s work, Bechtel contributed to the second Here and Now storybook, Another Here and Now Story Book (1937) and took a special interest in the Writers Laboratory that Mitchell started, where Bechtel met and became friends with Margaret Wise Brown. The immediate consequence was an article on Mitchell by Brown and a Bank Street colleague run in tandem with a featured review of Another Here and Now Story Book by Bertha Miller — who admits to “doubting” the first book — in the May 1937 issue of the Horn Book. In effect, Horn Book star treatment for one of Anne Carroll Moore’s least favored people.

Bechtel herself wrote two keystone articles on the newest of the new, “Gertrude Stein for Children” and “Books Before Five.” She took on the comics, in 1941, when that was the hottest topic in children’s bookdom. She wrote major pieces about Elizabeth Coatsworth, Helen Sewell, Rachel Field, and others she’d worked with. When she went to Egypt, she discoursed on the year’s Egyptian books; when she delivered a paper, as she was often asked to do, it usually saw print in the Horn Book. She was a fluent, eloquent writer, vastly informed, and a balance to Moore in her outlook and tastes. But she was enough like Moore to write a lovely appreciation of Walter de la Mare — and Moore was enough like her to also like Gertrude Stein.

The person who stabilized the troika of Bechtel, Miller, and Moore was the Boston Public Library’s Alice Jordan, scholar of American children’s literature and a steady, persuasive reviewer. What she taught Bertha Miller about children’s books by special arrangement, she taught formally to Elinor Whitney Field and decades of Bookshop/Horn Book hands at the Simmons Library School. It was she who gave Miller her first public recognition, in the June 1929 Atlantic Monthly (the portrait on this issue’s cover appeared with that tribute); she who wrote the studies of nineteenth-century American writers that first appeared in the Horn Book in the early 1930s and eventually saw publication as From Rollo to Tom Sawyer (1948); she who touched off the Caroline M. Hewins Lectures, underwritten by Frederic Melcher, on historic New England writers and publishers, that the Horn Book, Inc., also published. And it was Jordan to whom Bertha Miller turned in 1939 to take over the Booklist when total responsibility for the magazine, along with personal concerns, overwhelmed her. For the next eleven years the Horn Book boasted short, substantive reviews — light enough for layfolk, knowledgeable enough for professionals.

Jordan and Bechtel and Moore also went on the masthead that year, along with Elinor Field, to shore up the Horn Book and its frazzled editor. This was no mere window dressing: the erstwhile colleagues became active collaborators, and Miller, to secure their advice and assistance, had to listen to Bechtel’s recital of her shortcomings and Moore’s reproaches for one dereliction or another (each endangering the future of children’s books). Pressures to change, pressures not to change.

Bechtel faulted her for New England insularity — and that, for Miller, was easy to correct. She entered into a correspondence with Gladys English, of the Los Angeles Public Library, to secure an article about Arna Bontemps and an article by him — both appeared in the January 1939 issue — and took up English’s suggestion that the Horn Book have a California issue timed to the forthcoming ALA Los Angeles conference. She started a new department, Hunters Fare, in which a librarian would answer readers’ (alleged) questions about books, and recruited Siri Andrews, then of the University of Washington, to take a turn conducting it. She invited Eulalie Steinmetz Ross, in charge of children’s work at Cincinnati, to speak frankly about Horn Book policies and practices — and Ross did. Andrews later became part of the Horn Book inner circle, and Ross became Miller’s biographer.

OVERALL, SHE HELD TO HER COURSE. And with Beulah Folmsbee to faithfully execute her projects, Alice Jordan to depend on for reviewing, and counselors near and far, she was poised for a decade of enormous productivity. It might be her last — she could not stave off retirement much longer. In the Horn Book she moved away from literature pure-and-simple and toward controversial subjects. Under the auspices of The Horn Book, Inc. — “our little close corporation” — she published the books that would keep her original vision alive and intact, notably Paul Hazard’s lyrical Books, Children and Men and the imposing volume widely known as “Mahony,” Illustrators of Children’s Books: 1744–1945. Both books had their roots in the Bookshop and exude its cultural aura. Serene and good-mannered, they seemed ageless a decade after their publication.

Miller worked devotedly on these books for many years — the same years she was reaching out to working librarians on the West Coast, in the Midwest and the South, and monitoring the news of the world for its relation to children. When she stepped down from the Horn Book editorship in 1951, she left it suspended between the timeless and the timely. And why not?

From the September/October 1999 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Realms of Gold and Granite appeared first on The Horn Book.

What would Ruth Krauss have been without Maurice Sendak or Crockett Johnson or Marc Simont? There’d have been no Hole Is to Dig or Carrot Seed or Happy Day.

Some of the most original, imaginative picture book scripts have come from writers who relied on artist-illustrators to reconceive them in pictorial terms. The rare illustrators endowed with a willing hand and second sight.

And just when it seems as if there’s nothing new under the sun, such a pair-up comes along, overturning — of all things — the very order of the alphabet.

Paul O. Zelinsky was born free, it appears. He drew avidly from earliest childhood, and by the time he was in high school he was illustrating his assigned readings and the writings of friends. Then he had the good fortune to be at Yale when Maurice Sendak was teaching a course on children’s books, their history and illustration.

As his own work testified, Sendak had an equally keen interest in high art, the art of museums, and popular art, the art of newsstands. He collected with discrimination and gusto: Randolph Caldecott and Beatrix Potter, among forerunners; Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson, among contemporaries; and at large, Lothar Meggendorfer, an inventor of books with movable parts. In this, too, he was a forerunner.

Zelinsky was an apt pupil.

His first three noteworthy picture books might be called two curios and a cameo — and you probably wouldn’t recognize them as the work of a single illustrator. Who launches a career by being unrecognizable?

The Maid and the Mouse and the Odd-Shaped House (1981) is based on an old tell-and-draw, add-on rhyme. The “wee maid” is an old-fashioned old lady, her mouse companion plays the sax, and the odd-shaped house they move into grows, addition by addition, into a page-filling, rampaging cat. In cottage-kitchen pastels, with costumed figures and decorative details to match, it’s quaint and perky, amusing and inventive.

The Sun’s Asleep Behind the Hill (1982) is an adaptation of an Armenian lullaby by the accomplished Mirra Ginsburg, empathically reconceived by Zelinsky. “The sun shone in the sky all day. / The sun grew tired and went away to sleep behind the hill.” In dusky, spacious watercolor and pastel landscapes, the twilight deepens; leaves, bird, and squirrel grow tired and seek rest; and a little boy, first glimpsed flying his kite, is carried homeward by his mother, to be last seen asleep, kite on wall, moon shining in window. Throughout, insets on alternate spreads illustrate the refrain and supply a kind of subtext. “The bird sang / in the bush all day. / The bird grew tired, / The bird is quiet.” Curled up in its nest, the bird is barely visible: to the onlooker, it’s snug and safe. A two-lap goodnight book, as we might once have said, with proportions and perspectives, as well as images, suited to very young eyes.

The Lion and the Stoat (1984) is a lark — three episodes in the competitive life of two rival artists, a lion and a stoat, partially derived by Zelinsky from (of all things) Pliny’s Natural History. Who is the better artist, lion in top hat and tails or stoat in scarf and beret? The contests are full of surprises; the drawings are spotted with amusing detail; there’s wit wherever you look — in the frown on a turtle’s face, in the converging, surreal ceiling lines. The takeaway message: art is engagement, art is fun.

Meanwhile, Zelinsky was doing line drawings for fiction by Avi and Beverly Cleary, among other commissions. Cleary’s belated Newbery winner, Dear Mr. Henshaw, has his pictures. He was building a backlist, and he was versatile.

But 1984 saw him shift, starkly, from the periphery to the mainstream: with Hansel and Gretel, probably the most famous of Grimm tales, rendered in weighty, great-masterlike paintings, a complement to poet and translator Rika Lesser’s grave retelling.

For all its popularity as a story and as a “property” (World Cat lists 3,772 in book form), “Hansel and Gretel” is inherently difficult to handle as a picture book. With its episodes of emotional cruelty and physical terror, it’s one of those stories best heard, or read, with a single arresting illustration. Most picture-book versions go light on the darker aspects; Zelinsky doesn’t. Opening by opening, one spine-chilling illustration follows another.

Narrative composition is one of his strengths, visible in the wordless mini-drama of little-boy-and-kite in The Sun’s Asleep. In Hansel and Gretel, the illustration of the children being hurried into the forest (a second time) by their unrelenting parents, the linchpin of the story, is a dramatic marvel. The road sweeps around from the immediate foreground to the mid-distance, where Hansel stops to drop his telltale crumbs; but the thrust is vigorously, almost violently forward — toward the forest, the next page, and what awaits.

The artwork of Hansel and Gretel is redolent of German Romanticism, with its combination of the bleak and the impenetrable. Rumpelstiltskin (1986), on the other hand, is set squarely in a reincarnation of Northern Renaissance painting.

Some of the illustrations are magical, in a fairy-tale way. Who can forget the double-page spread of the queen’s emissary, spotlit, as she pursues her stealthy midnight search through the forest for the little man, to somehow learn his name? But much of this simple story, about a young woman who makes a bargain with a wizard and how she gets out of it, is burdened with an immensity of architectural detail and other scenic effects. The verbal parrying between the two, the crux of the story, loses out.

Hansel and Gretel and Rumpelstiltskin were both Caldecott Honor books (as was Swamp Angel, coming up). When Rapunzel (1997) appeared, in an Italian Renaissance guise more imposing than its predecessors’, it was bound to win the Caldecott for effort and ambition.

The story of a lovely young girl imprisoned in a tower at puberty is problematic for children of picture-book age; and to my mind, the presentation is too much for the story. Oversize pages are the setting for oversize actions—the sorceress-jailer looms, contorts, shrieks, and pops her eyes. No misfortune goes undepicted: see the prince, overseen by the malevolent sorceress, falling in horror from the tower. Then see him, on the opposite page, lying inert on the ground. The physical action overshadows the emotional drama. But no one can forget that spectacular tower.

Zelinsky’s knack for animating almost any kind of material yielded, in the years between Hansel and Gretel and Rapunzel, a rich miscellany: two picture books about extraordinary women and a book with movable parts, among others. He was his own singular self.

The first picture book was Lore Segal’s sly comic turn, The Story of Mrs. Lovewright and Purrless Her Cat (1985). Segal and Zelinsky’s sly comic turn, rather, for no ordinary pictures would have done for the face-off between shivery string bean Mrs. L., with her vision of a cute and cuddly cat, and Purrless, who’ll have none of it. “I can’t believe how mean you are!” she protests when he pre-empts her footstool, then her bed. The drawings are done in colored pencil and pen-and-ink, mainly in shades of orange (for Purrless the tabby) and blue (for “chilly” Mrs. L.); they’re all over the page, and askew. It’s a look with the nip of Segal’s prose.

The book with movable parts was, of course, The Wheels on the Bus (1990), low-tech hijinks in the scatty, helter-skelter spirit of the Big and Little Golden Books. The rushing vehicles and teeming crowds of Tibor Gergely come to mind — except that Zelinsky has rendered his passengers and the passing scenery in oils: sticky, shiny oils. When “the wipers on the bus go swish swish swish” and the rain falls in torrents, the surface turbulence calls up a painting by de Kooning or Soutine.

