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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Perhaps no children’s book has been more subject to the corrosive influence of commerce than Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Its tangled publishing history features professional bullies more ruthless than Mr. McGregor (whose wife put Peter’s father in a pie) pursuing this hapless rabbit across time, committing acts of piracy, “copyfraud,” and criminally bad taste. Potter’s longtime publisher, Frederick Warne & Co., has joined their ranks, baking Peter into an unseemly sequel, The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit (about which more later).

The bunnysploitation seems especially glaring in light of Potter’s unique gifts as writer and illustrator. Born in London in 1866, Potter was an assiduous student of animal anatomy and behavior from childhood on. She and her younger brother Bertram furnished their nursery with exotic pets, wild and domestic, bringing home mice, lizards, bats, frogs, birds, and, of course, rabbits. The children became determined amateur naturalists, documenting their finds in sketchbooks, never squeamish about studying dead specimens. (Indeed, when their captives succumbed, sometimes to rather outré diets, the young Potters would boil the skeletons and draw them as well.)

Beatrix carried her affections into adulthood: Potter scholar Judy Taylor once compiled a list of the author’s named pets throughout her life, tallying eighty-nine. Among them was the rabbit Benjamin Bouncer, who perished after breaking a tooth on hard candy. But he and his successor, the beloved Peter, lived long lives, providing ample opportunities to study their attitudes and habits.

With this intimate familiarity, Beatrix Potter became one of the finest observers of rabbits since Dürer. And not just rabbits: clothed or not, the mice, pigs, red squirrels, rabbits, hedgehogs, cats, foxes, and owls of her books are all true to life, animated by a keen eye for muscular and skeletal structure as well as by the common postures and characteristic movements she captured. Animals in her tales do fantastical things — mice embroider buttonholes; newt Sir Isaac Newton, clad in a species-specific “black and gold waistcoat,” dines on “grasshopper with lady-bird sauce” — but they do them plausibly. They are charming and convincing in large part because they are rendered naturalistically. This can be seen in all of her tales but also in a pen-and-ink drawing, the meditative masterwork “The Rabbit’s Dream” (c. 1899). A sleeping rabbit conjures itself under a counterpane in bed, surrounded by portraits of itself in over a dozen different positions — stretched on its side, prone with legs kicked back, with feet tucked under the body, with ears erect, ears folded back, ears parted over the shoulders, etc. A virtuosic performance, it remains among the most moving of Potter’s works, a testament to imagination enriched by experience.

Potter first told the story of Peter Rabbit in 1893 in a picture-letter sent to the bedridden son of her former governess. Its simple line drawings introduce the principals — Peter and his siblings; his mother; and his nemesis, Mr. McGregor — while its tiny tale of temptation and trial in an English garden unfolds in simple perfection. Several years later, she borrowed the letter back, expanded it, and, after failing to interest publishers in producing a small, affordable book with a single color frontispiece and black-and-white illustrations (she felt color throughout was too expensive), printed it herself; it was snapped up by friends and relations. She quickly secured a contract with publisher Frederick Warne, agreeing to redo the illustrations in color.

The book proved an immediate success on publication in October 1902, rapidly selling out a first printing of eight thousand copies. “The public must be fond of rabbits!” Potter wrote to the youngest Warne brother, Norman (to whom she would be briefly engaged, before his untimely death in 1905); “what an appalling quantity of Peter.” To her dismay, the firm failed to register copyright in the United States, leading to piracies and loss of revenue. Although she helped save the company in 1917, after embezzlement by another Warne brother nearly bankrupted it, she scolded them on quality, condemning a copy of Peter Rabbit’s Almanac for 1929 as “wretched.” She wrote sharply, “It is impossible to explain balance & style to people, if they don’t see it themselves.” While she enthusiastically crafted her own unique merchandise prototypes — including an extraordinarily soulful Peter Rabbit doll — she could have had no idea of the extent of commodification to come.

After Potter died in 1943 at the age of seventy-seven, Warne cast itself as the guardian of her legacy. But eventually the guardian began behaving badly, seeking to wring profits from its most famous long-eared property. In 1983, Warne was acquired by Penguin, itself owned by the international conglomerate Pearson, the largest book publisher in the world. Then, as scholar Margaret Mackey chronicles in The Case of Peter Rabbit: Changing Conditions of Literature for Children, Warne embarked on the expensive process of remaking printing plates for Potter’s books. While the new reproductions were a welcome improvement, Warne festooned them with what Mackey terms “aggressive” assertions of copyright, although Peter was already in the public domain. (In the UK, copyright protection lapsed but was then extended until 2013 when the European Union “harmonized” copyright law.) Warne seized on its “re-originated” illustrations to declare itself “owner of all rights, copyrights and trademarks in the Beatrix Potter character names and illustrations,” going so far as to attach a “tm” to the scampering Peter on the cover. Back in 1979, the publisher had sued a competitor, claiming trademark rights to eight images from Potter’s books that, it argued, were identified in the public mind with Warne alone. The case was settled out of court, but Viva R. Moffat, a legal scholar who teaches at the University of Denver, has called Warne’s claims (in a paper on “Mutant Copyrights”) a “stretch.”

