As someone who occasionally needs to ask Warne for permission to use Potter images in my talks — and as a long-time member of the Beatrix Potter Society, which relies on close ties with Warne — I was a bit worried about our publishing this article. Given the harsh truths that Frasier reveals, what might it mean for that symbiotic relationship? But as soon as I read the piece in full it became clear that we had to publish it. Thank you, Caroline!

Emma Thompson’s new Peter Rabbit adventure next to Beatrix Potter’s original.

We wanted to post some Potter-related articles for you, but the most recent, “London Sketches” (November/December 2011 Horn Book Magazine), won’t be available online because while we DID get permission to reproduce the images in the article, we are only allowed to use them in the print version. (Note that you can buy the print issue via this page or look for it in your library.)

What we were able to put up is “Beatrix and Bertha,” my 2006 piece on the friendship between Beatrix Potter and Horn Book’s founder Bertha Mahony Miller. If you want even more and don’t mind doing some spelunking, there’s even more here on our archived site.

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1. Water in the Park is all about observation. What’s your favorite place to people- and animal-watch?

EJ: I live in Brooklyn and am fascinated by the huge variety of people in the city — people from all over the world — and by the texture and rhythms of the street life in my neighborhood. I wrote about it in Lemonade in Winter: A Book About Two Kids Counting Money (Schwartz & Wade/Random, 4–7 years) and the Invisible Inkling series (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins, 5–8 years) as well as in Water in the Park. The feeling of the neighborhood is very fundamentally American in that it’s the proverbial melting pot in action. People are mixed, racially and culturally and economically and spiritually, but we all go to the same park and the same corner shop, you know? It’s thrilling.

My own stoop is my favorite place to people- and animal-watch. There’s a woman who shelters all these rescue dogs down the block, and an aged greyhound with a perpetually bandaged hind leg. Also an enormous fluffy dog with a brown head that looks transplanted onto its white body. There’s a veteran who sweeps his walk in a haze of illegal-smelling smoke, a noisy French-speaking family, and an old lady who puts her Agatha Christie novels out on the street for people to take when she’s done with them.

2. How closely do you work with your illustrators? Did anything about Stephanie Graegin’s pictures for Water in the Park surprise you?

EJ: Sometimes I get to see sketches and dummies before a project goes to final art, and sometimes I don’t. As I’ve gotten to know certain illustrators, projects have come from a desire to work together. Small, Medium, Large: A Book About Relative Sizes (Star Bright, 3–5 years) was a book Tomek Bogacki and I put together ourselves. Paul O. Zelinsky and I are doing a Toys Go Out picture book that originated in some conversations we had while on tour.

With Stephanie Graegin, I didn’t see the work until it was completely finished, but I was freaking ecstatic with everything she did, especially the way she threaded characters and little narratives through a story that hardly identifies anyone but the dogs by name. There are so many personalities and little dramas on her pages. And she draws awesome babies.

3. Your book What Happens on Wednesdays, illustrated by Lauren Castillo (Farrar, 4–7 years), also deals with time and the progression of the day. Do you have daily routines or rituals?

EJ: I love community rituals that involve large meals and a million kids running around like lunatics, jacked up on sugar. Hanukkah parties, birthdays, Sunday dinners, I’’m your person. Then I declare myself exhausted and want to see nobody for weeks. As for daily rituals, I think I am more of an observer of how those rituals are important to children, and what they mean in the fabric of a family or neighborhood.

4. The pets in your books, such as Mr. Fluffynut and Little Nonny from Water in the Park and FudgeFudge and Marshmallow from That New Animal (Foster/Farrar, 4–7 years), have fantastic names. What’s the best pet name you haven’t used yet?

EJ: Thank you. The nefarious kitten Pumpkinfacehead in Toys Come Home (Schwartz & Wade/Random, 5–8 years) was just a typo that made me laugh, but the others I chose quite deliberately. Perhaps I should now push my imagination in another direction. I love that the tiger in Life of Pi is called Richard Parker. So: maybe a guinea pig called Louisa May Alcott. That makes me smile.

5. You’ve written picture book reviews for various publications. How does reviewing other people’s work inform your own creative process?

EJ: It forces me to think carefully about what I value in picture books, and about the relation of text and image. It helps me remember to leave room for an artist to fully illustrate my books. I don’t want the text to do all the work. Or even most of it. There needs to be room for pictures.

From the May 2013 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

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The Edward Gorey House’s 2013 special exhibit “Edward Gorey’s Vinegar Works” opened for their 2013 season on April 18th. The exhibit covers the “three volumes of moral instruction” in Gorey’s Vinegar Works boxed set: The Insect God, The West Wing, and his best-known work, The Gashlycrumb Tinies.

Renowned author/illustrator Peter Sís will give the 2013 Barbara Elleman Research Library Lecture (titled “Walls and Bridges…Books With Wings”) on Saturday, May 4th, at the Carle Museum at 2:30 pm. This annual lecture series is “designed to feature the country’s preeminent scholars, book collectors, researchers, editors, authors, and illustrators in the field of children’s literature.” The event is free with museum admission and will be followed by a reception and book signing. A luncheon with Mr. Sís prior to the lecture is sold out, but the museum is accepting names for a waiting list; call 413-658-1126 to be added.

On Tuesday, May 7th, children’s literature critic and former Horn Book editor in chief Anita Silvey will host an in-store book fair at Porter Square Books. The event, a benefit for the Foundation for Children’s Books, begins at 6:00 pm.

Author Mac Barnett and illustrator Jon Klassen will discuss their Caldecott Honor book (and BGHB 2012 Picture Book Award winner) Extra Yarn at the Carle Museum on Saturday, May 11th. The event begins at 2:00 pm and will include a book signing; it’s free with museum admission.