It would be possible to write a paean to the simplicity and cleverness of the movable parts: the babies opening their mouths to wail, the mothers wagging their fingers, for instance. But when the last pull-tab has broken, the book will still be fun to look at, for the pictures will still be full of energy and action. Human interaction, too.

Swamp Angel (1994), Anne Isaacs’s whirl with tall-tale Americana, gave Zelinsky another go at historical reconstruction—this time, with a wink. The deftest piece of stagecraft may be the “formal” frontispiece: on a very large page, “wood-framed,” is a “primitive” portrait of a very large young woman, a giantess, with piercing blue eyes and a dome of red hair. Since she is alone in the picture, how do we know she is very large? Zelinsky has repeatedly dealt with issues of size, and his resources are incalculable. Here, Angelica Longrider, a.k.a. Swamp Angel, has a huge head…flowing down into smoothly rounded, sloping shoulders…which terminate in small, gentle, almost dainty hands…that clasp a tiny bunch of minutely detailed flowers, a touchstone of folk painting.

From baby Angelica’s birth, the pictures build in successive serial-narration images that wind around the double-page spreads until Angelica grows too large to be contained even in the double-width. Why, when she lines up behind the local frontiersmen for a shot at Thundering Tarnation, the biggest baddest bear, only her head and shoulders are visible behind the hill.

The book can be opened at random, and savored. For every one of Angelica’s feats, Zelinsky devises a new pictorial solution; a feat in itself. For a tutorial in narrative illustration, you couldn’t do better.

Swamp Angel was done in oil in a range of woodsy to swamp-grassy hues. The Wheels on the Bus flaunts the sharp pinks and reds and yellows of city and town life. Mrs. Lovelace is distinctly orange and blue. In the three books, distinctive colorations, acquired by different techniques, give each book a particular identity. Would you, then, recognize the three as the work of a single illustrator? Well, you might venture a guess. Agitation, elongation, and headlong momentum are common to all three, along with the inventiveness and humor that have been Zelinsky hallmarks from the start.

Not that he’s predictable, never that. The text inspires the response, and Zelinsky’s originality is a match for the author’s.

Let one character be a red ball named Plastic; the second, a plush stingray; the third, a stuffed buffalo. Such are the Little Girl’s cherished toys in Emily Jenkins’s Toys Go Out (2006) — and by not having them be teddy bears or baby dolls or anything else familiarly cuddlesome, Jenkins stretches a child’s power to imagine, to identify and sympathize. But can these oddities be objects of affection? Using a close focus, knee-high perspectives, and tightly framed compositions, Zelinsky achieves an intimacy that makes the pictures as toy-centric as the text. The soft black-and-white pencil drawings, on stubby pages, are velvety and enfolding. You sink into them with Plastic and StingRay and Lumphy.

Awful Ogre’s Awful Day (2001), on the other hand, is Zelinsky on the loose, capturing the wit and zest of Jack Prelutsky’s suite of poems in pictures of comic abandon. All shrewdly calculated, of course. Awful Ogre, almost adorable despite his single centered eye, his bulbous nose, and potato head (thanks to his big lopsided grin), stars in a drama of size and space and detail. Horrifying, disgusting detail.

Starting the day, Awful Ogre grooms himself with onion-juice mouthwash and dragon-blood rouge — and his face in the mirror is in our face, filling the page, with a teeny, tiny skunk inhabiting his nose. But when he proclaims himself “Statuesque!” on top of a mountain, all we see of him are his feet, at the top of one page, and his dripping nose hanging down from the top of the page opposite. The infill is imagination, Zelinsky’s and ours.

Call it drawing with a wink and a nudge; or call it cartooning.

Kelly Bingham’s Z Is for Moose (2012) is sheer madcappery. What is more basic than the alphabet, more familiar than an alphabet book, more explored than the possibilities of the alphabet book? Its very order invites us to categorize, to proceed from an ABC of animals to alphabets of almost everything imaginable.

Once, we also had true nonsense alphabets: in verses by Edward Lear and other early wits; in Sendak’s Alligators All Around, more latterly. These artist-illustrators have fun with, make fun of, the very structure they’re exploiting. And we, the reader or listener, laugh to see how each expected letter brings forth an unexpected line of text, and with it a comical picture.

In Z Is for Moose, Bingham takes the structure seriously; subverting it is her story, the unimaginable her starting point. Zelinsky, as her co-conspirator, makes the book itself an orthodox ABC, with plain borders, flat colors, and an item per letter — only to have Moose flout those conventions one after another in his impatience to appear, alphabetical order be hanged.

He’s a personality now — we laugh, we gasp, we cringe — yet still a prototypical alphabet figure. He’s both real and unreal.

The pictorial climax, a great bit of vaudeville, has Moose, denied even his proper place in the alphabet by Mouse, crayoning antlers and feet on a Ring and antlers and tail on a Snake (to turn both into representations of you-know-who)…and Zebra, in desperation, trying to protect the Truck and Umbrella, Violin and Whale, from his alterations. And Z? See the title, read the story. Savor it to the last mischievous tailpiece.

Yes, there’s more than one tailpiece. And why not? In Z Is for Moose nothing goes according to custom — and Zelinsky, accordingly, is in his element. Never more so. What he might be inclined to do next, from one book to another, is an open invitation to writers to think afresh. If you can dream it, he can draw it.

WANTED: Bright Ideas

Artist has pen, pencil, brush. Experienced in
illustrating many kinds of books, in diverse
styles and techniques. Nothing is too tricky.

Let your challenge be our opportunity!

The post Z Is for Elastic: The Amazing Stretch of Paul Zelinsky appeared first on The Horn Book.

One Times Square:
A Century of Change at the 
Crossroads of the World

The post Review of One Times Square appeared first on The Horn Book.

Different images, different feelings. Distinct images, distinct feelings.

A closed door is a mystery. What’s inside? Who will come out?

One house sits prettily in a garden, set apart — vines curving up in a smile, window-eyes cast demurely down. Or are the vines reaching up to embrace the house? Either way, the picture is alive without a creature in sight.

The other house stands straight and tall along a city sidewalk. In front is a city tree, fenced in and curved round — with bauble-leaves in the branches, as if a clever child drew it. Together with the pink door, the pilasters and pediments, the tree brings the house to life.

In the old house in Paris covered with vines, live — memorably — “twelve little girls in two straight lines.” Under the watchful eye of Miss Clavel, life is as orderly and proper as Ludwig Bemelmans’s drawing, by contrast, is loose and lighthearted. There’s a hint of deviltry, indeed, in the very hairbows on those twelve young heads.

But it’s the smallest of the little girls, Madeline, who’s the liveliest, the boldest, the least inclined to stay in line. “She was not afraid of mice-…To the tiger in the zoo / Madeline just said, ‘Pooh-Pooh.’”

In the intrepid, insouciant Madeline, Bemelmans’s imagination and his imagery coalesce. She’s the admiration of the other girls, the secret rebel in every watching child…

The house on East 88th Street, meanwhile, is empty. It won’t be for long, though — the Primms are moving in.

In emphatic, often comical line and a mass of eye-catching detail, Bernard Waber presents an image of cheerful disorder to be sorted out. See the faces in the upstairs windows, see the fish and bird on the sidewalk. And what to make of the four characters at a loss on the facing page?

But wait! Strange sounds are coming from upstairs. Mrs. Primm takes a peek…starts…and summons Mr. P.…

A crocodile in the bathtub of a Manhattan brownstone is outlandish — and in Waber’s astute, offhand rendering, in his element. Filling the tub and then some, just as the jungly-papered bathroom fills the page and then some, Lyle with his friendly grin is more at home than the hapless Mr. Primm.

A brief performance of his stage tricks, to the delight of the two young Primms, and Lyle is established as a member of the household. What kids wouldn’t want an amiable, accomplished crocodile as a companion?

*   *   *

To open a picture book, any picture book, is to enter a new world where seeing is believing, if the artist makes it so. Suppose, for instance, snow is in the picture. Does it mean  outdoor fun? Is a big, scary storm coming? Or will you be happily watching the snowflakes fall?

In Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day, a classic in collage, the expressive elements are silhouette, texture, and pattern. And color, of course. Singing color that is not naturalistic, and not abstract either, but out of a life envisioned by a child — from Peter’s very red snowsuit to the blocky buildings that background the snow to the spectacular pinkish-purple tub Peter soaks in after his day’s adventures. (Yes, bathtubs figure large in picture books.)

Color animates the pattern, too, and gives texture — sparkle, shadings — to the snow. It partners with silhouette, the other crucial element.

A silhouette, Jim McMullan has said, “can convey a particular vitality better than the details themselves.” At first opening, we see Peter’s pert profile against the snow outside his window — an indelible image set off by the jaunty silhouette of his black iron bedstead. And then it’s the elfin Peter in his red snowsuit that beguiles us — smacking snow off a silhouetted tree or simply making icy-blue tracks across the white, white snow.

Without dialogue or plot line or distinguishing detail, The Snowy Day makes an individual of Peter and an absorbing experience of his every footprint in the snow.

William Steig’s Brave Irene has dialogue and plot and detail in abundance, without sacrificing primal emotion.

Irene’s mother, Mrs. Bobbin, has finished a beautiful gown for the duchess to wear at tonight’s ball, but now she’s too sick to deliver it — so Irene insists on going instead. It’s very cold out, it’s already snowing, the wind is fierce…and for page after page, Irene struggles against the storm.

At the last, when all seems lost, something remarkable — not quite a miracle — occurs. The duchess’s lost-and-found gown is duly delivered and Irene, too, dances at the ball, radiant “in her ordinary dress.”

At once utterly fanciful and totally down to earth, Brave Irene is a story that only a cartoonist with Steig’s aplomb could pull off. The drama comes not from the flying snowflakes or bending branches or any other scenic effects but from Irene’s body language and spoken language, and the assortment of looks on her face. We feel for her.

Peter wakes to a blanket of snow, Irene confronts a blizzard. The mittened and mufflered tyke of Uri Shulevitz’s Snow, in turn, gladly sees a storm coming…

In a quaint Old World city, a single snowflake falls: a white speck in the gray sky over the huddled gray buildings. A boy with a dog sees it, and celebrates: “It’s snowing.” His elders scoff; radio and television say no snow. But snowflakes keep falling and falling and falling — coating the scoffers with snow, silencing radio and television, even enticing Mother Goose and her flock to quit the bookstore and join boy-and-dog for a romp in the snow.

Their panoramic gambols stretch across the double-page spreads as snowflakes fill the sky and blanket streets, roofs, housefronts. At the last, boy and dog have the whole white city to themselves.

Shulevitz, a past master at visionary landscapes, gives the scene a ghostly frosting. In the boy who foresees the snowfall, and in the doubters he encounters, there’s something roguish, out of the realm of folklore. To look at, Snow is a weather event with an enveloping, timeless aura.

*   *   *

Looking at pictures, our sympathies expand. Machines old and new capture our imagination too, with their likeness to us, our likeness to them.

Mike Mulligan and his faithful steam shovel Mary Anne are ageless. When the book was published in 1939, “steam shovels were being sold for junk,” as Virginia Lee Burton wrote. But Mike believed in Mary Anne: “she could still dig as much in a day as a hundred men could dig in a week; at least he thought she could.”

Up to this point, the pictures illustrate the text — crisply, amusingly, with a natural-born storyteller’s imagination. It’s a Child’s History of Heavy Construction.