Warne has applied for trademarks here and in the EU for every imaginable Peter Rabbit–related item that might feasibly be sold, from “books and texts in all media” to “toilet seat covers” and “meat extracts.” Moffat assails the practice of forcing trademarks to pinch-hit for lapsed copyright, while another legal expert, Jason Mazzone (who teaches intellectual property law at Brooklyn Law School), defines the placement of misleading warnings on public domain works as “copyfraud” in his book by the same name.

Warne’s zealous pursuit of its rights has not deterred it from crass acts of its own. In 1987, the same year it published its painstakingly remade edition, the firm allowed Ladybird Books, a purveyor of cheap paperbacks owned by the parent company, Pearson, to market The Tale of Peter Rabbit with bowdlerized text, eliminating Potter’s dry wit, dispensing with the pie made of Peter’s father (Mrs. Rabbit instead explains that Mr. McGregor just “doesn’t like rabbits”), and replacing Potter’s illustrations with photos of stuffed animals. Warne was excoriated in The Times of London, which condemned the new edition as “Hamlet without the ghost, Othello without the handkerchief.” Undaunted, a few years later Warne took out an advertisement in The Bookseller — “Peter Rabbit™ Packs a Powerful Punch” — threatening those who wandered into its garden with “expensive legal action” (see below).

The text of Warne’s advertisement asserting its legal rights to Peter Rabbit.

Now the firm has set its hobnailed boot upon Peter again, muddying the same waters it sought to protect:  publishing The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit, a large-format sequel written by actress-celebrity Emma Thompson and illustrated by Eleanor Taylor, whose previous books include Go-Go Gorillas. The idea did not originate with Thompson. According to her, Warne solicited the sequel, sending her two half-eaten radishes and a note purportedly written by the Rabbit Himself. The story finds Peter once again in Mr. McGregor’s lettuce patch (ground already covered in Potter’s own sequel, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny), climbing into a picnic basket, and being carried off to Scotland, where frenetic adventures involving a giant black rabbit named Finlay McBurney ensue. Smarmy in tone, the text relies heavily on italics and typographical tricks to engender interest. Its author clearly knows little about rabbits, suggesting that Finlay’s mother goes about with her ears “tied in a neat knot.” (One hopes an impressionable toddler will not do the same to a pet.) Saddled with a thankless task, artist Taylor produces soft-focus brushwork that seems timid and amateurish, lacking Potter’s precision and authority, her unerring color sense, and her humor. Taylor’s Mrs. McGregor is copied from Potter’s privately printed original and is more appropriation than homage, while poor Finlay’s chest juts above his kilt like a pouter pigeon’s. Missing are Potter’s beautifully detailed portraits of flora and fauna, from the water beetle in The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher to the Red Admiral butterfly in The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse. No one, it seems, has done more to dilute Potter’s work than her own publisher.

Other ersatz sequels have proliferated recently, as publishing houses cash in on classics, from The Wind in the Willows to Winnie-the-Pooh to A Little Princess to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Indeed, there will be sequels to The Further Tale: Thompson has signed up for two more. Ultimately, such derivative stuff can’t harm the originals, just as a bad production of Shakespeare can’t touch the play itself. But sequels, it seems to me, are particularly confusing to the youngest readers, who are just developing notions of authorship. As the editor of the Library of America’s edition of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, I’ve been asked by children where the recent sequels, written by an heir who never met Wilder, came from. From someplace hotter than the Dakotas, I think.

What sets The Further Tale apart is that it presents inferior work to an audience of very young children who have not yet developed the intellectual capacity to distinguish between original and unoriginal text and art. In her discussion of the multiplicity of Peters, scholar Mackey quotes Margaret Meek’s essay on the profound influence of early encounters: “Children’s literature is undeniably the first literary experience, where the reader’s experiences of what literature is are laid down. Books in childhood initiate children into literature; they inaugurate certain kinds of literary competencies.” The competency that The Further Tale inaugurates is that of copying. It tells children, It’s acceptable to be unoriginal. It’s acceptable to exploit the work of others. And it’s acceptable — even desirable — to make money from that exploitation. This is being done in an era when publishing has been beset with scandals involving plagiarism and other unethical practices, the perpetrators of which are often young. With the model set by today’s publishers, this is hardly surprising. Perhaps Warne could learn a lesson from the original Peter: gluttony always leads to tears.