Annual national Children’s Book Week takes place May 13th through May 19th. For a nationwide event schedule, Children’s Choice Book Award voting, and the gorgeous promotional poster (illustrated by Brian Selznick) and bookmark (illustrated by Grace Lin), see the official Book Week website.

On Monday, May 13th, YA author Sara Zarr will speak and sign books at the Brookline Public Library main branch at 3:00 pm. The free event celebrates her latest novel, The Lucy Variations.

Wellesley Booksmith’s baseball-themed “double header” book event at 4:00 pm on Tuesday, May 14th, will feature Matt Tavares (Becoming Babe Ruth) and David Kelly (The Ballpark Mysteries). Ballpark snacks will be provided, and kids who come dressed in baseball uniforms or memorabilia will be entered to win a baseball signed by the authors.

On Thursday, May 16th, Ayanna Coleman will moderate a panel on “Diversity on the Page, Behind the Pencil, and in the Office,” co-hosted by Charlesbridge and Children’s Book Council Diversity Committee. Panelists include author Mitali Perkins, illustrator London Ladd, and editors from Boston-based publishers Charlesbridge, Candlewick, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The event will be held at 6:00 at Charlesbridge’s Illustration Gallery in Watertown. The panel is free, but space is limited, so please pre-register online.

Barbara Elleman will lead a gallery tour of the exhibit “The Caldecott Medal: 75 Years of Distinguished Illustration” at the Carle Museum on Saturday, May 18th, at 8:00 pm. The exhibit features “high quality prints drawn from more than 30 Caldecott Medal books.” Following the tour, author Lawrence Webster will discuss and sign her book Under the North Light: The Life and Work of Maud and Miska Petersham, a biography of the Caldecott-winning couple. The tour and presentation are free with museum admission.

Illustrator Raúl Colón will give a lecture entitled “Art is a Mind Game” at the Carle Museum on Saturday, May 18th, at 12:00 pm. The lecture will be followed by a book signing and is free with museum admission.

Authors Cal Armistead, Scott Blagden, Jack D. Ferraiolo, and Joe Lawlor will present a panel called “So You Want to Write a Book…” for young writers in grades K–12 at Wellesley Booksmith on Saturday, May 18th, at 4:00 pm. Attendees can bring a single double-spaced page of original writing to receive feedback from one of the panelists. The panel is free; please RSVP to kidevents@wellesleybooks.com.

On Wednesday, May 29th, at 7:00 pm at the Brookline Booksmith, Michelle Tea will have a book launch event for her first YA novel, the “modern-day fairy tale” A Mermaid in Chelsea Creek. Ali Liebegott, author of adult book Cha-Ching!, will join her.

Attending or hosting another children’s lit–related event in the greater Boston area this month? Please let us know in the comments!

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1. Possible spoiler alert: At what point in the series did you think up this book’s Big Reveal (re: Jeffrey)?

Jeanne Birdsall: And how do I answer that without giving anything away? Here goes. While I was writing the first book I knew this would happen in a future book, but it wasn’t until I was writing the second book that I knew it would happen in this particular book, the third.

2. Is love in the cards for Aunt Claire? Or did I read too much into her friendship with Turron?

JB: No, you didn’t read too much into that friendship. Thanks for noticing. Was it the jigsaw puzzles of romantic places?

By the time Turron leaves Point Mouette he’s determined to see Aunt Claire again, and she’s hoping he’ll follow through. I can’t tell you any more than that. All will be revealed in the next book.

3. Your pastoral settings — in this case coastal Maine — are always so vividly described. How much is real and how much invented?

JB: My settings are a hodgepodge of real, imaginary, and (sometimes) places I’ve read about. (Arundel, the setting for the first book, borrowed a little of E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle.) Point Mouette started out as a real place called Ocean Point, near Boothbay Harbor in Maine. I found it through dumb luck, seized on the little private beach and the long dock, then began to add and subtract. The golf course was an invention, and the pinewood came from ancient memories of my Girl Scout camp in Pennsylvania. I was forced to subtract a flying blue bug that I just couldn’t work into the story and a beautiful stone chapel I was dying to use. But I couldn’t have Dominic skateboarding on hallowed ground.

 4. Is there one Penderwick sister to whom you feel the greatest connection? Has that changed as the books have progressed?

JB: I go back and forth between Skye and Batty, depending on which of them is struggling the most. (I connect with struggle.) Batty had a relatively easy time of it at Point Mouette, but Skye…didn’t. So right now I’m still feeling pretty Skye-ish. As I get deeper into the fourth book I’ll reconnect with Batty, who has lots to work out in that one.

5. Each of the books is a satisfying stand-alone while also being very much part of a whole. Can you share clues about further Penderwick adventures?

JB: The fourth, which I’m working on now, will take place five-and-a-half years after the end of the third book, which means that the three older sisters will be teenagers. However, to keep the book middle grade, everything that happens will be seen through the eyes of Batty and Ben, who will be eleven and eight respectively. Thus, two writing challenges: to portray the life of teenagers without getting inside their minds and to channel an eight-year-old boy, which I certainly never was. Challenges aside, it’s going to be fun to write about Rosalind, Skye, and Jane as teenagers. Jane will finally get her hands on all the books she hasn’t been allowed to read all these years, including Proust, which she’s reading (slowly) in the original French.

From the June 2011 issue of Notes from the Horn Book. For more on Notes — and to sign up — click here.

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It’s a special honor to speak with adults who are as committed as I am to bringing books and children together. I am a mother and have been a daycare provider and a middle-school teacher…and I can tell you that the most magical moments I have experienced with children have been with books.