But once Mike resolves that he and Mary Anne will be the ones to dig the cellar for the new Popperville town hall, the pictures stretch into friezes and the action rolls rhythmically across the two wide pages, drawing the eye back and forth from the grim city the duo are leaving behind to the trim, cheery little town where young and old excitedly await them.

With typography that mimics the illustration, we reach a roaring, clamoring, quivering climax: will they finish the job before the sun goes down?

Even in that tumultuous picture, we can see what’s on Mary Anne’s mind by the expression on her…face? Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is an unabashed hero story. For all the sweeping, whirling momentum and perky anecdotal detail that together distinguish Burton’s illustrations and make them worth revisiting, time and again, we also cherish the book because we’re aware in every picture of how Mary Anne feels.

You don’t have to be consigned to the scrap heap to have feelings. You don’t even have to have a name. Thanks to the magic of illustration, you can be a powerful earth-digging machine cleaning up scrap like the backhoe loader in Kate and Jim McMullan’s I’m Dirty!

He is not voiceless or faceless, that’s the trick, and his jaunty, talky, running account of the day’s work is right there in the pictures with him; on the page, he speaks.

From the look and sound of him, he exults. What kid wouldn’t also revel in the clean-up countdown as Backhoe Loader swings his steel arm and flexes his loader bucket and scoops up “10 torn-up truck tires, 9 fractured fans” all destined for the dumpster. We hardly need to see his face, indeed, so expressive are his movements.

This is virtuoso drawing: ten variations on the theme of a backhoe loader picking up scrap — not a dancer, not a nodding daisy — that might inspire anyone with a pencil and a sketch pad.

The climax is, properly, a mud bath — Backhoe Loader’s reward for doing “the dirty part of the job,” digging up a stump. The key gesture this time is the steel arm showering him. His own arm, is it? You better believe.

Sixty-odd years earlier, Mike Mulligan’s Mary Anne dug up a storm, and stayed clean. But who cares? Each picture book is a world, and an experience, unto itself. Waiting.

Art credits

Images from Madeline © 1939 by Ludwig Bemelmans, used with permission of Viking Children’s Books.

Images from The House on East 88th Street by Bernard Waber. Copyright © 1962 by Bernard Waber, renewed 1990. Used with permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

Images from The Snowy Day © 1962 by Ezra Jack Keats, used with permission of Viking Children’s Books.

Images from Brave Irene © 1986 by William Steig. Used with permission of Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers.

Images from Snow © 1998 by Uri Shulevitz. Used with permission of Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers.

Images from Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton. Copyright © 1939 by Virginia Lee Burton, renewed 1967 by Aristides Burton Demetrios and Michael Burton Demetrios. Used with permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

Images from I’m Dirty! © 2006 by Jim McMullan. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

The post Absorbing Pictures and What They Say appeared first on The Horn Book.

The sight of a ‘children’s room’ in a public library just after school hours is enchanting…they pour into its doors, the crowd of children, well-dressed, poorly clad, boys, girls, big, small, all with an assured air of welcome, comfortably, easily, happily at home among bookshelves as they are in no other spot. Thirty years ago nobody would have dreamed of such a golden picture as a possibility.

So wrote the novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher in Children’s Library Yearbook Number One, a 1929 volume reviewing what might have been called, in the idiom of the time, three decades of progress.

But specialized work with children in the burgeoning public libraries was well underway before 1899. It didn’t spread from the storied cities of the Northeast, with their intellectual eminence; it arose almost simultaneously in many scattered locales. None were more representative of the children’s library movement, however, than Cleveland and Pittsburgh—cities of the industrial heartland with large immigrant populations and, crucially, a succession of gifted, forceful librarians who met a prevailing need in a historic partnership.

William Howard Brett was an accidental librarian. Born in 1846, he repeatedly tried to enlist in the Union Army—once putting a slip of paper in his shoe inscribed with the number 18, so he could honestly say he was “over eighteen”—until, in the last year of the war, he passed muster as a drummer boy. After the war his attempt to go to college foundered for lack of funds. But he was an avid, discerning reader and made his mark selling books—first in his native Warren, Ohio, then at the big Cleveland bookstore Cobb & Andrews. When the post of city librarian became vacant in 1884, who better qualified?

The Cleveland Public Library—originally the Public School Library—was then housed on the second and third floors of Board of Education headquarters. In the circulation department, borrowers waited at a high counter for an attendant to fetch the requested books. No one under fourteen could get a card.

As a bookseller, Brett knew two big things that the cloistered librarian didn’t: the value of browsing among books and the importance of books to children. He brightened up the quarters, and made them comfortable; he cataloged the collection by the new Dewey system. And with added space, a few years later, he arranged the nonfiction in alcoves by subject and allowed readers to go to the bookcases. In a large city library, where the borrowers were strangers to the staff, open shelves were a daring innovation.

Brett had audacity. A year after taking office, he submitted an article to The Cleveland Plain Dealer, called “Books for Youth,” soliciting a donation of $5,000 (about $125,000 today) to build up a collection of reputable children’s books. Youngsters shouldn’t be reading “worthless and corrupt literature,” he wrote, because the library didn’t have enough copies of Louisa May Alcott titles to meet the demand. No concerned citizen responded, but the article was reprinted in Library Journal, with an editorial salvo, and launched Brett as a children’s library advocate. In later years, Anne Carroll Moore was reputed to have called Brett “the first great children’s librarian.” The quote may be apocryphal, but the tribute rang true, and stuck.

Brett’s polemic against trash also expressed a common sentiment. In those days, you didn’t have to be stodgy to look askance at Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore or Horatio Alger’s heroes. What enlightened grownup didn’t?

The Cleveland Library was then, like many others, serving children through the schools. But the popularity of the school collections only demonstrated to Brett “the pressing need of a system of branch libraries and delivery stations in a city so widely extended as our own.” In 1892, the library opened the first of four branches in existing buildings; from 1904 to 1914, with a grant from Andrew Carnegie, seven new libraries were constructed, with spacious, attractive children’s rooms, in key neighborhoods around the city: the neighborhood library came to be, in large part, as a place that kids could get to on their own.

At the Central Library, meanwhile, restrictions on children’s use were soon relaxed and, in 1896, the age limit was abolished altogether; to join the library, a child had only to write his or her name, and get a parent’s signature. But where were the newcomers to go? Brett’s solution was to partition off the largest of the alcoves, and cut a door into the corridor. In this makeshift space—with high bookcases around the walls, and upper shelves reached by a ladder that children propelled (to their delight) by pushing with a foot—Effie Louise Power was installed as librarian. In later years, Power liked to speak of herself as “Mr. Brett’s first children’s librarian.” He had recruited her himself, out of high school—making her, according to youth services historian Christine Jenkins, the first person “hired specifically for children’s work.”

Brett made another significant hire in Linda Eastman, who became vice-librarian in 1896 and shared his interest in children. The next year, Eastman and Power launched the Children’s Library League to encourage respect for books and teach their proper care. There was also a reading component—children made lists of the books they read, for posting as suggestions for others. The first year’s program climaxed spectacularly with a mass meeting in the city’s largest auditorium.

At the American Library Association conference that year, when Brett was president, Eastman presented a paper on the program—one of many contributions to ALA affairs that Cleveland librarians made regularly through the formative years of children’s services. They did groundbreaking work, they wrote about it for professional journals, they shared their experience with colleagues. A new profession was rapidly taking shape.

The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, by contrast with its counterpart in Cleveland, sprang “almost full-grown from the mind and purse” of its namesake, as a later director wrote. The central building opened in 1895, and within five years there were five large neighborhood branches, with three more soon to follow. In 1898, Frances Jenkins Olcott was hired to oversee service to children in the growing system, the first in the country to hold such a post.

In Cleveland, Effie Power had been tapped to be a children’s librarian, and later got professional training. Frances Olcott had professional training (at the New York State Library School, the nation’s first) and might be called a children’s librarian incarnate. She had spent her early years in France, where her father was in the consular service; she’d been homeschooled by parents steeped in the traditional literature of Germany and France. She had a sense of drama.

She was also a force—on fertile, uncharted ground. The Progressivism of the period imbued librarians with a social mission to elevate the masses. In cities like Pittsburgh and Cleveland, that meant both the majority of children who were either immigrants or the children of immigrants and the school-leavers—the overwhelming number who didn’t get past the eighth grade, if they got that far.

No child left out, might have been the motto. With a strong, supportive director, Olcott instituted one after another “experiment”—her word—in extending the library’s reach. There was storytelling in all the branches: cycles of myths and legends for the older children, fairy tales for the younger ones. By 1905–06, more than 600 stories were told to over 400 groups of children. There was Library Day once a week at the summer playgrounds, a cozy introduction to books away from the branches. “The ‘little mothers’ invariably saved a place on their cards for a book to please the baby brother or sister tugging at their skirts,” a librarian reported, “or for some older member at home.”

There were also programs, such as the “Home Library,” tailored to the time and place. A neat bookcase with “a small, carefully selected collection of attractively bound and illustrated books” was kept in a neighborhood home. The oldest child in that family usually served as librarian, recording the books borrowed and returned at the group’s weekly meeting. There, a “friendly visitor” led the group of ten to twelve youngsters in an informal program of games, storytelling, and group discussion. Before long the groups ranged across the city and covered the ethnic map.

All of this was labor-intensive work, and much of it was performed by students at the Training School for Children’s Librarians, housed in the Central Library. Founded in 1899 as a training class to meet pressing local needs, it emerged in 1901 as a professional, certificate-granting school, with (eventually) both one- and two-year programs and more than half its students from outside the Pittsburgh area. A few had four-year college degrees; a few already had library experience. The next year the school enrolled graduates of Smith, Vassar, Wellesley, Northwestern, Bryn Mawr; it had “special students”—working librarians—from the New York Public Library and from Cleveland, Des Moines, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Mansfield, Ohio; already, its graduates were working as far afield as Galveston, Texas.

Frances Olcott was the head of this booming operation, as she was of children’s services, and the instructors were drawn from the library staff. The course of study, that first year, ranged from the basics of ordering and cataloging, to children’s literature and storytelling, to school-library relations and Home Libraries, to “psychology” and “civic education.” (“Psychology” meant reading the childhood portraits of Dickens and Spyri and Ewing, not “analysis of the children themselves.”) Then there was the practice work: “presenting various [facets] of the cosmopolitan life of a fast-growing industrial city.” And, increasingly, there were visiting lecturers: in 1914–15, the roster included Caroline Hewins, Alice Jordan, Anne Carroll Moore, and Boy Scout Librarian Franklin Mathiews. No one prominent in the field escaped.

Olcott’s reign over library and school ended abruptly in 1911, when an “insurrection” by library school students—in the words of the library director—led to her dismissal. Yes, she could be a prima donna. She didn’t lose her standing in the profession, however, and it was she who was asked to write the section on “Library Work with Children” for ALA’s 1914 Manual of Library Economy.

In 1916, the Training School became the Carnegie Library School, and soon courses of study for school librarians and general librarians were added. But it remained preeminent, under the new name, as a wellspring of work with children. In school and library conjoined, Pittsburgh had talent in depth.