From the May/June 2013 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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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.

The post More Than Just the Facts: A Hundred Years of Children’s Nonfiction appeared first on The Horn Book.

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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Roger Sutton: Are you conscious of working as an independent publisher?

Mary Cash: Definitely. I used to work for what was at the time the largest publishing conglomerate in the world (what is now Random House; then it was Bantam Doubleday Dell), so I think about it every single day. At Holiday House we aren’t beholden to either shareholders or owners who are not accessible to us, or to a group of executives that are charged with making us all behave or making sure that we’re profitable.

Jason Low: The independent thing is pretty huge at Lee & Low, too. I’ve been in the publishing business for fifteen years, but I haven’t had any other type of experience — I’ve only known it this way. I work with my brother and my dad — it’s a small group of people, and there’s no red tape. Essentially, we get together, jointly make a decision, and then go from there. It’s incredibly challenging to run a small publishing company. Publishing is going through such changes — just to be in the business at this time is really interesting.

RS: Mary, at Bantam Doubleday Dell, you would have had an elaborate acquisition process, which I’m guessing is only more elaborate there now, in which several levels of approval would be required…

MC: …and paperwork that had to be filed before you could even make an offer. You had to do an entire research project! I was so used to this method that when I first got to Holiday House, for the first book I wanted to acquire, I went into John Briggs’s office, and I had my reviews, my sales figures, all about the author, how many awards she’d won, all kinds of things that I’m rambling on and on about, and John’s looking more and more confused. Finally he stopped me and said, “Mary, what about the book?” That is a big, big difference.

RS: Sales are just as important to small publishers as big publishers, but I’m guessing the scale is different.

JL: For us, it’s just that everything’s smaller. Print runs are smaller. Our expectations are smaller. We’re very realistic. If we can cover the initial investment, everything else is gravy. It frees us up to take a lot of risks, and we do. And really, there are a lot of risks, in terms of what we acquire. Because many of the things that we go after are, for instance, biographies of people you’ve never heard of.

RS: Like that guy with the motorcycles — Honda. I loved that book.

JL: Before we did Honda, I didn’t even know there was such a person; I just thought it was the name of a car company. What I like about that book is the universal theme of “follow your dreams.” Honda wasn’t a good student; he was terrible, in fact. But he was good with his hands, with machinery. I think that’s an important message to give to kids. You have your different things you’re really good at—it may not be school, but hey, look at this guy. Honda’s a great example of a project we might go after.

RS: And how does that work at Lee & Low? If an editor brings in a project, what does he or she have to go through in order to get that book approved for publication?

JL: The owners are all in the room — we all read everything that we’re going to acquire. And then the editors, and that’s it. We really just go by the notion that nobody has a crystal ball in terms of what’s going to be successful, so you’ve got to go with your gut. If the people in the room feel strongly about this manuscript, then we’re going to give it a shot.

MC: And so many things can change between acquisition and publication. At a big publishing house, you have to jump through hoops if you discover that a thirty-two-page book needs to be, say, a forty-eight-page book. And there’s always tension if you want to alter the specs, because it was not what was approved of or signed off on. And you’re signing up books two to five years before you publish them, and so many things can change in that time. Including the technology.

JL: We’ve seen a lot of change in technology. But I feel that it doesn’t speed up the process of making books, because the illustrations are still dealt with by archaic media. We’re still dealing with paintbrushes and paint, stuff people have been using for ages. And then you plan for a book to take six months to a year, but then, you know, illustrators — how often do they run into personal problems that basically make that fall down?

RS: Like sleeping late.

JL: Exactly. So more often than not I see books become multi-year projects. It’s not uncommon. I think publishing’s a very odd industry in that way. Economically it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s really based on this creative process that’s very old.

RS: So do you feel then you have more — I can’t remember what the latest business-world buzzword is for “flexibility.” Oh, yes, we must be “nimble.” You can easily say, “Okay, this isn’t going to be on spring 2014. We can put it on this list.” Or can you speed something up?

MC: We can do both. Although it’s easier to put things off than speed them up. In all of our decisions, as at Lee & Low, the decision-making process is completely streamlined. I always tell people I can get an answer right away, whether it’s the answer I want or not. It’s like the difference between trying to turn a small sailboat, which takes some thought and some skill, and trying to turn a gigantic ocean liner, where you’ve got to get hundreds of people working together. We can turn on a dime.

JL: We’ve had to do that many, many times over the years.

RS: Do you find that being smaller and more agile can work to your benefit with authors and agents?

MC: Definitely. For one thing, our contract is much easier to read. And agents do send us a lot of new people, too, because it’s easier for us to take on new talent. We don’t have to come up with a whole marketing strategy to sell the project to the publishing board.