We all know how critical books are to the development of reading in a child. A good book and the joy it provides is often the reason a child is motivated to become a reader in the first place. Language is fun. Imagination is fun. And when a child experiences the joy of reading with a childcare provider or teacher, he or she is encouraged to take that next step and become a reader. And we all know that readers thrive, while non-readers fall behind in this world of the written word.

However, what I really want to remind you of is this: when you read with a child, you are doing so much more than teaching him to read or instilling in her a love of language. You are doing a much more powerful thing, and it is something that we are losing, as a culture. By reading with a child, you are teaching that child to be human. When you open a book, and share your voice and imagination with a child, that child learns to see the world through someone else’s eyes. I will go further and say that that child learns to feel the world more deeply, and the child becomes more aware of himself and others in a way that he simply cannot experience except in your lap, or in your classroom, or in your reading circle.

When we read books with children, we share other worlds, yes, but more importantly, we share ourselves. Reading with children makes an intimate, human connection that teaches that child what it means to be alive as one of many live beings on the planet. We are teaching empathy. We are naming feelings, expressing experience, and demonstrating love and understanding…all in a safe environment. When we read a book with children, then children – no matter how stressed, no matter how challenged – are drawn out of themselves to bond with other human beings, and to see and feel the experiences of others.

I believe it is that moment that makes us human. In this sense, reading makes us human.

The world can be a scary place. It can be a scary place for adults, but it is often worse for children. Children experience homelessness, hunger, abuse, and neglect. They can’t get in a car and leave a situation that they find challenging or displeasing. They can’t choose their own lifestyles. Children have very little control over their own lives. Children have to go where they are told and do what they are told to do, often with no apparent justification. They feel powerless. And the truth is, they often are powerless.

So, how do we help those small, often powerless people to grow up to feel strong and confident in this crazy world? How are our children going to feel safe? This happens when we teach children to love themselves, and to understand that there are other people who love them, too. Children need to feel that they are part of a loving, empathetic unit.

A child with a strong emotional center doesn’t hurt other children. It is the damaged child, the wounded child, who lashes out. And a damaged, wounded child grows to be a damaged, wounded adult unless he learns to soothe himself and feel safe in this world.

There are people on the planet who are incapable of empathy. But for most of us, empathy is learned. We learn it as children. Empathy is what keeps us from hurting each other on the playground, from cutting each other off on the highway, and from committing acts of terror and horror on other human beings. When we understand what makes us function, we can understand other people. When we understand that no matter how badly we feel, someone else may be feeling badly, too, we are able to step back and care for others. That is what living in a society is all about.

So, you are saying to yourselves: that’s a big job! And yes, it is. We teachers and caregivers can’t do all of it; parents have to do it, too. Society must also do it. But we can do our part, and here’s a really good way to go about it:

Sit down, put a child on your lap, and read a story. Have fun. Read in character. Use funny voices. Ask questions. Laugh and cry. Be human and be strong, and that will allow the children in your care to be human and be strong. And, they will also learn how to read.

Thank you.

This speech was delivered at the Fostering Lifelong Learners conference held on April 25, 2013 at the Cambridge Public Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For more from the conference, click here.

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There are now in Europe about ten thousand public and private vehicles that are self-moving. They are usually called “automobiles.”. . . It is thought that there are now about three hundred such vehicles in this country. The automobile is the coming vehicle. We shall see it in all our cities and along our country roads. They are safe, fast, comfortable, and to use and ride in one is a pleasure we all want to enjoy. . . . We may imagine the child of the twentieth century saying: “Good-by, Mr. Horse! . . . We thank you for all you have done for us. Go back to your farm and live in peace and comfort. Do the work you can do, and please don’t feel offended if we prefer to go to ride without you.”

Those prophetic remarks are from an article titled “The Automobile: Its Present and Its Future” by a writer named Charles Barnard. It appeared in the March 1900 issue of St. Nicholas magazine, the best-known and most respected children’s periodical at the turn of the century.

St. Nicholas was directed toward children ages six and up, but its articles and stories made few concessions to the slower reader. The type size used was small, and the vocabulary — like that in the above excerpt — was by no means limited to simple words. In this, it was typical of the books that were written and published for children in the early years of the twentieth century. Although a few big-city libraries had children’s rooms by this time, no book publisher as yet had established a separate children’s book department. If a manuscript for children came into the house, it was processed by an adult editor, and many books became children’s favorites almost by accident.

The Macmillan Company was the first to launch, in 1918, a department devoted exclusively to the publication of books for children. Heading the department was Louise Seaman, who had previously done publicity on adult books for Macmillan. Before that, Seaman had taught in a progressive school, so she knew how curious children were about the world around them and how things worked. From the start, her list at Macmillan included a wide assortment of informational books. Among them were such titles as Buried Cities by Jennie Hall, Girls in Africa by Erick Berry, and Men at Work, written and illustrated by the eminent photographer Lewis Hine. Seaman’s list reflected her belief that “there is a poetry in jet planes and space ships and atoms.”

Recognizing a new market, many other publishers founded children’s book departments in the 1920s and 1930s. But none of these departments published the nonfiction book that won the first Newbery Medal in 1922: The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon. This title was issued by Horace Liveright, an adult book publisher.

One of the strongest supporters of van Loon’s book was the influential head of children’s services at the New York Public Library, Anne Carroll Moore. In fact, she had been actively involved in its development, for van Loon had shown her his manuscript chapter by chapter as he was writing it. Later Miss Moore commented, “No boy is likely to skip . . . a single chapter of a history which makes the world he lives in seem so spacious, so teeming with human interest.” (She probably singled out boys for special attention because — then, as now — they were often viewed as reluctant readers.)