One of the special students in the Training School had been Cleveland’s Effie Power—about to move from Cleveland to Pittsburgh to St. Louis and back to Pittsburgh, where she eventually became one of Olcott’s successors. For her successor as head of children’s services in Cleveland, Power recommended Caroline Burnite, from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library and the Training School faculty. At that time, in 1904, the Cleveland Library’s great expansion was just beginning; by 1915, the library exuberantly reported a juvenile circulation of “thirteen times as many books as there are children in Cleveland of the reading age.” They got those books from the new branch libraries, where the children’s rooms averaged more than seventy seats (and some had over a hundred); but they borrowed them, as well, from far-flung stand-alone collections.

With her Pittsburgh experience, Burnite also established a Training Class for Children’s Librarians—where, students testified, her standards and beliefs, along with her commanding presence, marked them for life.

All the pathfinders were serious about children’s reading. Up with the classics, down with popular fiction. Down with fiction, up with nonfiction. Burnite thought, simultaneously, of the one and the many. “No books weak in social ideals should be furnished, provided we do not lose reading children by their elimination.” So some “mediocre” books should remain, from which children could be guided upward; the “reading ladder” was her idea. Similarly, older boys and girls should graduate to adult books as soon as they were ready, and every children’s room was provided with some. A boy reading an Alger-like sea story, for example, might be introduced to Captains Courageous—as, aptly, “the story of a rich boy who fell overboard from an ocean liner and was picked up by the crew of a fishing yacht.” The sequence concludes with Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World, which Burnite describes as “difficult reading…[to] be used with discrimination.”

It’s become commonplace in recent times to characterize early librarians and editors as “guardians” or “minders” interested only in foisting middle-class standards on their charges. Rather, they saw good books as a path to freedom—a way of broadening minds, deepening sympathies, sharpening perceptions. Midway in the Burnite years in Cleveland, William Brett was killed in a freak streetcar accident and Linda Eastman, by his side at the time, became his successor—the first woman to head a major city library. In 1919, Burnite resigned to get married, and Effie Power returned to Cleveland for a second, golden stretch as head of children’s work.

In Pittsburgh, Power had a complement in Elva S. Smith, a serious woman of letters. Smith had graduated from the first training class in 1903, with varied California experience behind her, and she immediately became a presence as instructor in the school and cataloger at the library. Over the next four decades, Smith taught everything in the juvenile field—book selection, cataloging, bibliography, history of children’s literature and development of children’s work—and ultimately became head of the children’s department. She wrote the book, literally, on cataloging children’s books and compiled a remarkable syllabus, with full bibliographies, for the teaching of children’s lit from King Alfred to Kipling. The History of Children’s Literature, first published in 1937, was reprinted by ALA as late as 1980. Her students—in the library world and in publishing—were legion.

While Elva Smith was mining the past in Pittsburgh, Effie Power was looking ahead. “Our task is to reach all the children,” she said at ALA in 1925, and “to establish permanent interests; to train them to read books and to love books; and to relate their use of books and their general reading to their lives.” The next year she launched the Book Caravan, bringing the mobile library from the countryside to the city. “It…has a value as publicity when seen passing through the streets,” Power wrote, as well as usefulness in “carrying library materials to the indifferent.” Library administration and librarian training were specialties of Power’s; and Pittsburgh library school students routinely did their practicums in Cleveland. So did others, by choice—among them Mildred Batchelder, the future ALA children’s specialist, then a student at the New York State Library School. Unsurprisingly, Power was tapped by ALA, in 1930, to write the first textbook on Library Service for Children.

The 1920s was a period of relative plenty when children’s librarians, consolidating their gains, began to exert influence outside their immediate communities.  They had money to spend, or withhold, for books, and publishers listened. They had social concerns, as well, and the ability to advance them. In those interlocking areas, Power was, well, a power. When she protested racist usage in Doctor Dolittle, the author and publisher made the desired change; when she questioned Langston Hughes, whose work she had championed, on a harsh phrase in an essay, he found a solution satisfactory to both of them.

The combination of past and present in children’s librarianship can be encapsulated in Smith’s scholarship and Power’s activism.

The last scene brings most of the principals back on stage—writing or editing the kinds of books they wanted kids to read. Books of traditional literature, mainly: collections of fairy tales and folk tales, of myths and legends; anthologies of poetry; compilations of holiday verse and lore. Olcott was the most prolific, turning out some two dozen volumes over the years, but Smith and Power contributed their share. All told, children’s librarians had produced almost ninety children’s books by 1929, including some original fiction, according to Children’s Library Yearbook Number One. Several of the other authors hailed from Cleveland or Pittsburgh, or both.

Singly and together, Cleveland and Pittsburgh created children’s services from the ground up, and then showed others how. It was an inspired work—inspired, it’s fair to say, by the children. A 1922 report from a Cleveland branch reports on a neighborhood “two-thirds Hungarian, with an admixture of Bohemian, Jewish, Italian and American borrowers—good readers all.”

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Their aims are admirable, their commitment is impressive, their enthusiasm is infectious; as a cadre, they have a lot to be proud of. But not because their work, however fine, surpasses the work of their predecessors. It isn’t better researched or better illustrated, as some of the contributors suggest, and it certainly isn’t more venturesome. In kids’ nonfiction, “going where no adult book has gone before” is nothing new.

From the beginning of specialized publishing for children, the idea was to create books for kids different from adult books. Books that suited their interests, captured their imagination, told them what they wanted to know and made them want to know more. Books in new subject areas, and old.

New sorts of books, too, that capitalized on the attraction of pictures.

One was the pictorial panorama, replete with documentary detail, exemplified by the work of Holling C. Holling, in the 1940s and 1950s; of Edwin Tunis, in the 1950s and 1960s; of David Macaulay, in the 1970s and 1980s and beyond. Predicated on children’s fascination with the concrete and specific—how a beaver skin becomes a beaver hat, how the dome of a mosque is constructed—the books of Tunis and Macaulay, in particular, provided natural entrée into the life of an entire society. They were hands-on books, besides, original and authoritative, and as such also embraced by adults.

Photographs, in turn, gave a human face to strangers among us, and their customs…

One God: The Ways We Worship Him, telling-and-showing how “we”—American families—worship as Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, was published in 1944, a time to fight bigotry. The author, Florence Mary Fitch, was a distinguished scholar of Old and New Testament literature who wore her learning lightly. Absorbing full-page photographs, selected by Lothrop editor Beatrice Creighton, matched the text at every opening, giving the book a documentary feel. Fitch followed through with two similar books even more singular in their time, Their Search for God: Ways of Worship in the Orient (1947) and Allah, the God of Islam (1950).

Expanding into comparative religion, Fitch was doing what came naturally to a global resident and acquaintance of Gandhi. But developments in the world at large were catching up—and beginning in the 1950s, accelerating in the 1960s, children’s books, for the first time, kept pace with national issues and world events.

Three exploding areas held the interest of kids: the Space Age; the endangered environment; the civil rights movement and its counterparts.

In 1957, the launching of the Russian satellite, Sputnik, to the astonishment of the world and the chagrin of the United States, shook up American science education and spurred the publication of science books at all levels—supported, crucially, by federal funds for library purchase. This was Franklyn Branley’s moment. Director of education at the Hayden Planetarium (and subsequently the planetarium chairman), the indefatigable Branley wrote books that kept up with space science, year after year, as well as conceiving and co-editing Crowell’s monstrously successful Let’s-Read-and-Find-Out series of basic science picture books, many of which he also wrote. [See “What Makes a Good Space Book?” beginning on page 28.] His last such, published posthumously in 2002, was Mission to Mars: how would they do it? After fifty years, Branley was still keeping kids ahead of the curve.

Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s 1962 exposé of the deadly effects of pesticides, especially on birds, was only one factor in the transformation of conservation, as a special interest, into environmentalism, as a mass movement. But it raised awareness. Late in 1969, which began with the massive Santa Barbara oil spill, Congress passed the landmark Environmental Policy Act, making endangered species and fragile ecosystems a national concern. Suddenly, the keyword was ecology. From 1955 to 1960, there were a bare handful of children’s books of this sort published; from 1965 to 1970, there were more than a hundred. They ranged from in-depth studies originating at the American Museum of Natural History; to close-ups of specific ecosystems by Jean Craighead George and others; to picture-book stories by old hands like Alvin Tresselt and Edith and Clement Hurd. Kids became steeped in the subject and tutored their parents.

Meanwhile, dealing with public issues of great moment, writing for kids grew up. The practice of “writing down” declined, and in nonfiction as well as in fiction, there was an openness to disagreeable facts. No area gained more from the new maturity than the civil rights movement and its offshoots.

The thrust began, in fact, even before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Nothing substantial had been written about Harriet Tubman for thirty years when, in 1932, Hildegarde Hoyt Swift published Railroad to Freedom. Even more telling, perhaps, nothing resembling a biography of the great Frederick Douglass had appeared for forty years when Shirley Graham’s There Was Once a Slave came out in 1947.

Swift’s book was historical fiction; Graham’s was distinctly fictionalized. But in the succeeding years of struggle, writers with solid nonfiction credentials took up the cause. They wrote lives of persons like Paul Cuffe, Sojourner Truth, and Martin Delany unknown except to the few black-history specialists; they wrote of historical episodes, like Reconstruction, still largely presented from a white point of view.

As a champion of social justice, Milton Meltzer was everywhere. Black history was his métier, then Jewish history. But he also edited the Crowell “Women of America” series, launched in 1969 with biographies of six assorted notables, including Margaret Sanger and Mother Jones, and the legitimate boast that no other biographies existed of many of them. That was true of Mother Jones. The first thorough, scholarly biography did not appear until 1974.

In those five intervening years, did Irving Werstein’s abbreviated bio, in the Crowell series, substitute for a bio by a historian writing at full length to academic standards? Of course not. But the Werstein book, even now, makes lively, trustworthy reading for the general reader. The same can be said of Russell Freedman’s biographies over the years and of the best of the kids’ nonfiction coming out today.

Freedman’s life of Eleanor Roosevelt might be the model of a kids’ book that sounds grown-up. ER was not only the First Lady of the United States, and subsequently the First Lady of the World, she had a personal life of epic proportions. By her own accounting, she was an ugly duckling mocked for her solemnity by her beautiful mother and an insecure young wife overborne by her magisterial mother-in-law. After her death, in 1962, the rest of the story emerged: Franklin’s infidelity, their asexual partnership and personality conflict, ER’s intimacy with newspaperwoman Lorena Hickok and her attachment to two handsome younger men in her orbit. Freeman’s 1993 bio tells it all: with “sensitivity and frankness” (School Library Journal), with “unflinching clarity” (New York Times). The same could be said today, nearly twenty years later.

What’s really new, then?

Research-consciousness, for one thing, if not the research itself. In that March/April Horn Book, Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s animated discussion of what she dubs “extreme research” demonstrates why she’s such an effective writer for kids: she makes holing up in the archives exciting, and fun. But the principles and procedures she cannily ticks off, one by one, are standard among experienced “adult” researchers, and were not unknown to Werstein, Meltzer, et al.

She and her counterparts are indeed making greater use of first-person testimony—in part, to write a different kind of book—and, chapter by chapter, they identify the sources of their many quotes. But they don’t generally source the information. A rich descriptive bibliography, such as Bartoletti provides in They Called Themselves the K.K.K., is a stand-alone resource. It’s not a substitute, however, for knowing where to find something in particular, whether to question or to learn more.

