One more award

I was a member of the ALSC Distinguished Service Award committee this year, along with Cynthia Richey (chair, and a new friend), Joan Atkinson (an old YASD--yes, that old--buddy with whom it was great fun to work again), Peggy Sullivan (who I've known since library school), and Terry Borzumato-Greenberg (from Holiday House; the youngest person in the room but who I also feel I've known forever), and with great pleasure we selected Margaret (Maggie) Bush, professor emerita at the GSLIS of Simmons College, as the winner. I knew Maggie slightly before I came to the Horn Book in 1996, but once I was in Boston I realized she was the Zena of New England, sending generations of children's librarians out into the world to continue her good work. Congrats, Maggie!

Is It a Crime?

Drinks for anyone but Elizabeth who can identify the musical quoted in the title.

The Simmons program Crime and Misdemeanors is ending this morning with closing remarks from M.T. Anderson, and my responsibilities--save paper-grading--will be through. I've been twittering away from the back of the room, but it's difficult to convey the extravagant genius and delivery of a Jack Gantos in 140 words. (And something tells me that Mr. Tobin Big Words won't be any easier.) If you go to the HornBook feed (linked over there on the right) you can at least get a sense of who's been talking.

Yesterday I was on a panel with Vicky Smith (Kirkus) and Deborah Stevenson (BCCB) about reviewing; the best moment for me was when Deborah and I confessed to letting House in the Night slip by while Vicky quietly crowed that Kirkus had named it the best picture book of the year. What we neglected to get into is how incestuous this whole business is--I used to run BCCB, Vicky formerly reviewed for the Horn Book, Deborah taught the Simmons summer course the last time and has an article coming up in our November issue. It's a very small pond.

I'll try to get you some more moments from the Institute later this week but am off tomorrow for some kind of management retreat in Ohio. If they think I'm doing trust circles or paintball wars . . . .

School of the Air

I totally wanted to go to one of those. But here's your chance, if you feel like playing along with the class I'm teaching at the Simmons College Center for the Study of Children's Literature. The class begins today and is called Crimes and Misdemeanors, and it is something of a lead up to the Center's biannual Institute, which you can attend, and which will take place at Simmons July 24-26.

But if you're lonely in the outback, here's the reading list to keep you warm. Asterisks by the title indicate that the author will be appearing at the Institute.

Anderson, Laurie Halse, Chains, Simon and Schuster, 2008
*Anderson, M.T. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party
*Avi, Nothing but the Truth, pub? 1991
*Babbitt, Natalie, The Devil’s Storybook, Farrar, 1974`
*Balliett, Blue, Chasing Vermeer, Scholastic, 2004
Bannerman, Helen, The Story of Little Black Sambo, HarperCollins
*Brooks, Martha, Mistik Lake, Kroupa/FSG, 2007
*Cashore, Kristin, Graceling, Houghton, 2008
Cormier, Robert, The Chocolate War, Pantheon, 1974
Forbes, Esther, Johnny Tremain, Houghton, 1943
*Gantos, Jack, Hole in My Life, Farrar, 2002
*Gantos, Jack, Rotten Ralph books, Houghton and Farrar, various (read a few)
Harris, Robie, It’s Perfectly Normal, Candlewick, 19994, 2004
*Henkes, Kevin, Lilly’s Big Day, Greenwillow, 2006
*Henkes, Kevin, Olive’s Ocean, Greenwillow, 2003
*Hinds, Gareth, The Merchant of Venice, Candlewick, 2008
Lamb, Charles and Mary, “The Merchant of Venice” in Tales from Shakespeare
*Lawson, JonArno, Black Stars in a White Night Sky, Boyds Mills, 2008
*Levine, Ellen, Freedom’s Children: Young Civil Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories, Putnam, 2000
*Look, Lenore, Ruby Lu, Empress of Everything, Atheneum/Schwartz, 2006
Myers, Walter Dean, Monster, HarperCollins, 1999
*Nelson, Marilyn, The Freedom Business, Boyds Mills, 2008
Parnall, Peter, And Tango Makes Three, Simon and Schuster, 2005
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Levine/Scholastic, 1998
*Silvey, Anita. “Has the Newbery Lost Its Way?” School Library Journal, October, 2008
Von Ziegesar, Cecily, Gossip Girl, Little, Brown, 2002

Can I borrow your notes?