Today, it’s hard to believe that any young person, male or female, would respond excitedly to van Loon’s five-hundred-page tome. The author’s enthusiasm for his subject can be infectious, and his line drawings — which appear on almost every page — are charming. But other aspects of the book strike a contemporary reader as old-fashioned, if not hopelessly dated. This excerpt from the foreword provides a good example of van Loon’s writing style:

History is the mighty Tower of Experience, which Time has built amidst the endless fields of bygone ages. It is no easy task to reach the top of this ancient structure and get the benefit of the full view. There is no elevator, but young feet are strong and it can be done.

In structuring the book, van Loon follows the standard historical route of his day. He begins the chronicle with Prehistoric Man, then moves on to Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Dark Ages in Western Europe, and the Renaissance, and he concludes with the modern era. There is nothing in the book about the history of Africa, and the coverage of Asian civilizations is limited to just ten pages on Confucius and Buddha.

Most surprising of all, for a book of this scope, the original edition contains a “Historical Reading List” at the back, but no index. How did young readers of the 1920s, and later, use the book for research?

The Story of Mankind may have been awarded the first Newbery Medal, but it certainly didn’t start a trend. In the years since 1922, only five other informational books have won the Newbery. And none of them is a history; instead, all five are biographies. The winning titles are: Invincible Louisa, the life of Louisa May Alcott, by Cornelia Meigs (1934); Daniel Boone by James Daugherty (1940); Amos Fortune, Free Man by Elizabeth Yates (1951); Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham (1956); and Lincoln: A Photobiography by Russell Freedman (1988). It’s interesting to note that the five subjects of these biographies were all Americans, and only one of them was a woman.

Children’s nonfiction fared better when it came to the selection of Newbery Honor Books. There have been thirty of those over the years, eighteen of them biographies (including two of George Washington). But the scope of subject matter treated in the Honor Books has gradually broadened. In 1951, Jeanette Eaton’s Gandhi: Fighter without a Sword became the first biography of a non- Western figure to be awarded a Newbery Honor. Science writing received overdue recognition when Katherine Shippen’s Men, Microscopes, and Living Things made the Honors list in 1956. And a book of African-American history entered the winners’ circle for the first time in 1969 when the Newbery committee awarded an Honor to Julius Lester’s groundbreaking work, To Be a Slave.

Looking back at the biographies that have won Newbery Medals or Honors brings up a question that has often been raised but never entirely resolved. Should biographies include fictionalized scenes and dialogue in order to interest young readers, or should they hew strictly to the facts?

Author Jean Lee Latham made no bones about where she stood on the matter. In her Newbery acceptance speech for Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, she frankly described her winning book as “fictionized biography.” And as late as 1981, when the sixth edition of Children and Books by Zena Sutherland and May Hill Arbuthnot appeared, that Bible of children’s literature endorsed Latham’s approach: “Perhaps fictionalized biography is the best pattern of biography for young people,” the authors wrote. “There is no doubt that dialogue based on facts, written by a scholar and an artist, brings history to life and re-creates living, breathing heroes, who make a deep impression on children.”

A series of juvenile biographies launched in 1932 had helped to create a climate of acceptance for the fictionalized approach. The Childhood of Famous Americans series enjoyed great popularity in the thirties and for many decades after that. A typical biography in the series was Ethel Barrymore: Girl Actress by Shirlee P. Newman, published in 1966. The copy on the jacket flap calls the book a story, not a biography, and the text bears out that description. It is written almost entirely in dialogue, in short, fastmoving paragraphs. Here’s a sample passage:

Tumbling off the bed, Lionel and Ethel threw their arms about their grandmother’s knees. “Is it time to go, Mummum?” Ethel cried, using her grandmother’s pet name. “Is it time to go and see Mama and Papa on the stage?” “It will soon be time.” Mummum leaned down and hugged them close. Then she pushed them away gently, and smoothed her long skirts. “Are you going to the theater like that, Ethel? What would the newspaper say?” Mrs. Drew held a make-believe newspaper in the air. “Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” she pretended to read. “Ethel Barrymore, daughter of actors Maurice Barrymore and Georgia Drew Barrymore, went to the theater last night in a long, pink nightie.”

In accordance with the series title, the majority of the book focuses on the subject’s childhood. One hundred and seventy-six of the book’s two hundred pages take the reader up only to Ethel’s stage debut at age fourteen in a play with her grandmother. The rest of the actress’s life is crammed into the next fifteen pages, and the book ends with Ethel’s seventieth birthday celebration, ten years before her death at eighty in 1959.

Stopping before the end of the subject’s life was common in children’s biographies of an earlier time. For example, in Abraham Lincoln, the picture-book biography by Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire that won the Caldecott Medal in 1940, there is no mention of Lincoln’s assassination. On the book’s last page, the president simply sits down to rest in his rocking chair following the end of the Civil War. Such endings were an attempt — which many today would call misguided — to shield young readers from the harsher realities of life and give them a happy ending, no matter what the truth.

Attitudes toward fictionalization had changed dramatically by the late 1980s. Jean Fritz, noted for her lively young biographies of the Founding Fathers, has written: “Once a biographer has collected the facts, it is not a matter of coaxing up a story; it is a question of perceiving the story line that is already there. . . . I need as much evidence as I can get, for I do not invent.”

Russell Freedman, in his Newbery acceptance speech for Lincoln, took an even stronger stand in favor of sticking to the facts and avoiding any sort of dramatization. “Many current biographies for children adhere as closely to documented evidence as any scholarly work,” he said. “And the best of them manage to do so without becoming tedious or abstract or any less exciting than the most imaginative fictionalization.”