Which came first, the form or the format? In 1987, when Russell Freedman called his life of Lincoln a “photobiography,” he turned a new, squarish pictorial format into the equivalent of a new genre. Closely akin is photo-history, ideal for chronicling the civil rights movement: Elizabeth Partridge’s Marching for Freedom, in particular, is a stunning synthesis of words and pictures. But Bartoletti’s Klan history is also inconceivable without the confirming illustrations from period journals—most of them not photographs, but engravings (there being, as she notes, few photos of Reconstruction-era Klansmen). Call it, then, graphic history or biography: an evolving form of book for the Internet age.

It’s about people. Based more on primary sources (and less on previous histories), heavily dependent on pictures, the new nonfiction, biography or not, tends to be about people: groups of historical figures, unusual individuals, selected faces-in-the-crowd.

The story tells, in historical context, what happens to these people.

Compare They Called Themselves the K.K.K. with its only consequential predecessor, Meltzer’s 1982 The Truth About the Ku Klux Klan. As his title suggests, Meltzer’s book is timely and impassioned. Pegged to a resurgence of the Klan, it provides a condensed history of the movement from its founding through its twentieth-century outrages. Bartoletti makes the Klan’s founding intelligible, then focuses on the lives of the black victims—the terror, the bravery, the dashed hopes—to the end of the Reconstruction period, when the harm was done and Jim Crow set in. Her update is succinct and empathic; she doesn’t editorialize.

Meltzer wrote to satisfy existing interests. Bartoletti writes to kindle and deepen interest. Meltzer’s book is political history, an adult book scaled down. Bartoletti’s could be called narrative history, from the ground up.

But it will not do to categorize too closely. Today’s pictorial, personalized nonfiction resists categorizing. That’s one of its hallmarks.

Take David Weitzman’s Skywalkers: Mohawk Ironworkers Build the City, classified in the catalog of the Seattle Public Library under twelve subject-headings, six juvenile and six adult. Better yet, consider Weitzman’s output over the last four decades. Unlike some nonfiction writers for kids, he has followed his own star: from backyard history to industrial archaeology to book after book, for kids and adults, on the building of a giant locomotive (Superpower, 1987) or ship (Old Ironsides, 1997), to a more personalized industrial history, shading into biography (Model T: How Henry Ford Built a Legend, 2002) or social history (Jenny: The Airplane That Taught America to Fly, also 2002), to last year’s Skywalkers, which is fully social and industrial history, both.

Nowadays, the Mohawk ironworkers whom Weitzman follows for a hundred years might seem like a ready-made multicultural subject. And certainly there’s a timely “ethnic” interest. But the ironworkers from Quebec, with their Brooklyn outpost, have captured the interest of journalists—especially New Journalists like Joseph Mitchell and Gay Talese—for nigh on seventy years. What Weitzman adds, along with an expert’s knowledge of building with steel, is the insight to question the myth of the fearless sure-footed Indian.

And yes, the Mohawks, as Native Americans, add a dimension of interest. Blacks and other ethnic identities add interest. Women add interest. Odd people add interest, especially in picture-book biographies, probably the most creative genre in today’s books for kids. Typical has little place.

But the anomalous, offside nature of much of today’s nonfiction has something to do, also, with today’s publishing. Where once the traditional trade houses aspired to balanced lists, with a selection of picture books, fiction, and nonfiction, some of the largest firms now publish only a handful of nonfiction titles each year. Where once the old trade houses published lots of books in series, related to the curriculum, they have ceded that market to firms that publish nothing else. In publishing less nonfiction, they’re aiming for a bigger splash.

One way or another, the books are different—not better or worse than their predecessors, but interestingly different. Different books for different times.

The post Nonfiction: What’s Really New and Different — and What Isn’t appeared first on The Horn Book.

On the library scene, Moore and Jordan had counterparts at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh and elsewhere. For all of them, bringing children and books together was a Cause, not just a career.

This series focuses on three notable librarians of the succeeding, or second, generation: Virginia Haviland (1911–1988; see  January/February 2011 issue), Augusta Baker (1911–1998; see May/June 2011 issue), and Mildred Batchelder (1901–1998).

Nobel or Pulitzer, Newbery or Caldecott or Batchelder—fame is an award in your name. In time, it may be the one thing you’re famous for.

Mildred L. Batchelder presided over children’s and young people’s affairs at the American Library Association, in one form or another, for thirty transformative years. At her retirement in 1966, her librarian constituents established a prize in her name for the best translation of a children’s book each year—a fit recognition of Batchelder’s long and serious interest in books as cultural bridges. Whatever else the prize may have accomplished, it’s kept Batchelder’s name current.

To keep knowledge of a career alive—especially the career of someone who might be described as a functionary, with mainly offstage achievements—takes something more: it takes a biography. Batchelder’s Boswell is Dorothy J. Anderson, who worked with Batchelder at ALA headquarters and made her the subject of a PhD dissertation at Texas Woman’s University in 1981. Interviews with Batchelder herself are the chief source of information—and “Batch” was known for speaking her mind.

Mildred Batchelder was born in the old industrial city of Lynn, Massachusetts, northeast of Boston, in 1901, the first of three daughters. Her father was a prosperous businessman, a sportsman, and a genial host. Her mother, a former teacher, took the girls to lunch and the theater in Boston. The Batchelders lived well. But both parents had high expectations of their children, and gave them responsibility accordingly.

In Batchelder’s childhood, “the most exciting place in the world” was “Rocky Island” off the Massachusetts coast—a complete island at high tide, surrounded by saltwater marshes at low tide—where the family spent every summer. There, it was up to Mildred and her sister Ruth, three years younger, to fetch a hundred-pound block of ice from shore. The two little girls also had the freedom to set off on long rowboat journeys to “secret places.”

It sounds like an idyll, out of a children’s book. Could Batchelder actually have been a “small and sickly child,” as she describes herself? Yes: this is the genesis, it appears, of the woman who was afflicted, in midlife, with a painful and crippling form of arthritis and bore it with so little fuss that people hardly noticed her physical condition.

Cut, then, to the New York State Library School at Albany. Batchelder had gone to Mt. Holyoke College, an exacting Seven Sisters school, where she felt unprepared academically and socially. She decided to become a librarian, she told Anderson in her frank, self-mocking way, because she liked seeing college catalogs addressed to “Mildred Batchelder, Librarian” when she was helping in the high school library.

After a one-week course in school librarianship from one pioneer, Mary Hall, a slightly longer course in public-library children’s work from another, Clara Hunt, Batchelder signs up for a month of practice work under Effie L. Power in Cleveland—site, she’s heard, of some of the best children’s services in the country.

Power’s plan for the month reads like a syllabus: one week in the central library; a week in each of two contrasting branch libraries; attendance at the long monthly book selection meeting; an assortment of social events.

Batchelder had gone to Cleveland uncommitted. In her life-story, there’d been no reminiscence of childhood reading, no tribute to a beloved book. The month in Cleveland, with its enthusiastic, humorous, bookwise librarians, decides her. “How could anyone not rush into work with children after an experience like that?”

It’s not, of course, the equivalent of professional experience. So Batchelder takes a giant step when, with her new library degree, she goes to Omaha as supervisor of children’s work at the main library, four branches, and thirty-two grade schools. (“Mildred Batchelder would be a good gamble,” Effie Power had assured the director.)

She’s systematic, energetic. Early on, she develops a quasi-professional training class for her staff. She’s enterprising. For Children’s Book Week, she puts out a multi-page booklet extolling the library’s collections and encouraging parents to build home libraries. A second year, she adds a special event in concert with the Woman’s Press Club of Omaha. This is the mid-1920s, when children’s library work outside the major cities was still in its infancy, and Batchelder herself was only twenty-five.

She’s also making contacts, keeping touch. Long before the term came into use, Batchelder was an assiduous networker. She sends a copy of her Book Week pamphlet to Clara Hunt, and reaps praise for her interesting, unusual book selections. She depletes her savings to attend a distant ALA meeting. On a trip home to Massachusetts she takes a detour to Toronto to meet Lillian Smith, the distinguished head of children’s work. “She was tremendously impressed,” Anderson writes, “with the way Lillian Smith personally helped little libraries throughout Canada in their book selection, the way she trained staff, and the way she encouraged other organizations to recognize children’s library work.” Augurs of Batchelder’s own later endeavors at ALA.

After three years, she decides to leave Omaha—having done, she tells the director airily, “all I can here”—and takes a position as children’s librarian at the St. Cloud (Minnesota) State Teachers College (now St. Cloud State University). It’s the first such position in Minnesota, an uncommon position anywhere; but for Batchelder it has promise. “Meeting with teachers and children in groups and individually, [she] worked out innumerable ways for them to involve the library in what they were doing.”

In what would become a pattern, she promptly writes an article for Elementary English Review describing the program—the first of many, many articles in professional journals and compendiums that publicized her ideas and beliefs.

But she and the college librarian had disliked each other from the start, and given Batchelder’s forwardness, it was hardly surprising that she was fired after the first year.

Her next position, at the Haven Intermediate School in Evanston, Illinois—a progressive school in a well-to-do, progressive community—gives her the opportunity that she had envisioned at St. Cloud: to make the library the center of the school.

Batchelder tells everyone—not only children—about children’s books. She passes along word of new books to teachers, gives talks about children’s literature to young mothers. And, again, she puts her views in writing: while “the classroom teacher has only one year…to create interest in reading,” she writes, “the librarian continues her contact with a particular child from the first grade until…high school.”

Making a name for herself, she’s also making new, strategically placed friends. Carl Milam, executive secretary of ALA, has a daughter at the Haven School, and Batchelder becomes a regular guest at the Milam home. Visiting ALA headquarters, teaching summer courses at Indiana University, she extends her acquaintances. As hospitality chair for the school library section at the 1933 Chicago ALA conference, she meets colleagues from all over; by year’s end, she’s a member of the executive committee: an insider and a prospective leader. At the 1934 Montreal conference, the idea for the school library program is hers.

Montreal is memorable for another reason, too. Hearing a “very distinctive, lowish, strange” voice, Batchelder turns around and beholds the magisterial Anne Carroll Moore—a small figure, she recalls to Anderson almost fifty years later, with “weird looking hair and [a] dull old red dress on her thin body.” “Oh, you old witch,” she thinks, the start of a lasting aversion. For persons who came to know and admire them both, there were many similarities between them, from absolute confidence in their own judgment to the ability to charm when they wanted to.

After eight years, the highly regarded Haven School librarian made it known that she was ready for “bigger challenges,” and in November 1935 Carl Milam named Batchelder ALA’s first school library specialist.

What did that mean? During Batchelder’s thirty years with ALA, the organization went through a number of reorganizations, and each time Batchelder’s responsibilities and prerogatives shifted. But in many respects the die was cast at the outset when she functioned, along with children’s library specialist Jessie Van Cleve, as an investigator, reporter, and adviser.

Together, Batchelder and Van Cleve attended local and regional conferences. They looked in on school and public libraries in New Orleans, Detroit, Cleveland, and Columbus, Ohio, and set up meetings with school, public, county, and parish libraries. In some cities, school and public libraries had had no previous contact with one another; at a time when school library development lagged far behind public library children’s work, coordination was a top priority.

Another was affiliation with other national groups interested in children. On a visit to Washington, Batchelder and Van Cleve established contacts with such organizations as the National Education Association and the National Congress of Parents and Teachers. There was the prospect of joint undertakings; at the least, libraries would be in the picture.