Monday catch-up

--Claire has a new booklist of fairy tales up on our site.

--Cynsations interviews my pal Cathie Mercier, director of the terrific Simmons College Center for the Study of Children's Literature, which includes among its founders Horn Book editors Paul and Ethel Heins, and for which I will be leading a seminar next summer.

--Mother Reader offers sixty-some suggestions for book-allied presents, like pairing a copy of Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek with a set of Lincoln Logs. If Santa is listening, I'll take a copy of A Little Princess coupled with a secret midnight feast delivered by a dark and handsome stranger.

Frontlist becoming backlist

Hearing Norma Jean Sawicki talk (see Tuesday's entry) about the massive debt behind the publishing industry's mergers and acquisitions made me feel much better about my Visa bill. It also made me think about how much more company is on top of what I personally see at most houses--I might know the editor in chief, the children's publisher, occasionally that publisher's boss, but most often a company goes up up and away into corporate dimensions we just don't see on the ground. Norma Jean and I had a good time talking about what that can mean for which books get published how.

The question that only came to me today is about how much frontlist becomes backlist, and how long it stays there. For example, what percentage of, say, juvenile hardcover fiction published five years ago is still in print? Ten years ago? What percentage of first-novelists get a second crack, and has this figure changed? When I look at the piles of new novels rolling in, I wonder how long an attention span any one of them can command. I worry about those forlorn first-in-a-projected-but-abandoned-trilogy books, their characters left at the breath of the Fire Dragon or in the mouth of the Imponderable Cave. How many books disappear, and how quickly? This is not to say that many of them shouldn't, and not soon enough, but have our expectations of a "normal" literary lifespan changed?

We Were There

Does anyone remember the We Were There books? There were two I read over and over: We Were There at Pearl Harbor and We Were There at Guadalcanal. I would have been reading them around 1964, roughly twenty-five years after the events in the books took place, which seemed to me like forever ago.

I'm thinking of them because tomorrow I'm talking to Norma Jean Sawicki's publishing class at Simmons; my topic, the last twenty-five years of children's book publishing. I was there. How weird. Now I know why Betsy Hearne was once initially resistant to giving the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction to a book set during WWII. She was there, so it didn't feel like history to her.

Hungry?

Then get on over here for information about Simmons College's Center for the Study of Children's Literature's 2007 Summer Institute, Food, Glorious Food, held July 26-29. I've participated in several of these events and they are always enlightening, spirited, and impeccably managed. PLUS: Susan Bloom, Professor Emerita of the Center and I believe still mistress of the Institute, is one fabulous hostess and chef, and you know, given the theme, that she will be forced to outdo herself. So come for Alice Hoffman and stay for the cupcakes.

For those with more than a weekend's time on their hands, Deborah Stevenson, editor of the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, will be leading the summer graduate-credit course that leads up to the Institute. Deborah is the smartest person I have ever known, and the fact that she will always be two steps ahead of your question before you've even asked it should not deter you from taking this class. She's as funny as she is formidable, too.

One more point re food, children's literature, and Deborah. When we worked together at BCCB, Deborah figured out exactly what kind of book I liked to read while eating my lunch. I would hear her call "lunch book!" while waving a galley at me from across the office. I was thinking about this last week while watching a Law & Order re-run and eating pretzels. It was a good episode, and one I hadn't seen before (murder among Iraqi emigre caviar dealers), but as soon as I ran out of pretzels, I ran out of interest, too. It's the same with lunch books: they are books I can read only when I'm eating. As soon as I'm done eating, whammo, I'm done reading. It happened recently with a new Alias-knockoff teen paperback original. I guess it has to do with how much attention a book requires, and it explains why people who watch TV get fat--there's nothing on that would get between me and my food.