JL: We work with a lot of new people, too. Part of Lee & Low’s original mission was to develop new talent, so that was the idea from the get-go. It lightens the negotiating of it — sometimes authors or illustrators are unagented, but if they are, they can’t really ask for the moon, and we can’t go there anyway. And large advances are just not possible. Our big thing is that our books stay in print a very long time, because we don’t publish many, and we can really pay attention to every single book that we are putting out. That’s something that agents like to hear, and authors like to hear it, too. They say, Well, I want to go with these guys even though I’m not going to get everything I asked for. And from an owner’s point of view, I know how much we’ve invested in this thing — time, money, everybody’s effort — so for me, I don’t want to see any books go out of print. I have a personal as well as monetary stake in this. I’ve got a lot of skin in the game, you know? So it definitely motivates us to try really hard on everything.

RS: One way that your companies think very differently from each other is in terms of audience. Mary, Holiday House is trying to reach traditional groups — schools, libraries, bookstores, general readers; basically the same people that Random House and Macmillan are trying to reach. Jason, your company has more of a mission: to bring multicultural books of all kinds, written by all kinds of people, to different channels. Mary, how does it feel to be the little fish in that big pond?

MC: It feels good. I have a huge amount of independence, which I would certainly not have at a larger publisher. And we still have our niches that we fit into.

RS: Holiday books.

MC: Yes, and holidays that aren’t necessarily big holidays to other publishers, like Groundhog Day and St. Patrick’s Day. We’re very attuned to what’s happening in schools, so we also do wacky grammar books and irreverent math books that still teach math, and I think these are areas that a larger publisher would not be as interested in. Because to pay for their overhead, they’ve got to sell a lot more copies than we do.

RS: And that’s something that’s true of both your companies — you really have an investment in the school and library market. Most of the Big Six publishers don’t depend on it.

JL: We made that decision many years ago. When I first entered the business, we worked with both the trade and the institutional market. But it seemed to me that the institutional market was the one that was embracing what we were doing. At that point I asked the question, “What kind of publisher are we?” We realized that, really, our strength was institutional sales. We went whole-hog and basically never turned back.

RS: But, like Holiday House, it’s trade books for the institutional market.

JL: Yes.

MC: Once librarians and teachers embrace a particular book or a particular author, it’s far more likely that it will have a longer shelf life. Because when a teacher starts to use it, when it’s part of the program, or when he sees that this book works well with a certain kind of kid, then he hangs onto it. It becomes part of his teaching.

JL: Yeah, it gets referred to kids year after year after year: the strength of the backlist.

RS: Mary, what do you miss most about big publishing? The deep pockets?

MC: The deep pockets are not available all the time, to everyone. They’re only available for specific kinds of things, and they weren’t necessarily the sorts of books that I was doing. I really can’t say that I miss that. Daily life is just so different. I spend much more time editing books. With a big corporation, communication is like this constant obstacle, and you spend much of your time doing presentations so that people in the company know what you’re doing, writing memos and reports, traveling to sales conferences in other places, having lots and lots of meetings. It’s so much more pleasant to be working on the books, with other editors, with the art director, calling up authors, having illustrators come in with their dummies. It’s a lot more fun than sitting in a meeting.

JL: All that stuff takes time away from what people are supposed to be doing. It takes time to put together a presentation. It takes time to do anything, really. If you were to run a timesheet on the things you do every day, even the simplest thing takes up your time.

RS: Jason, you’re an independent publishing baby. I mean, this is really all that you’ve known. When you see your opposite numbers at conferences, what do you envy about their situations?

JL: I do like, when I’m at an ALA conference or someplace, to see them building their towers [of giveaway ARCs].

MC: That’s the only thing I want, too. I want their booths.

JL: We just started a YA imprint — science fiction, fantasy, and mystery — and we’ve published two books. We’re just beginning to get those types of books, so my pathetic towers look nothing like their towers. I don’t have that many to give away, so my tower’s a bitty tower. We’ve just started asking: How are we going to get this new imprint’s books noticed on such a small scale? And I guess the social media stuff is going to come into play. But even that has its limitations, because you’re tooting your own horn to the people who are already following you. You’ve got to go out and try to get more people to subscribe, and that ain’t easy.

RS: So you both contend with big publishers. And now we have all these new self-publishers, digital publishers, or print-on-demand publishers. Do you keep your eye on that side of things?

MC: I would say not in a concerted way. I pay some attention, but there’s just so much out there. And I think that is the real disadvantage to being a self-publisher: there is so much out there. How on earth are you going to get any attention?

JL: It’s like the whole scheme of what’s being published anyway: there’s going to be good and there’s going to be bad. The only thing I take offense at is the co-opting of the “indie” label. These self-publishing guys are trying to take it for themselves, and I’m not willing to give it up to them.