To foster school library development, Batchelder compiled statistics demonstrating the lag, identified librarians in the vanguard, and highlighted their work in ALA publications and on-site consultations elsewhere. One library staff member recalled her vividly: “She was so authoritative and full of suggestions…some of the staff dubbed her ‘Mother-God.’” As Anderson scrupulously reports, Batchelder’s style was not to every taste.

She knew no boundaries for children’s books, no limits for librarians as champions of books. What were Latin American children reading? With the assent of executive secretary Milam, letters went out to ministers of education in Latin American countries, and Batchelder was dismayed when the answer was mostly textbooks. She also decried the portrayal of Latin American countries in American children’s books. And she found an all-embracing cause: “Librarians,” she wrote in her report, “believe that the best children’s books of all countries should be made available to the children of all countries.”

The Latin American Project, as it came to be called, began in the late 1930s when European prospects were bleak and American attention turned to our putatively Good Neighbors to the south. But Batchelder pursued it with equal zeal after World War II, when she was also engaged in projects for European reconstruction. Internationalism was a cause she could advance, on her own hook, from whatever ALA post she held.

When Jessie Van Cleve died early in their partnership, Batchelder succeeded to her position. Both had devoted half their time to Booklist; thereafter, Batchelder worked full time as chief of the school and children’s library division, which embraced young people’s work. But because children’s work in the public libraries had its own strong leadership, Batchelder continued to focus most of her attention on school libraries.

In that area, she was a visionary.

Being in Chicago also meant being in the orbit of the University of Chicago graduate library school, its galaxy of scholars, its programs and publications. For the Chicago compendium The Library of Tomorrow (1939), Batchelder was asked to contribute a chapter along with such notables as the director of the New York Public Library, the Librarian of Congress, Carl Milam, and Lillian Smith. Whereas Smith wrote in inspirational generalities, Batchelder titled her piece “School Library Service: 1970,” and created a place, peopled with students: “In addition to the students searching for books for personal needs, a 10th grade teacher, a 7th grade boy, and a girl from the primary grades were each assembling books to take to their classrooms…” A small girl, bearing poetry books, “was also looking for transcriptions of A. A. Milne and Robert Louis Stevenson reading their own poems. Milne records were supplied, but to the girl’s surprise, Stevenson had lived before the day of radio recording.”

And so it goes, for a day in the school library of the future—foretold with humor, drama, and the attention to audiovisual resources for which Batchelder also became known.

In the immediate postwar period, revolt against authorities perceived as authoritarian struck ALA and other professional associations. Carl Milam, under fire, resigned in 1948. For the next three years, the restive school library section agitated and plotted for the status of a division, separate from the children’s and YA librarians. And once they were up and running, they summarily fired Batchelder: they had their own leaders now, and those leaders (if not the entire membership) wanted to run their own show.

However Batchelder felt, she was not one to skip a beat. For a 1953 issue of Library Trends devoted to school libraries, she wrote a long, substantive article on—ironically—“Public Library Influence on School Libraries.” Expanding on the theme of complementary strengths, she pointed out that “public libraries have materials on various sides of a question.” Intellectual freedom had become another of her active pursuits.

To pinpoint her activities in the succeeding years is almost to pick at random, or to put in a thumb. In the international sphere, there were projects to make select foreign books available for American purchase and to identify suitable books for translation. On the domestic front, there was a campaign to gain passage of the groundbreaking Library Services Bill. In her own speaking and writing, Batchelder pressed for reforms to broaden the education of children’s and school librarians.

But always and forever, she was interested in people—talented, capable, zealous people, both to fill library posts (ALA was a clearinghouse) and to replenish the ranks of ALA committees, chairmanships, offices.

At the 1957 New York Library Association conference, Dorothy Broderick was a novice trying vainly to get a book selection discussion going when “a pert little lady, dressed in black, and carrying a cane” came to her rescue with a pithy remark. A dialogue ensued…and “An Entangling Alliance Was Born,” as Broderick titled her tribute to Batchelder on her retirement.

In a recent conversation, Broderick also recalled Batchelder saying, of her, “I want that one!” Did she recruit or dragoon others that way? I asked. “Everyone.”

As a culmination of her international work before retirement, Batchelder secured a five-month leave of absence, in 1965, to study the problems of books in translation more closely. She had made her first European trip in 1961, as a delegate to the International Federation of Library Associations meeting in Edinburgh, where translation of children’s books was on the agenda. She’d used her contacts with foreign publishers to make the ALA exhibit of children’s books at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, an international array—one seen by unaccustomed multitudes.

Her 1965 trip, to eleven countries, was both a triumphal tour of the European children’s book world, with return visits to persons she’d hosted in Chicago and invitations from prominent authors, editors, librarians, et al., and an investigation into the perplexities of translation. On her earlier trip, she’d been dismayed to discover multiple copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the shelves of children’s rooms almost everywhere. She’d been surprised to learn that Swedish children’s librarians looked askance at the Snipp Snapp Snurr books, while Dutch librarians had no use for Hans Brinker. Now, she could explore corrective measures. How to make sure the books selected for translation were each nation’s best?

As soon as she finished delivering her impassioned report at the ALA conference that summer, a translation award in her name was proposed—a choice, made-for-TV moment. It was highly unusual, too, for such an award to be named for a living person—and consequential, in the aftermath, for someone as thoroughly alive as Batchelder.

Once the retirement festivities were over, she was free to go where her inclinations led.

Charlemae Rollins, the crusading African American children’s librarian in Chicago, was an old Batchelder friend and concern—someone whose mistreatment in the South Batchelder had vehemently protested. When the third edition of Rollins’s historic booklist, We Build Together, came out in 1967, the Batchelder name joined the roster of illustrious contributors.

For a time at ALA, she had tended to library-trustee affairs. In 1969, at the behest of the American Library Trustee Association, she researched and wrote a comprehensive handbook that amounts to what-every-trustee should know.

As a member of the committee for the May Massee Collection, established at Kansas State Teachers College (now Emporia State University) shortly after the celebrated editor’s death, she provided a meticulous critique of the proposed catalog.

But her longest and deepest commitment, in the children’s book world at large, was to the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota. Before her retirement, she had proposed that the Kerlan add foreign-language editions of the Newbery and Caldecott winners at the core of the collection. Soon, she decided that Batchelder winners should join them, and she not only donated her burgeoning collection but also solicited contributions of the foreign-language originals. In time, she drew upon her vast knowledge of individuals and institutions to petition for anything that might advance children’s book research at the Kerlan.

She also promoted the Batchelder prize—or “the Batch,” as she called it—in a variety of ways, including suggesting books for possible translation. (To her great regret, she had only schoolgirl French.) As always, she wrote articles and spoke. On one such occasion she was interviewed by a reporter for the Evanston Review. How could librarians keep up with foreign books, it was implied, as well as all the others? “They must read more and faster,” Batchelder replied. Enthusiastically: “It can be done.”

—Barbara Bader

Heartfelt thanks to Dorothy Broderick and Mimi Kayden for reminiscences and to Heather Wade at the May Massee Memorial Collection, and to Karen Nelson Hoyle at the Kerlan Collection, for research assistance.

A special shout-out to Dorothy J. Anderson, not only for her indispensable dissertation but also for passing along the touch-true Evanston newspaper story with its disarming photo.

The post Mildred Batchelder: The Power of Thinking Big appeared first on The Horn Book.

The “father of black history” was famously dour, but he was also known to light up at word of some victory for the cause — healthy ticket sales for a Negro History Week event, respectful mention in the press.

What would he make, then, of a pair of African American authors with 120 or more books to their names at the end of 2006, the great majority to do with black history and life? The figure is inexact because Patricia and Fredrick McKissack are too busy to keep count. On the docket for 2007 are three new entries, one scheduled for each publishing season: A Friendship for Today, in the winter; Away West, in the spring; The All-I’ll-Ever-Want Christmas Doll, in the fall. Three periods, three settings, three kinds of book. Three longtime editors, too, providing both security and freedom.

The McKissacks do think big. “We’re Kennedy products,” Pat McKissack has said — idealists and optimists.

The two were childhood friends in Nashville, under segregation, and attended Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State University (now Tennessee State University) during the heady civil rights years. Married upon graduation, they moved to St. Louis, had three boys, two of them twins, and settled into careers — Pat as a teacher of junior high and college English, Fred as a civil engineer and contractor.

In the country at large: recoil and retrenchment. The assassinations of Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Malcolm X, coupled with the bitter divisions of the Vietnam War, had quashed the hopes of earlier years. “Just as blacks experienced white resistance to equality during Reconstruction, there was another backlash to the Civil Rights Movement of the l960s,” Pat McKissack notes in her SATA profile. “By 1980 blacks were once again on the defense, trying to safeguard their and their children’s rights.”

One way to win hearts and minds was by writing, Pat’s ambition since childhood. “Fred encouraged me to follow my dream and write full time,” she wrote in her 1997 autobiography for children, Can You Imagine?, and repeats without prompting. “He even offered to help.” In 1981 the McKissacks set up All-Writing Services to generate income from writing proposals, reports, and other business documents “while the children’s books were developing.” With similar foresight, today’s schedule of three books a year is designed to “keep the revenue stream flowing.”

The first of five books contracted with Children’s Press, a very easy reader called Who Is Who?, came out in 1983. On the cover are the heads of two identical little black boys, smiling at each other. They are Johnny and Bobby (per the McKissack twins), whose resemblance ends with their appearance: “Johnny likes red. Bobby likes blue.” The vocabulary could hardly be more limited — large and small, front and back, up and down — but the examples pictured have a lively, varied correspondence to child life that Dick and Jane never dreamed of. “Johnny likes big” ride-’em trucks, “Bobby likes little” motor-vehicle miniatures; going for a ride, Johnny likes to sit in “front” with Dad, Bobby likes to sit in “back” with Mom. Bobby and Johnny are two distinct personalities, two individuals. Knowing them, you know “who is who.”

To make so much of so little takes imagination, sensitivity, skill. To produce a variety of fiction and nonfiction, to fill an assortment of niches, takes application. Writing responsibly about people and times past takes research — Fred McKissack’s particular contribution.

In 1984, the year after Who Is Who?, the fledgling authors had six books on offer: biographies of Martin Luther King and Paul Laurence Dunbar, plus two other nonfiction titles, from Children’s Press, and two cautionary picture books about a little boy named Christopher from the religious publisher Augsburg. In It’s the Truth, Christopher, shock-headed, freckled Christopher learns the difference between “love and honesty” — or, after he loses almost all his friends, not to tell the truth when it hurts others. In McKissack stories, religious or nonreligious, hard choices are made, hard lessons are learned. It’s part of their attraction.

Pat McKissack had first written about Paul Laurence Dunbar years before, to give her eighth graders information about one of her favorite poets. They were not impressed: “Ms. McKissack, that was awful.” She rewrote her narrative for the next year’s class, and the next and the next, as she tells it, until she “learned to tell a good story” and got a thumbs-up.

For the fifth- to seventh-graders served by the Children’s Press series People of Distinction, yet another revision was in order. Dunbar is a dicey subject. His dialect poems were more highly esteemed by white literati, to his distress, than his formal poetry in standard English. His long-awaited marriage fell apart; he took sick and became an alcoholic. McKissack holds nothing back. “The worst thing you can do as a teacher,” she said to me, “is to teach what you later have to unteach.”