Later, referring specifically to Lincoln, Freedman added, “It certainly wasn’t necessary to embellish the events of his life with imaginary scenes and dialogue. Lincoln didn’t need a speech writer in his own time, and he doesn’t need one now.”

I’d venture to say that most writers of biographies for children today — as well as the majority of librarians and teachers who evaluate the books for purchase — would agree with Freedman’s position. As I’ve learned myself from writing biographies, the use of excerpts from a subject’s letters, diaries, speeches, and interviews can give young readers a much clearer impression of his or her personality than any invented dialogue possibly could.

Along with the move away from fictionalization in the 1980s, children’s book reviewers (most notably Hazel Rochman in a Booklist editorial) began to demand that nonfiction authors provide detailed notes on their sources — not just in biographies but in all types of informational books. Some authors resisted, claiming that long lists of sources would put off young readers. But by the 1990s most nonfiction titles included not just source notes but glossaries, tables of important dates, suggestions for further reading, and other kinds of supplementary material. And unlike The Story of Mankind, all informational books, even those for the picture-book age, were now expected to have an index.

The new emphasis on accuracy and completeness was only one of the trends that swept through the children’s nonfiction field in the latter part of the century. After the Soviet Union rocketed a satellite, Sputnik, into space in the fall of 1957, Congress responded by passing the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Among other things, the act provided funds for the purchase of science books by school libraries. This led publishers large and small to initiate new series of science books for all age levels. Among the most creative was the Let’s Read and Find Out series, launched by Thomas Y. Crowell in 1960.

Aimed at youngsters in kindergarten through second grade, this series was in many ways the nonfiction counterpart to Harper’s I Can Read series. It combined the work of such outstanding science writers as Franklyn Branley and Paul Showers with the illustrations of topflight artists such as Aliki, Ed Emberley, Nonny Hogrogian, and Paul Galdone. The result was a line of books that combined solid information with lively, colorful graphics, books that entertained young readers even as they educated them.

Before the Let’s Read and Find Out series came along, many nonfiction authors and editors thought the best way to interest youngsters in science was to surround the facts with a fictional framework. The result was the publication of countless books with titles like “Johnny and Janey Visit a Sewage Disposal Plant.” The Let’s Read and Find Out series and others like it put an end to this particular brand of nonfiction hybrid, which usually succeeded neither as fiction nor as nonfiction. But it surfaced again in a fresh and imaginative way with author Joanna Cole and illustrator Bruce Degen’s Magic School Bus series, proving that even an outworn approach can be given new vitality by the right author.

Increased support for school libraries came as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” program of 1964. This new financing benefited all types of children’s books, but nonfiction — and not just science nonfiction — got a large slice of the pie. The Great Society coincided with the rise of the civil rights movement in the United States. The latter movement, in turn, spawned a new interest in black history and the heroic men and women who had played active parts in it. Once again, Crowell led the way with a series of young biographies about prominent figures Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, and Paul Robeson, written by well-known black authors such as Alice Walker, June Jordan, and Eloise Greenfield.

As federal funds for libraries dwindled in the 1970s and 1980s, children’s book publishers shifted their focus to the bookstore market. To attract consumers, picture books became more colorful and juvenile nonfiction more visual. Some of the new nonfiction titles, like David Macaulay’s imaginative books about construction techniques, Cathedral, City, and Pyramid, were illustrated with detailed drawings. But most of the nonfiction books that caught people’s eyes in the 1970s were produced on heavy, high-grade paper and illustrated with top-quality black-and-white or full-color photographs. So many of these photo-illustrated books were published that they soon acquired a generic name: the photo-essay.

The name might be new, but photo-illustrated fact books had occupied a small but significant niche in children’s literature for many years. Florence Fitch’s One God: The Ways We Worship Him (1944) made effective use of photographs to portray the rituals of the major religions in America. Discovering Design by Marion Downer (1947) introduced children to the similar patterns found in nature and in art. What’s Inside? by May Garelick (1955) depicted the gradual emergence of a gosling from its egg.

The genre came into its own, though, with the publication of such photo-essays of the 1970s as Small Worlds Close Up by Lisa Grillone and Joseph Gennaro, The Hospital Book by James Howe, with photographs by Mal Warshaw, and Journey to the Planets by Patricia Lauber. Books such as these attracted readers with their inviting design layouts and dramatic photographs, then held the reader’s attention with tightly written and sharply focused texts, laced with carefully chosen anecdotes.

The trend toward more visual nonfiction books grew and spread in the 1980s. No longer was it confined to books for younger children; now it extended to books for the elementary and middle school grades. Many of the books were illustrated with contemporary pictures; others, such as Russell Freedman’s Children of the Wild West, with archival photographs. In some cases, such as the popular Dorling Kindersley series on everything from ancient Rome to whales, the visual concepts came first and the texts of the books were often little more than captions.

Planning the illustration approach and researching the pictures became an important part of the nonfiction writer’s job, as I discovered when I was working on Charles A. Lindbergh: A Human Hero. The search for photos to illuminate the airman’s life took me from the Air and Space Museum in Washington to the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul (repository of Lindbergh’s boyhood photo albums) to the backroom file cabinets of the Corbis-Bettman agency in New York City. Picture research can be an expensive proposition for the author. Most publishers build an illustration allowance into the contract for the book, but many authors exhaust it and end up digging into their own pockets in order to secure the best possible pictures for their books.

As children’s nonfiction was becoming more attractive, it was gathering more serious critical attention. Milton Meltzer’s article “Where Do All the Prizes Go?: The Case for Nonfiction” (February 1976 Horn Book) helped pave the way. In its wake, new awards were established to honor the creators of nonfiction: The Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Nonfiction; The Golden Kite Award for Nonfiction, given by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators; and the Orbis Pictus Award, presented by the National Council of Teachers of English. The Washington Post-Children’s Book Guild Award, established in 1977, honors a nonfiction writer for his or her body of work.