RS: Are you ever presented with a book that you love, but you think is not right for Holiday House, or not right for Lee & Low?

MC: All the time. Certain formats we can’t do — novelty books, board books. Which creates a bit of a problem if you have an artist who wants to branch out into those areas. We don’t have the right kind of distribution for those sorts of things. We can’t get a book into Walmart or discount drugstores, or the kind of places where that sort of book needs to sell.

RS: Why couldn’t you get a book into Walmart, say?

MC: First of all, Walmart doesn’t even want to see your products if you don’t have a critical mass. And big bestsellers. If you’re Random House, you go in there and say, Oh, I have all these cookbooks by Rachael Ray. Don’t you want those? And then you can get some other books in there as well. We don’t publish on a mass market schedule, either, where you’re really publishing every month. We have two lists a year, still. And that’s very old-school.

JL: We would probably have to avoid something that required a very large advance, so that would rule out a lot of high-profile authors and illustrators. We avoid things like, say, a book about Martin Luther King, because how many Martin Luther King books are already out there? What new spin would we bring to that? But we would do something about John Lewis, who was MLK’s right-hand man.

RS: What does the news that Random House and Penguin are getting together mean for your companies?

MC: After a certain point of big, it doesn’t matter to someone like us anymore. I don’t think we’re going to be affected by the fact that they have merged, because we aren’t competing with them in the same ways that the other big publishers are.

JL: We’re also not looking at the big guys as competitors, really. They’re almost in a different universe than we are. We’re a small universe. We do our own thing. We run the company as best we can. We try to do right by everybody who works with us, people working for us, the authors, the illustrators, and that’s our world. That’s all we’re focused on. Yes, we’re trying to predict like everybody else what’s happening with the digital stuff, but nobody knows that yet. I would have to say we’re definitely playing more follower than leader in that respect.

MC: And the leaders, I don’t think know where they’re going.

JL: Well, that’s the thing. Everybody’s driving and the headlights are out, basically.

RS: Given you don’t have the big pockets, how do you keep the authors and agents coming?

MC: I have to say, at Holiday House, our authors have been really wonderful and loyal to us, and I think there are some people who will always prefer to work with the smaller publishers. Some will want a huge one, but just like we’re not the answer for everyone, the big publishers aren’t the answer for everyone, either.

JL: We’ve started a lot of careers, and now and then those people end up moving on, but I will say that a lot of them do come back, like Greg Christie, for instance. We published his first book, and he does publish with many different houses, but he does come back, and he says it’s because he really likes working with us. We work with Ted and Betsy Lewin as well. They’re Caldecott honorees and all that, and they publish with us now because a) they like the experience, but b) the stuff they want to do in some of their books, the big houses aren’t interested in. It doesn’t matter that they’re the Lewins. They like to do these travel books, based on their adventures, and we think they’re great, so we will do that for them. There are people who are loyal. I think that if they didn’t have a good experience — obviously we earn their loyalty in some way in return.

MC: Yeah, good or bad, I think it is a very different experience.

RS: What is the next step for Holiday House and for Lee & Low? How are the next twenty years looking?

MC: I think smaller publishers are going to be, in a way, better equipped going into the future because of our small overheads. I don’t know that print publishing — because it is going to shrink — will be able to support the infrastructure of a large company.

JL: I think for us it’s just keep doing what we’re doing. We’ve found a way to be profitable, doing the kind of books that we do. Our mission has definitely dictated that, but it has also grown and shifted to encompass a lot of the things that are coming up in today’s modern world. People know to come to us for multicultural books; now we also address issues including sexuality, same-sex parents, disabilities, autism. We brought out a book about a deaf baseball player. So I think that gives us even more places to go, in terms of the stories we want to tell. I’m happy with that.

The post Jack (and Jill) Be Nimble: An Interview with Mary Cash and Jason Low appeared first on The Horn Book.

I hope everybody is getting some use out of our latest newsletter, Nonfiction Notes from the Horn Book. I’ve been thinking about NF a lot since ALA, where I spent two solid days talking to publishers about what they were planning for the coming year(s). Along with inflicting upon the world way too many books about bullying, they are more justifiably concerned with how to respond to the new Common Core State Standards. Should they be publishing more nonfiction? More teacher guides? How can they convince the lazier and/or busier and/or confused schools that the “exemplary texts” appended to the standards are, just as they say, examples, not required reading?

The thing is that aside from making sure they are publishing a healthy amount of nonfiction (because the CCSS require a lot of nonfiction reading), publishers aren’t really the target here. Teachers (and the librarians who support them) are. If you read the CCSS, you will see that its directives aren’t so much about what kids should read but how they should read. Even when I read the CCSS’s “Publishers’ Criteria” [PDF], I see an awful lot of verbose waffling (“texts” [ed. note: GROSS] should be short except when they’re long; texts should be difficult except when they’re not) without any real guidance.

