Milton Meltzer, 94

"That damned Horn Book"--the first words Milton Meltzer ever said to me, upon our mutual introduction fifteen years ago. Meltzer was ever-watchful of how the review journals were treating nonfiction books, a crusade begun by him in our pages more than thirty years ago. We commemorate the passing, on September 19th, of this omnivorously curious and immensely prolific writer with a profile of him written by Wendy Saul upon the occasion of Meltzer receiving the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award in 2001.

State Birds and Foods of Many Lands

In the most recent Booklist, Michael Cart wonders why "curriculum-related nonfiction" hasn't "migrated more or less completely to the Internet by now." Me, too: hardcover series books about countries of the world, mammals of Asia, rocks and minerals of the fifty states, etc. still proliferate like crazy, even though the information they contain is available all over the digital place. And with list prices averaging over twenty dollars per volume, they aren't cheap. And, for the many series entries that devote themselves to "current events," the information is often out of date before the book is published.

Why do schools and libraries keep buying them? Is it because book-based assignments are more manageable, or because a book feels more authoritative than the Internet? Lack of imagination? Fear? Laziness? To me, it feels like it all comes down to control, a favored emotion found in grownups dealing with the young. Series books promote the idea that they have things covered, you don't need to look anywhere else, that the things that are essential about, say, Nebraska, are the same things essential to Delaware. India, like Denmark, is "a land of contrasts." Everything you need to know is here, in a collection of books that look and sound the same on purpose. It's all under control.

Luckily, kids don't read this way!

So which is it?

Two books reviewed in the forthcoming issue of the Horn Book Guide:

From Bearport, Meish Goldish's Deadly Praying Mantis

From Lerner, Sandra Markle's Praying Mantises: Hungry Insect Heroes

Nothing* p.o.'d the late Zena Sutherland more than a nonfiction children's book ascribing virtue or venality to animals.

*Except maybe simultaneous translation in dialogue, as in "'Hola, Juan!' exclaimed the pretty teacher to the new brown-eyed and chubby-cheeked boy, 'Hello.'"

I like timetables, too.

Marc Aronson and I have been talking about Boys Books a lot, and about how boys can be confounded by adult definitions of what constitutes worthwhile reading: usually it means a book, often it means fiction, and when it does include nonfiction, it had better look a lot like a novel.

But I am loving this:


Transit Maps of the World: The World's First Collection of Every Urban Train Map on Earth, by Mark Ovenden (Penguin). Unless you are a boy, you might not think that a collection of subway maps would make for such compulsive reading. It's a kind of reading that often gets dismissed as "browsing," because you don't start at the beginning and work your way patiently through, and because most of the text works as caption, not exposition: "Barcelona's current Metro map (4) is a successful hybrid. While it shows some topographic detail, it manages to retain all the attributes of a schematic." Yeah, baby, talk dirty! But what you're mostly interested in reading is the maps themselves. There are four of the Barcelona system, ranging from 1966 to the present, showing not only the growth of the system but the refinements in graphic design, creating and reflecting changes in how we look at abstract information. The current map is an organized glory of lines and colors and informative dots. Berlin gets fifteen maps, from 1910 to the present, including spooky ones from the 1960s that show the "ghost" stations of East Berlin that the West Berlin trains would shoot right by.

If I were a boy today, I don't know if a collection of subway maps would do it for me, but I bet that I would appreciate the way this book celebrates Facts, especially facts united by a theme but untied to any story save the one they allow me to tell myself.