Newbery Award committees also showed an increased interest in nonfiction — especially the new brand of illustrated nonfiction. After singling out only one nonfiction title as a Newbery Honor Book in the entire decade of the 1970s, the committees of the 1980s chose three in quick succession: Sugaring Time by Kathryn Lasky and Christopher Knight in 1983, Commodore Perry in the Land of the Shogun by Rhoda Blumberg in 1986, and Volcano: The Eruption and Healing of Mount St. Helens by Patricia Lauber in 1987. These were immediately followed by the 1988 Newbery Medal for Russell Freedman’s Lincoln. It was the first time a nonfiction book had won the coveted Newbery since 1956, thirty-two years earlier.

After two decades of innovation in the children’s nonfiction field, the 1990s were largely a time of consolidation. Publishers brought out a number of fine books, but there were no striking new departures in terms of content or form. Russell Freedman received Newbery Honors for two more biographies, The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane in 1992 and Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery in 1994; and in 1996 Jim Murphy was given an Honor for The Great Fire, about the disastrous Chicago fire of 1871. But no informational book of the nineties was awarded the Newbery Medal itself.

All three nineties Honor winners reflected the high standards of design and illustration that had been established for children’s nonfiction in the previous decade. As more and more titles appeared in oversize formats with striking photographs or colorful paintings as illustrations, the traditional boundaries between age groups broke down. No longer did children in the upper elementary and middle school grades reject picture-book nonfiction as “babyish.” Heavily illustrated titles such as Diane Stanley’s biographies of Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, and Leonardo da Vinci; Seymour Simon’s spectacular books about the planets; and my own picture book biographies of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson found as much acceptance from sixth graders as they did from third graders.

There are several possible explanations for this change in attitude. The most obvious is that young people today, accustomed to getting so much of their information from television and the Internet, want the same sort of emphasis on the visual in their books. A second theory is less positive. It suggests that the many youngsters who are not able to read at their own grade level may be drawn to the brief texts in nonfiction picture books, finding them easier to grasp. Whatever the explanation, it seems clear that the trend toward nonfiction picture books for older children will extend into the new millennium.

Another trend that’s likely to endure is the willingness to discuss hitherto taboo topics in children’s informational books. In recent years, nonfiction writers have explored in a frank, thoroughgoing manner such subjects as child abuse, teenage sex and pregnancy, abortion, homosexuality, and substance abuse — despite lingering opposition from groups of various stripes who believe that such books are unsuitable for children and young adults.

I was made vividly aware of this situation a few years ago when I was asked by a Texas school librarian what project I was currently working on. I told her about the book that eventually became When Plague Strikes, a comparative study of three deadly diseases, the Black Death, smallpox, and AIDS. “Oh, good,” the librarian said. “I’ll probably be able to purchase that book for my library because you put AIDS in the context of those other diseases. Given the strong feelings in my community, I couldn’t buy a book about AIDS alone.”

Despite such hurdles, I’m convinced that nonfiction writers will continue to explore controversial subject matter in the twenty-first century. Sensitively handled, these explorations can be an effective counterbalance to all the exploitative programming that is readily available to young people today via television and the Internet. If the opponents of so-called “unsuitable” books could be made to realize this, they might end up embracing the very books they’re now trying so hard to ban.

Another issue under discussion as the new century begins is the long-range impact the Internet will have on book publishing generally, and children’s nonfiction in particular. There are those who claim that the book as we know it cannot survive, and that young people in the future will receive all the information they need from one form of electronic transmission or another, including electronic books. I find this hard to believe, remembering when, not so long ago, various experts predicted that television would soon replace the book.

In fact, television in many instances has whetted the public’s appetite for informational books. One librarian after another has told me that when a television program focuses on a particular subject — say a National Geographic special on elephants — libraries experience a run on books about elephants in the weeks that follow. I have a hunch that something similar may happen in the case of the Internet. After obtaining a summary of the desired information on a screen, the young person will turn to a book for a more in-depth treatment of the subject — a book that does not require an electrical outlet or battery to operate, and that can be transported easily to any place the young person wants to sit and read it.

I began this essay with an excerpt from an article about the automobile that appeared in a 1900 issue of St. Nicholas; I’ll end with an excerpt from another article about the automobile, “A Hundred Years of Wheels and Wings” by Jim Murphy. (The latter appears in my recently published anthology of pieces by various authors, The Century That Was: Reflections on the Last One Hundred Years [Atheneum]).

Like its predecessor, Murphy’s article is filled with intriguing facts and is written in the sort of clear, lively style that has always marked the best informational writing for children. The piece is framed with an account of the doings of an actual Connecticut farmer. Here is how it begins:

In the spring of 1901, Connecticut farmer Abel Hendron hitched his team of horses to the wagon and began the 7.5 mile journey to town to pick up a plow ordered in February. Ordinarily, it could take him anywhere from two to four hours to reach town and come home, not counting stops he mightmake along the way to chat with neighbors . . . .

And here is how the piece ends, some sixteen pages later:

If Abel Hendron took a ride to town today, he would probably drive a pickup truck or an off-road four-wheel-drive vehicle. Few things would slow his drive, certainly not mud or roads so rutted as to be impassable. In all, his travel time for the round trip journey of fourteen miles might be a half hour to forty minutes. . . .

He would probably be startled to learn that the auto had replaced the horse in the lives and hearts of most Americans and that only a tiny handful of determined farmers still used them for work. . . . He might even blink in disbelief if someone told him that tests were being done on cars that moved over roads without wheels. . . . But Abel Hendron considered himself a modern farmer. So he would have driven quite happily into the twentyfirst century, ready for whatever new forms of transportation the future might hold.