The CCSS themselves offer exciting opportunities, no question. I would really enjoy, for example, asking kids to “compare and contrast a firsthand and secondhand account of the same event or topic; describe the differences in focus and the information provided” But that’s a job for the classroom and the library, not a publishing house. Unless, and again GROSS, you decide the world really needs a new series called FirstHand/SecondHand that saves time for the teacher at the expense of the library’s budget. Shoot me now.

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Mischief: “Playful misbehavior or troublemaking, especially in children.” “Playfulness that is intended to tease, or mock or to create trouble.” As for the mischief-maker, my favorite definition: “Someone who rises up against the constituted authority.”

I remember a historical mischief-maker, the Lord of Misrule, who for a brief time around Christmas in medieval England disbanded all rules, and everything in society was inverted. A servant was the lord, the lord was a servant; chaos was encouraged. Anything could happen, and frequently did.

And isn’t this true in the best picture books as well? Status is inverted: the child rules! Or animals. The outside world’s adult-created orders are frequently and happily subverted. Or the book creates rules of its own. In a picture book, mischief is a badge of honor.

I am a firm believer that mischief in a picture book begins with its author and artist: their sense of play, of fun, of teasing, of surprise. In text think Russell Hoban, Peggy Parrish, Roald Dahl, Mo Willems, Kevin Henkes, Jon Scieszka. In art think David Small, Lane Smith, Tomie dePaola, Rosemary Wells, Eric Carle, Steven Kellogg. The author and artist must wake up to the child in themselves in order to create a picture book. Wake up to delight, surprise, tease. Wake up to the freedom that mischief allows.

Imagination — the bigger, the better — is, of course, a fellow traveler in all of this childlike play. Daring is, too, perhaps.

Ironically, in the beginning, frequently reflecting the period in which they were writing—puritanical, rational, Industrial, Victorian — children’s books in general were most often didactic, meant to teach a lesson. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the industry of printing and reproduction was beginning, books for children became “items of commerce.” Only then, writes chronicler Susan Meyers, “did cows leaping over the moon, Banbury cock-horses, bridges falling down, mice running hickory dickory dock or songs of sixpence assume any significance in the realm of children’s literature.”

Had there always been Edward Lears and Walter Cranes lurking in the draperies? In the mead halls? Did the new possibilities for printing and reproduction let the mischief-makers out of the bottle? In 1846, the nonsense and illustration of Edward Lear was being discovered by Londoners. Lear loved simply entertaining children. He wrote to a friend, “Nothing I look forward to half so much as to giggle heartily and to hop on one leg down the great gallery…but I dare not.” Yet his verses and art never lost this sense of the absurd, “and they were designed to make children laugh, not tremble.”

Randolph Caldecott came onto the London scene in the mid-1800s; and in the 1860s, one of my all-time favorites, Walter Crane. He believed that stories should teach, but by arousing the child’s imagination. He felt stories that aroused the child’s imagination were not only acceptable but “downright necessary.”

The tradition of mischief-making in picture books, then, is long. Indeed, with twentieth- and twenty-first-century picture book writers and illustrators, this state of mind is so pervasive that it makes its way grinning or dancing into the contours of every aspect of a picture book. And to say “what if?” to the most extraordinary and frequently lawless, spirited, outrageous and impossible circumstances.

Think of Virginia Lee Burton’s Mike Mulligan of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel fame who loved his steam shovel so much that, when Mary Anne was deemed old hat, defunct, and surrounded by new electric and diesel shovels that put her out of work, Mike decided he and Mary Anne would dig a hole for the new town hall, unbidden. So, happily — and mischievously — they took on the whole Popperville establishment by proving that Mary Anne was anything but defunct, as huffing and puffing she indeed dug the cellar of the new town hall in one day. The problem: no way to get out of the cellar. It was a little boy, in another inversion of power, who said, “Why couldn’t we leave Mary Anne in the cellar and build the new town hall above her?” Talk about mischief!

And how about Strega Nona by Tomie dePaola? DePaola, himself a mischief-maker, clearly loves Strega Nona, the wise witch of the Italian village, but it is into childlike Big Anthony that he puts his sense of mischief and play, allowing the character a liberating day of Misrule. On that day, Big Anthony doesn’t listen, and he doesn’t obey! He cooks pasta in Strega Nona’s forbidden magic pot, and pasta flows out of the pot, out of the doors, and into the very streets of the tiny village. Big Anthony, totally out of control. Do you suppose Tomie dePaola was grinning wickedly as he let the pasta roll?