The McKissack difference comes broadly to light in the 1987 biography of Frederick Douglass, in the same series, that bears the names of both McKissacks. Compared with thirteen other children’s biographies of Douglass on the shelves of the Seattle Public Library, the McKissack entry is incomparably richer in historical insight and internal conflict than anything else below the YA level.

At the beginning of the third chapter, young Frederick Douglass turns sixteen. It is 1833, the year, the McKissacks remind us, that slavery was banished in the British Empire. “The irony,” they continue, is that he might have been freed in America, too, had the “colonists lost the Revolutionary War. Black men, however, were some of the strongest supporters of the Revolutionary cause.” In the spirit of Crispus Attucks, black men also press for their own freedom, freedom from slavery, during and after the war . . . Douglass, his future thus foreshadowed, joins a church, marvels at the hypocrisy of slave-holding churchgoers, takes comfort in learning that white abolitionists recognize and denounce that hypocrisy, and questions some of his own religious motives. How can he be asked to “turn the other cheek” toward a vicious, abusive owner? All this, as part-and-parcel of the story, in just four clearly written pages.

The McKissacks were going full steam. Besides the Douglass bio, 1987 brought one other sizable work, a history of the civil rights movement, and twelve assorted books for younger children, from simplified folktales to activity books to that irresistible demon of clean-up, Messy Bessey, for a grand total of fourteen. As before, the majority were done with Fran Dyra at Children’s Press, first of the editors Pat McKissack is quick to bless.

For sheer durability, Messy Bessey’s biggest rival may be its near-antithesis, Flossie & the Fox (1986). More a personal creation than its predecessors, less a product for a pre-existing market, more textured and less tightly drawn, the story of cagey little Flossie who outfoxes a fox introduces an authorial voice that was soon to become familiar — the voice of the homegrown storyteller, Pat McKissack, paying tribute to her forebears as she passes on their legacy. She especially recalls her grandfather speaking, “on a hot summer day . . . in the rich and colorful dialect of the rural South.” Flossie was Pat McKissack’s first book with a major trade publisher, Dial, and with Anne Schwartz, another of her editorial icons whom she followed to Knopf, Atheneum, and now Schwartz & Wade/Random.

In the vein of family folklore Pat McKissack went on to produce some of her most distinctive work: the expansive picture-book tales that begin with Mirandy and Brother Wind (1988) and the two collections of original stories “rooted in African American history,” The Dark-Thirty (1992) and Porch Lies (2006).

Flossie & the Fox is a timeless story, self-contained and self-referential, not unlike “Little Red Riding Hood” in that respect. Mirandy and Brother Wind is social history with a political subtext and, of course, a crackling story: how Mirandy doesn’t get Brother Wind for a partner at the junior cakewalk and wins instead with Ezel, the “clumsy” boy who dances up a storm. Inspired by a photograph of McKissack’s grandparents as cakewalk winners in 1906, Mirandy and Brother Wind shows African Americans having a grand good time in the bad old days, the period African American historian Rayford Logan justly called “the nadir.” It’s cultural and social history, and both figure importantly in the McKissacks’ work thereafter.

McKissack nonfiction entered a new stage, too, with projects of their own making — projects with a great deal of meaning for the African American community. In two years, 1991 and 1992, the McKissacks together published eighteen basic biographies with Enslow, nine each year: Louis Armstrong and Mary Church Terrell and Ralph J. Bunche, Zora Neale Hurston and Satchel Paige and Paul Robeson, for a sampling. A balanced assortment of notable men and women, not all headliners or childhood heroes, presented in a manner equally suited to youngsters and to adults of limited reading ability. Here is Paul Robeson under fire for his politics: “After the war, any American who was friendly with the Soviet Union or Communists got into trouble. Paul was one of them . . . A lot of Americans thought he was a traitor.” The prose is old-school primer-ese; the information is the plain truth.

The two works celebrating the achievements of the Pullman porters (A Long Hard Journey, 1989) and the WWII Tuskegee airmen (Red-Tail Angels, 1995) do their readers a personal service as records not only of black struggle-and-success but also of who-did-what, with name after name to note with pride and admiration.

During these crowded years the McKissacks also wrote substantial biographies of two slippery giants, scholar and Negro-rights militant W. E. B. DuBois and abolitionist/feminist/mystic Sojourner Truth. The Truth biography, an especially difficult exercise, took the McKissacks to Scholastic and to Ann Reit, with whom they would do two path-breaking books of slavery history for young people, Rebels against Slavery (1996) and Days of Jubilee (2003), about the two-hundred-year fight for freedom and the curious “twists and turns” of its coming.

Pat McKissack tells how, researching one project, she and Fred often had leftover material that launched them into another project. What grew internally, incrementally, also grew into what the regular McKissack reader perceives as a web of historical allusion and a continuum of sustaining tradition. Take the 1906 cakewalk that figures so large in Mirandy. Its historical antecedent appears, along the way, in a McKissack account of 1859 Christmas plantation revelry: in the dark days of segregation, we see, blacks drew upon strengths of their own from the days before emancipation.

From the look of it, The Dark-Thirty (1992) might simply be a collection of Southern gothic tales with black settings. From its title alone, Christmas in the Big House, Christmas in the Quarters (1994) might be happy holidays upstairs and down. The two books, published by Knopf and Scholastic, respectively, are not only not what they appear to be, they both pack an unexpected wallop; coming from dissimilar origins, in folklore and history, each packs a similar punch.

“The Legend of Pin Oak,” first of the ten original stories in The Dark-Thirty, concerns the two sons of a white plantation owner — “legitimate” Harper, a weakling neglected and slighted by his father, and “mulatto” Henri, the image and favorite of that father. After the father dies and the plantation comes upon hard times, you don’t have to guess what might happen: Harper’s announcement that he has sold Henri is the shocking beginning of the story. The flight of Henri and his family ends in a disaster that is, indeed, the stuff of deep-seated black legend. Other eerie stories find their inspiration, variously, in the exploits of Pullman porters, the psychic powers of a WWII veteran, the Montgomery bus boycott. Through the merger of folklore and history, Pat McKissack expands the parameters of historical fiction.

Christmas in the Big House, Christmas in the Quarters, a large-format picture book authored by both McKissacks, gets its extraordinary effect by seeming to be an ordinary, anecdotal re-creation of daily plantation life. But as preparations are made for the coming holiday, we see by the section-headings that it is December 1859. Then it is January 1, 1860. The masked ball has ended in the Big House, the cakewalk is over in the Quarters. With the decorations down, life returns abruptly to normal. The first day of the year is separation day, when Massa announces the names of the slaves who’ve been sold or hired out. Husbands are parted from their wives, children are parted from their families, perhaps forever. And as the McKissacks first turn the screw and then lift the curtain, a young white girl begs for her own slave, only to be reassured that five years hence — “December 1865,” the girl counts on her fingers — “there’ll be plenty of slaves . . . to choose from.” In the Quarters, meanwhile, the talk is of a runaway slave, of the freedom that surely must come, anticipating the events of that momentous year.

Pat McKissack’s own experience of un-freedom and the fight for black rights in the 1950s has come to the fore in — this being McKissack — three disparate books. Goin’ Someplace Special, with exuberant Jerry Pinkney illustrations, is another book that only looks benign. Though she’ll be allowed into the downtown library, ’Tricia Ann has to ride in the back of the bus, finds that the bench in the nearby park is for “Whites Only,” and has a real scare when she innocently follows a white crowd into an off-limits hotel. Youngsters who read about ’Tricia Ann will appreciate Rosa Parks’s resolve all the more.

The two civil rights novels, A Friendship for Today and Abby Takes a Stand, bring a fresh perspective to the integration experience. For ten-year-old Rosemary in A Friendship for Today, having a white friend is not the best of all possible worlds. In Abby Takes a Stand, the food in the restaurant the Nashville young people fight to integrate turns out to be nothing to clamor for. Whatever the circumstance, it’s being free to choose that matters.

Abby Takes a Stand is the first in a series, Scraps of Time, that Pat McKissack is developing with another of her editor-collaborators, Jane O’Connor at Viking. McKissack and O’Connor brainstormed possible projects, and came up with the idea of tying family mementos in granny Gee’s attic to episodes in African American history. McKissack sees the series as going on more or less forever, exploring unknown terrain as well as familiar ground.

Who knows what will appear alongside? Maybe even some more zippy, warm-hearted, laugh-aloud stories like Tippy Lemmey (2003) and Loved Best (2005), drawn from Pat McKissack’s life — contemporary stories with nary a social problem and only a few white characters, where black is the default setting. To fill a proper library for all kinds of kids takes all kinds of books — stories of struggle, stories with a lineage, stories that are plain entertaining. Any of them might come with the McKissack name.

From the March/April 2007 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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For Cooney, it was the work of a lifetime that began auspiciously in Brooklyn in 1917. Father was a stockbroker with New England roots. Mother was an amateur painter from a prominent German-American family of art and music patrons; she was proudest, however, of the forebear who painted oils-by-the-yard and cigar store Indians. Summers Cooney spent with her paternal grandmother on the Maine coast, the start of another lifelong allegiance. In due course she went to boarding school, then to Smith College. Though she had always drawn, it didn’t occur to her to go to art school — a matter sometimes of regret, sometimes of pride — but apparently she never considered being anything but a children’s book illustrator. “The answer is that I love stories.”

Between 1940 and 1943 she illustrated three books, to some small effect, and wrote three of her own, to less effect. Then, after a brief wartime stint in the Women’s Army Corps (WACs), she entered upon a progression common to women of her generation: twenty busy years of “getting married and having children” (two marriages, four children), of “staying home and taking care of my family” — and, in Cooney’s case, “decorating books.”

From the mid-1940s through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, there were very few years when she didn’t illustrate at least two or three books; in 1952 her name was on six. Many she did for money, not for love: all those younglings to educate. But the 1952 batch included two by Margaret Wise Brown, Where Have You Been? and Christmas in the Barn (both Crowell) — and led to another warmly regarded Brown/Cooney Christmas book, The Little Fir Tree (Crowell, 1954). In Cooney’s mind, children and animals were always with her, in person and on paper; and she was plagued by the thought that the number of her commissions depended on “the quality of the fur she drew.” To outsiders, she was a Little Master. Just as her gentle, grave, very plain illustrations give conviction to Brown’s rural New England Nativity — or rather, turn Brown’s all-inclusive narrative into a New England Nativity — her crisp, animated embellishments are the making of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s American Folk Songs for Children (Doubleday, 1948) and its successors.

In the 1950s and 1960s the Cooney name was synonymous with scratchboard, and, in the United States at least, she was the prime exponent of the medium most closely associated with book illustrations. This made sense: she had come into children’s books as a black-and-white artist in order to illustrate, decorate, do a job — not, like a painter or designer or cartoonist, to create independently. For the 1960s Horn Book series “The Artist at Work,” she wrote a description of scratchboard illustration, a model of its kind, that says a good deal about Cooney herself.