Just as we will move into the future, ready for whatever new forms the transmission of information will take. Among them, I’m convinced, will be an old familiar form — the children’s nonfiction book. The best of these books will embody the same qualities that the finest children’s nonfiction titles of the past have possessed: a topic of interest to young people, explored in depth, and presented with verve and imagination.

And it looks as if nonfiction will be accorded more recognition in the twenty-first century than in the one just ended. Starting in 2001, a major new award, the ALSC/Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award, will be presented annually to “the most distinguished American informational book for children published during the preceding year.” Named for Robert Sibert, founder of the Bound-to-Stay-Bound prebindery which is funding the award, the Sibert joins the other major children’s book awards administered by ALSC, including the Newbery and the Caldecott.

It may take a while for the Sibert to achieve the name recognition and prestige that surround the Newbery (whose criteria, incidentally, remain open to works of nonfiction). But even now, in its infancy, the new award is an encouraging indication of the support that exists in America for the writing and publishing of quality children’s nonfiction.

James Cross Giblin is the author of twenty nonfiction books for young readers, the most recent being The Amazing Life of Benjamin Franklin (Scholastic). His article is adapted from a talk given in a Children’s Literature Assembly workshop at the 1999 National Council of Teachers of English conference in Denver, Colorado. From the July/August 2000 Horn Book Magazine.

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Sometimes you think you’ve finished the research for a key section in a nonfiction book, and then something occurs that makes you realize you’ve got it all wrong. This happened to me recently in connection with a book I’m working on about silent screen star Lillian Gish and her discoverer and director, D.W. Griffith.

The two met in 1912 when nineteen-year-old Lillian and her younger sister Dorothy came to the Biograph movie studio in New York City to visit their friend and fellow actress Mary Pickford. She introduced them to Griffith, who invited them to audition for a new short film, a melodrama titled An Unseen Enemy that he was rehearsing later that day. He explained that they would play orphaned sisters trapped in their home by thieves out to rob the family safe.

Gish in her autobiography and Griffith in his unpublished autobiographical notes recounted in detail what happened during the rehearsal. At one point, to get the young actresses in a suitably terrified mood, Griffith without warning shot off a live pistol over their heads. Apparently they performed to his satisfaction because he cast both of them in the movie and told them to report back to the studio the next day. Gish and Griffith then go on to describe in lesser detail the finished film.

I decided to use the story of the rehearsal and the eventual film as examples of how movies were made in the early days. I didn’t take into account the fact that because they were silent, movies then had no written scripts, only story outlines, and these often changed during the course of filming. I tried to see the movie, but it didn’t appear in any of the compilations of Griffith’s Biograph shorts that I located. Not until November 2010, during a MoMA retrospective on Lillian Gish, was I finally able to view An Unseen Enemy in an “incomplete print.”

It was complete enough, however, to show me that my synopsis of the story was seriously inaccurate. When I got home, I made notes of all the differences. Now I could rewrite the episode, confident that the plot was correct. And I wouldn’t have to face the communication that every nonfiction writer dreads — the sentence in a review or the letter from a reader that points out a major error in the book’s content.

James Cross Giblin’s latest book is The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy (Clarion). From the March/April 2011 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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I met Elaine several times, first when she gave a dynamite speech about censorship at the University of Chicago when I was a student, and last when she gave another dynamite speech upon receiving the University of Southern Mississippi Medallion in 1998. An acute critic, she was one of the few writers for children  who I thought could do an equally good job on our side of the fence. She had a big Carol Burnett smile and was always the most stylishly dressed person in the room. That goes for her prose, too.

Elissa has collected some of Konigsburg’s Horn Book moments.

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Although Mom can detect the most subtle nuance in painting or prose, she never developed a musical ear. Knowing that, my brother Paul purchased several classical records and proceeded to give her a course in music appreciation. It is not surprising that Mom’s interpretation of music took on a literary dimension. After hearing the first movement of Mozart’s Symphony #40 in G Minor, she knew she would one day use it as a model for a book. Like that movement, her book would have a short opening, a recurrent theme, and a melody that was separate yet intertwined, repeated and extended. The result was The View from Saturday.

Discord, not harmony, motivated Mom to conceive From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. As she listened to Paul, Ross, and me complain about insects and heat during a family picnic, she concluded that her suburban children would never run away from home by opting for a wilderness adventure. Instead, we would seek the comfort and splendor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Although the inspiration for these Newbery books was as disparate as the three decades which separate their publication, their theme is the same. In fact, every one of E. L. Konigsburg’s fourteen novels are about children who seek, find, and ultimately enjoy who they are. Despite this common denominator, E. L. Konigsburg’s writing is the antithesis of the formula book. Her characters are one-of-a-kind. They include Jamie Kincaid, who likes complications and cheats at cards; Ned Hixon, who turns the finding of fossilized sharks teeth into a competition as fierce as Wimbledon; and Chloë Pollack, who learns to put bad hair days and other people’s opinions into perspective.

Mom always lets her characters speak for themselves. At the same time, she persists in having them speak to the core of her readers. Thirty years has not changed the fundamental identity of Mom’s audience–middle-aged children who crave acceptance by their peers as desperately as they yearn to be appreciated for their differences. E. L. Konigsburg’s success can be attributed to the fact that when children read any of her novels, they see themselves, and they laugh.

Since readers recognize themselves in E. L. Konigsburg’s books, they frequently ask how she discovered her own identity as an author. The answer is that her writing career began when she was a graduate student in chemistry.