I love the whole school world of Kevin Henkes: Chrysanthemum, Owen, Julius, Chester. But no character more so than Lilly of Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse. Surely Henkes became the saucy Lilly herself to know so intimately and understand so well how crucial it was for her to tell her favorite teacher, Mr. Slinger, about her new musical purple plastic purse immediately, mid-class, not waiting, even though the purse was tinkling right throughout show-and-tell. When Mr. Slinger takes Lilly’s purse away until after class, Henkes lets Lilly loose, allowing her to mischievously send Mr. Slinger a note saying: “Big Fat Mean Mr. Stealing Teacher! Wanted by F.B.I.” Talk about Misrule!

Characters as “mini Lords of Misrule” abound in picture books. You are probably naming more of them to yourself now. And you know their stories: Madeline, Curious George, Babar, Eloise, Max of the Rosemary Wells sort as well as Max of the Sendak sort. And these are old friends, but new friends appear every year. Friends like Olivia by Ian Falconer, The Ladybug Girl by Jacky Davis and David Soman, Otis by Loren Long, Fancy Nancy by Jane O’Connor, Pigeon from Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! by Mo Willems — at-large child characters in adult worlds. Children love characters that are characters, and they love adult worlds out of control. It gets children’s attention like almost nothing else.

Mischief affects everything in a book. Even shape and design. In truth, shape and design are a critical part not only of the artistry of a book but of the character’s adventure itself — its very motion. This was certainly something that I discovered when editing picture books at Philomel: that — in addition to the words and the draftsmanship — the shape and design of a picture book is part of the mischief.

One of the prime movers of picture books is the shape created by the snowball effect. George Meredith, in his “Essay on Comedy,” writes about comic spirit and the snowball effect as an accumulation of event that gathers the snow of story as it careens up or down toward climax, going too far, and making us laugh or wonder or cheer because it is out of control. The snowball effect functions similarly in picture books. Something happens to unleash the snowball of story — in art and text — rolling faster and faster, up or down hill, as it gathers the snow of incident or mishap or superabundance — like the growing number of animals in Amos McGee’s kitchen in the Caldecott-winning A Sick Day for Amos McGee by Philip C. Stead and illustrated by Erin E. Stead — until something happens to stop it. The speed and growing weight demands redress.

Wanda Gág, that Minnesota-born American writer, came on the scene in the 1920s with Millions of Cats. Her snowball-gathering story of the little old man and little old woman who had no child rolls relentlessly through the pages of this book as the old man, deciding that a cat of their own might be just the right substitute, “climbed over sunny hills…trudged through cool valleys…at last [coming] to a hill which was quite covered with cats. Cats here, cats there, cats and kittens everywhere, hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats.” Over and over in the best picture books, the artist and author are willing to go far enough. In this case, two cats wouldn’t do. Nor would ten. Nor would fifty. The old man chose hundreds, thousands, millions and billions and trillions of cats. A superabundance. Gág’s woodcut art snowballs lyrically through the book, stealing your eye and telling it just where to go as the hundreds, thousands, millions and billions and trillions of cats make their way home with the old man, and begin to quarrel. The chaos of misrule finally gets redress when the littlest, homeliest kitten somehow prevails, to become the couple’s own.

Can you feel Wanda Gág, both artist and author, going far enough? Can you feel the snowball of story? And supreme designer that she is, understanding that after the weight of all those quarreling cats, their climactic fight to see who will stay, the single small, slightly homely kitty, even in design, is an extraordinarily powerful image.

Shapewise, you can begin to see the picture book is almost a wave of story, and the artist as well as the writer knows that: creating horizontally, letting go to picture after picture, shape is a felt thing. A mischievous thing. Shape is not only lovely to look at, to savor, to appreciate: shape is movement, horizontal movement, a vehicle for story on its way to climax. It takes a sense of mischief to push it far and originally enough.

Readers know David Small, and his books, the touching The Librarian or enchanting The Gardener, books that he created with his poet wife, Sarah Stewart. However, it was the wildly funny manuscript that the usually sensible nonfiction writer Judith St. George wrote that grabbed Small’s internal child by the collar and gave it a shake. The manuscript was called So You Want to Be President?, about the quirky history and known foibles of presidents.