Each illustrating medium has a character of its own. Like wood engraving, which it resembles in appearance, scratchboard has an affinity for the printed page. The crisp, forthright technique makes a happy marriage with the clean letters of type. The flat black-and-white surface of the drawing preserves the flat surface of the page and the unity of text and illustration. For the artist, the medium is a good disciplinarian. It allows no subterfuge, no sketchy representations, no incomplete statements. Weaknesses cannot be hidden. The results may be delicate or brutal, but they are never indecisive. In short, the artist must know how to draw and he must draw with precision, for there is a finality too in drawing on scratchboard….

For Cooney, scratchboard was a source of pride and vexation. She liked the demands it made, the results she achieved; she didn’t like her work to be valued, by anyone, for “the quality of the fur.” She knew it was essentially a black-and-white medium; she didn’t like being told, when she asked for full, camera-separated color, that she had “no color sense.” To do scratchboard illustrations in two, three, or four colors was laborious — you made the black key plate on scratchboard, then scraped or scratched the design for each additional color into a transparent overlay — but in the world of children’s books, where color cost money, each additional color added to the artist’s standing. For the first picture book of her own, an adaptation of “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” from Chaucer, Cooney was granted five colors, at least for half the pages. Some double spreads would be in five colors, some in two colors, and some would be split — ideally, in such a way that the discrepancy would be unnoticed and the picture might actually benefit; such is the case with the barnyard scene, described below, which is the most reproduced illustration in the book. Chanticleer and the Fox, a work of craftsmanship and intelligence, won the Caldecott.

The farmyard scene that sets the stage is a Late Medieval idyll, poor as the widow and her daughters are said to be. We are charmed by the sight of the winsome little girl snuggling up to the stout, flower-wreathed old sheep that has eyes only for the flowering tip of the mullein, one of nature’s least graceful creations. We take delight in the sows feeding in their thatched and planked and split-log surrounds, a vignette remindful of Thomas Bewick, the father of wood engraving. These goodies are but prelude to the fable of the vain rooster Chanticleer; the worshipful little hen, Demoiselle Partlet, too doting to believe her dream of imminent danger; and the sly fox whose appeal to Chanticleer’s vanity almost succeeds as a consequence. From the tip of his comb to his taloned toes, from his proud, puffed-up breast to his sweeping tail feathers, Chanticleer is an image fit for an English inn sign. But the story only gets up off the page when Cooney is stalking the fox, or stirring up the chickens, in two colors. The multicolor pictures are too decorative and diffuse, perhaps, to be effective as dramatic vehicles.

With the success of Chanticleer, the constraints on Cooney eased. She took her family to France for the summer, the start of a twenty-year, mid-career period of foreign travel and engagement with things French, then things Spanish, things Greek. She worked at her art and, without abandoning scratchboard, tried other media. Early in the French days she did The Little Juggler (Hastings House, 1961), adapted from the legend of the juggler of Notre Dame, and illustrated it with scratchboard drawings, in one and four colors, that attest to her burgeoning sense of place. Though the color is still conventionalized, the drawing is much freer; and to Cooney’s gratification the people are much more “a part of the place.” She illustrated French versions of nonsense verse by Edward Lear and Eugene Field — in a new, light-and-dark technique — and she was asked to do Mother Goose in French (Crowell, 1964) in full color. It was not a good idea, for Barbara Cooney or Mother Goose: the pretty, picturesque illustrations could pass as French travel ads of the time. Cooney was not yet a painter or a colorist.

More happily met, from those restless, ambitious years, is a book of modest intention; a story that, like “Old Mother Hubbard,” has tempted artists known and unknown since the first nursery books were printed: “Cock Robin.” Or, in the complete form in which Cooney did it, The Courtship, Merry Marriage, and Feast of Cock Robin and Jenny Wren, to which is added the Doleful Death of Cock Robin. She had settled on Chanticleer, Cooney used to say, because she wanted to draw chickens. Songbirds are birds of another feather, true, but Cock Robin cuts a fine figure, Jenny Wren is enchanting as a blushing bride, the proceedings tap a vein of merry spoofery in Cooney, and she draws and colors with a lightness of touch she seldom exhibited elsewhere.

Mere excellence was not enough, though. To end her apprenticeship, as she put it — to come into her own, we might say — Cooney needed a major achievement in full color. The opportunity, when it came, could have been tailor-made. To illustrate Donald Hall’s homespun prose-poem Ox-Cart Man, she did a set of folk art-ish paintings that gained her a second Caldecott and freed her forever from unwanted commissions and pre-separation. With the kudos also came the confidence to think of telling stories of her own. She was sixty-two.

Hall’s methodical, cadenced account of a nineteenth-century New England farmer and his family through the seasons — a steady round of growth and work and going to market — draws upon Cooney’s long-standing affinity for vintage Americana and her later-come ability to integrate people and places. The artwork is the new thing. Did she realize that her natural inclination toward silhouetted forms, flat planes, precise detail, and needlepoint verdure gives an appearance of folk painting? That, with Ox-Cart Man, she might be in her element: a sophisticated artist working in a naïve style? So we have, on oh-so-formal display, the family members, the family sheep, and the goods each family member has made from the sheep, ready for the farmer to take to market…where he will purchase new tools and equipment, and “two pounds of wintergreen peppermint candy,” that all hands will enjoy together in a glowing fireside scene.

Many years ago I went on record as finding the landscape too immaculate, the town scenes too tidy, the whole effect more quaint and tranquil than Hall’s plain words dictate. Indeed, Ox-Cart Man is the New England myth of industry, equanimity, and stability incarnate, and people love it for just that reason.

After Ox-Cart Man, Cooney might have coasted along as the newest New England icon. But that wasn’t enough, either. She continued to accept commissions, selectively, and especially welcomed the chance to go to new places and learn new things. To illustrate John Bierhorst’s Spirit Child, a Mexican story of the Nativity (Morrow, 1984), she went to Mexico; for Louhi, Witch of North Farm, a Finnish tale retold by Toni de Gerez (Viking, 1986), she was off to Finland. But mainly she wrote and illustrated Miss Rumphius and the two other highly personal books, Island Boy and Hattie and the Wild Waves, that she referred to collectively as “my trilogy.”

The wonder is that it took this born storyteller and fine writer — see her Caldecott acceptance papers, the scratchboard piece — forty years of illustrating other people’s stories before she was ready to put words to paper again. She lacked confidence, she said. But it may also have helped that she was back in the Maine of her childhood at a time in life when looking backward comes naturally. It was a time in American life, too, when the urge toward personal retrospection was strong; Ox-Cart Man had its source in family legend. There is also the woman factor: the two dominant books in the trilogy are both about determined, creative women, like Cooney herself.

Potentially, Miss Rumphius is a snooze and a sermon — the long, undramatic life of a spinster librarian who, in her last years, makes the world beautiful by scattering lupine seeds. As Cooney pictures her — in words and in pictures — she’s Katharine Hepburn without attitude. The words are as good as the pictures. Little Alice Rumphius (who has a corolla of red hair) sits on the knee of her beloved painter grandfather in her sailor suit; when she grows up, she tells him, she too will go to faraway places and live by the sea. She must do a third thing, he says, she must make the world more beautiful; and she agrees, not knowing what that might be. “In the meantime Alice got up and washed her face and ate porridge for breakfast. She went to school and came home and did her homework.” New paragraph: “And pretty soon she was grown up.”

The narrator is a child, elderly Miss Rumphius’s great-niece, telling the story — partly as her great-aunt has told it to her, partly in her own droll way — to other children. The text is pithy, exquisitely paced, and consistently interesting. In composition and execution, the pictures are a leap and a bound beyond their counterparts in Ox-Cart Man. We are not looking at a scene, we are on the scene; Cooney has raised the sightline and let the forms bleed off the page. She has learned to draw architecture, like the Old Masters, to create multiple settings and points of interest. Her silhouetted forms have substance; her interior has light and air. She has achieved complexity without losing focus. The fashionable lady in the lower stacks, the two children on the heavenly second level, the tot in the nook beyond — all these claim interest, along with the newspaper reader, the trim young miss and her pug, the revolving bookstand, the stuffed animals…while only reinforcing the centrality of Miss Rumphius, in the picture and the library.

Her exotic, far-flung travel is complete in two magic Movieland scenes, with accompanying vignettes, that are at once spare and suggestive. There’s wit, too, in Miss Rumphius atop the mountain encouraging her male companion below — and then, on the opposite page, hurting her back getting off a camel. It’s time, maybe, to find her place by the sea.

The pages flow. The clean, spacious design — a collaboration between Cooney and Viking art director Barbara Hennessy — allows each small figure its gesture, then carries the eye onward. In full color, artist and designer have achieved the happy union with paper that was once the preserve of scratchboard and other linear techniques — a union more easily achieved, in paint, with transparent washes. Cooney, working in acrylic, had to adapt.

When Miss Rumphius is settled in her house by the sea, the picture expands onto the facing page, like the opening picture of the harbor her grandfather sailed into. And when she has become That Crazy Old Lady who scatters lupine seeds to the winds, we have a double-page spread — in the breezy spirit of a bygone New Yorker cover — that positions the reader along a lupine-lined lane to watch her approach.

Island Boy (Viking, 1988), the second book in Cooney’s trilogy, tells of a Maine family resolved to remain on their island, generation after generation, and hold off summer “rusticators.” It’s a slight, predictable work borne along by sincerity. Hattie and the Wild Waves (Viking, 1990), based on the childhood of Cooney’s mother, has a great deal of substance: it’s set firmly in the turn-of-the-century household of a prosperous, refined German-American family where Hattie and her brother and sister have a full life upstairs and downstairs at holiday celebrations and during summers at the seashore. It’s at the shore that Hattie, the family picture-maker, is inspired to become a painter; she persists through the society marriage of her sister, the business success of her brother, winters at the downtown Brooklyn hotel he builds (the historic Bossert), evenings of going to the opera with Mama and Papa — until, hearing a young performer “[sing] her heart out,” she takes the plunge and enters art school. The pictures are some of Cooney’s loosest and freshest: the scene of the children playing cards with the servants below-stairs has the rugged expressiveness of a genre painting; the scene aboard Papa’s “beautiful boat” gives a new, dramatic thrust to Cooney’s penchant for parallels. But Hattie and the Wild Waves remains family history pointed up, and social history by the by, where Miss Rumphius is legend.

Together the two books launched a new subgenre of pictorial life-portraits suited to “different” women and other out-of-the-way figures. Cooney herself wrote and illustrated a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, Eleanor (Viking, 1996) and illustrated a book about Emily Dickinson conceived in a Cooney-esque way, Michael Bedard’s Emily (Doubleday, 1992). The last book she illustrated, Mary Lyn Ray’s true-to-life story of a family of basket-weaving backcountry outcasts, Basket Moon (Little, Brown, 1999), is a departure for Cooney in subject and treatment — a somber tale with a violent, transforming climax.

Barbara Cooney died in March 2000, working away as if she would indeed, as she once said, live to be a hundred.

•   •   •

Barbara Cooney was almost uniquely a librarians’ illustrator. For the greater part of her career she illustrated quietly disarming books — like Lee Kingman’s The Best Christmas and Peter’s Long Walk — that lived full, rich lives in school and public libraries; and for the most part it was librarians (along with fellow artists) who admired and appreciated her work. Consciously or not, she gave back their love — our love — with Miss Rumphius. The child who grows up enterprising, adventurous, and romantic becomes a world-traveling librarian. Then, retired to her seaside cottage, she watches as the local children gather up lupines, her wild lupines, by the armful. To a children’s librarian, that’s a job description.

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