Both science and art demand discipline and imagination. The laboratory protocol that compelled Mom to log and monitor experiments developed into the self-control she exercises when she forces herself to sit at her desk and write. Conjecturing how molecules fit together during chemical reactions became training for creating character and plot. Indeed, chemistry showed that transcending intellectual boundaries is prerequisite to true discovery. How else did a former student of architecture, Friedrich Kekulé, dream that a snake was biting its own tail, and so discover the ringed structure of benzene?

Today, there is less recognition that skills can be transferred from one discipline to another. The current crop of help-wanted ads demand specialized degrees and mastery of specific computer programs. They don’t mention imagination. It’s a good thing E. L. Konigsburg has found success as an author, because she’s out of sync with today’s narrowly defined careers. She has a terrific sense of design, but what firm would hire a graphic artist who’s never heard of CorelDRAW and has trouble double-clicking a mouse? Mom would also have difficulty as an administrative assistant. She’d comply with requests to organize office records, but nobody else would be able to retrieve them. The process her brain goes through to store and retrieve information is as mixed-up as Mrs. Frankweiler’s files (and uncovers as much treasure).

So the entire Konigsburg family is grateful, truly grateful, that readers and the Newbery Committee admire and recognize E. L. Konigsburg’s talent. By coincidence, my family and I arrived to visit my parents the very day they learned that she had won the 1997 Newbery Medal. She had only five minutes to spend with us before she left to be on the “Today” show in New York. We spent those moments jumping for joy.

While Mom was in Manhattan, Dad answered dozens of phone calls, and the condominium filled with floral arrangements. I was moved by how proud Dad was of her. For forty-five years, he has been her sounding board, and throughout her career, he has been her business adviser. I was also touched by how many well-wishers were friends who had helped our family celebrate the 1968 Newbery. Now, some of their children called with congratulations.

Mom came home, exhilarated from her trip. Soon, she was returning phone calls and writing thank-you notes. She had already returned to being wife, mother, and grandmother. After learning that my thirteen-year-old son was wearing a stocking cap to prevent his hair from curling, Elaine Konigsburg took her grandson to a hair salon and bought him styling mousse. That evening, she heated up the brisket she had made to celebrate our visit. We enjoyed our meal, and I thought about how receiving a second Newbery has made Mom’s life come full spiral. After twenty-nine years, that’s better than full circle.

Laurie Konigsburg Todd, her husband Robert, and son Sam operate a five-hundred-acre farm in upstate New York.  From the July/August 1997 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Early in her life, there was evidence that she would be successful. But nobody would have predicted that she would achieve recognition in the field of children’s literature. Elaine was valedictorian of her class in high school. Subsequently, she was an honor student at Carnegie Institute of Technology, where she majored in chemistry and was awarded the degree of Bachelor of Science. She continued her studies in chemistry in the graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. After a few minor explosions, burned hair, and stained and torn clothes, she began to think about other occupations. Frankly, it seemed like a just end to anyone who would even contemplate writing a thesis concerning the Grignard reaction using heterocyclic compounds of a pyridine base.

Fortuitously, her husband, an industrial psychologist, made one of his many moves. The Konigsburgs left Pittsburgh and a much relieved laboratory staff to live in Jacksonville, Florida. There Elaine taught science to young girls in a private school until 1955, when Paul was born. Seventeen months later Laurie arrived, and in 1959 Ross uttered his first of many sounds of protest. It was wonderful to watch the children develop, but there was a champagne celebration when all three were out of the diaper stage.

Shortly afterwards, Elaine returned to teaching. Her initial thoughts about writing stories for children occurred during this period. Instead, however, she explored her talents as an artist. With a strong desire to excel in any endeavor, she devoted many hours to perfecting techniques. Her efforts were rewarded with prizes in local shows. On a trip to the Grand Canyon, she made friends among the Hopi Indians by sketching their little boys and girls.

In 1962 our family moved to the metropolitan New York area. Elaine took several courses at the Art Students’ League. Her paintings received awards in shows held in Westchester County. As the children grew older and we became more involved with suburban living, Elaine was intrigued with the various forces exerting an influence on us.

In 1966 she began to write her first book, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth. Laurie, Paul, and Ross were delighted to serve as models for her illustrations. The five of us danced around the room the following year when the manuscript was completed and accepted by Atheneum.

Even before she received that good news, Elaine had begun writing From, the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Again our children were used as the models for the illustrations. Despite a fracture in her left leg and a series of accidents which resulted in seventeen stitches in Ross’s head, she persevered. Trips to the emergency room in the Port Chester hospital became almost a monthly routine.

Paul reached the age where he was involved in little league baseball, football, and basketball. We attended the games and cheered wildly for his team. If he caught the ball or made a hit, the game was a success regardless of the final score. Not satisfied with superficial knowledge, Elaine studied the official rule books. Serious discussions were held at the dinner table about the merits of a drag bunt and when it was wiser to run and hit instead of hit and run. We even got her to Shea and Yankee stadiums where she let her opinions about the managers’ decisions be known. This furnished the background for her third book, About the B’nai Bagels, which will be published in 1969.

With fond memories, the family left Port Chester in August, 1967, and returned to Jacksonville, Florida. January 13th of the following year proved to be anything but an unlucky day. We were in the middle of moving out of an apartment into our new house when the telephone rang. Amid considerable turmoil, Elaine learned that she had received the Newbery Award. There was much hugging and kissing and shouts of joy with neighbors and friends. And we are pleased that things have not yet settled down.

To date, Elaine has performed in a superior manner as an artist and author. Her accomplishments in those areas, however, are insignificant when compared with her achievements as a mother and wife. She has an excellent sense of priorities and a value system which promotes harmony. As our youngest, who plays a competent game of poker, says, “Don’t bet against her.”

From the August 1968 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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