Everything was wrong about this picture book text. It was too long — twenty typed pages. It was certainly too old for kindergarteners. It was about presidents: not kindergarteners’ favorite subject. But, oh, that text! Both smart and sassy, and definitely mischievous. I loved it on the first read. Cecilia Yung, Philomel art director, thought almost instantly of David Small to illustrate it. That was fine with me. I remembered that David had illustrated Gulliver’s Travels in a nice warm and sensible crosshatch that would be perfect. We sent him the manuscript and crossed our fingers. He loved it instantly, and I am sure with a wry grin and mischievous pen, he started sketching president after president even before he had a contract. When the first wild sketches came in, I just flopped down into a chair and said, “Oh, my!” He had worked as an editorial cartoonist for the Wall Street Journal and New Yorker — unbeknownst to me then — and he launched into these presidents like a koi fish at a feeding! He sent us sketches for Nixon kicking up his heels in the White House bowling alley, Taft being lifted into a giant bathtub by derrick, Reagan getting fitted in Truman’s haberdashery. And so it went.

Despite having nothing in Caldecott rules that asked for art to add something to text, So You Want to Be President? added mood and mischief, and David Small won a Caldecott medal for his trouble in 2001.

There are almost no limits or rules for the mischievous world of the picture book, except: does it work? Anything goes, as long as it is good: words with wit and tenderness and original moment, art that is art, in unlimited mediums — collage, line, erasers, oils, pencil, computer — a vast variety of mediums and creators mischievously going “far enough” to give their readers something so new it imitates the best of life. Perhaps more than life.

In the 1860s Walter Crane called creating a picture book a “matter of consequence.” But lately, the very future of the picture book has been called into question. Let me ask it out loud: how important is a picture book?

None of us knows what changes the digital age will bring to the picture book. Even so, while it is exciting to see a child read a book by him or herself in whatever form, lucky the parent and child who can cuddle together, child in lap or close, to read a picture book — with all its wonders — and to look at the extraordinary art along with the words as a miraculous extension of life itself.

There is in a picture book, make no mistake, something for the eye, something for the heart, something for the mind, something for the funny bone, something for the senses. The picture book, made through the wit and comic spirit of high mischief and consummate skill, is, and will continue to be, as Walter Crane said well over those hundred years ago, “something of consequence.”

This article  is adapted from the BERL Lecture (originally delivered at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art on October 22, 2011) and is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

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The jacket as a selling tool, rather than as merely the protective wrapper (or “dust jacket”) it started out as more than a century ago, is hardly a new phenomenon. But as the major market for children’s books shifted from libraries and schools to retail from the 1970s onward, and as the publishing industry itself went corporate and redrew its organizational chart, cover designs rooted in editorial vision became a good deal rarer. Jackets produced as a group decision, with the marketing and sales force of the house taking the lead, became the new norm.

A devil’s advocate might interject here that children tend to love glittery lettering, shiny Mylar surfaces, and gold tinsel spines; and if amusing cheap tricks like these lead to a love of reading, why complain? Even if there is a disconnect between a book’s content and its cover design, does that really matter? I would say that it matters whenever the result is a book that feels sadly at war with itself (the oversized Peter Rabbit “sequel,” for example); and when a certain kind of cozy, intimate book for which there has long been a proven place falls by the wayside. The cover designs of Don Freeman’s Norman the Doorman (Viking) and Esphyr Slobodkina’s Caps for Sale (Harper) — to name two mid-twentieth-century picture books that attained “classic” status in time to withstand the current trend — would be unlikely to pass muster at any of today’s major publishing houses. True, both of these books date from the time when a new picture book was typically encountered up-close on a library shelf or table, not glimpsed at forty paces in a big box store, amid a crazy quilt of color-splashed alternatives. But whatever the market forces that happen to be at work, if the picture book as a genre is to thrive in the future, publishers will need to make books that have more to offer, from the cover on in, than calculated cleverness.

Consider two of the most beloved picture books of all time. What, besides their publisher (Harper) and editor (the late great Ursula Nordstrom), do Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are have in common? Stylistically, their illustrations look nothing alike and their story lines could hardly be more different. Still, these two perennial favorites do share one striking feature—and it is a pretty strange one when you stop to think about it: in both instances, the hero of the tale does not appear on the cover.

In a preliminary jacket sketch for Goodnight Moon, Clement Hurd painted a more static version of the cover image of the Great Green Room everyone knows. It’s pretty much the same design, except that in the sketch the bunny child perches on the windowsill, at the center of the picture. In the finished cover, the bunny has gone missing.

Nearly all picture book covers make it their first order of business to introduce readers to the hero of the tale; it seems only good sense to do so. But when it was time to finalize the cover for Goodnight Moon, Nordstrom took a counterintuitive approach that reflected her understanding of the text’s mantra-like magic string of words. It was she who instructed Hurd to take out the bunny.

Nordstrom’s argument went something like this. The bunny was not a hero in the ordinary sense but rather a placeholder for the child at home who, swept up in the spell of Margaret Wise Brown’s hypnotic lyric, would want to imagine himself inside the Great Green Room. The story, she told the illustrator, wasn’t really the bunny’s story. Viewed this way, the jacket image came to serve as a door left open for the reader to enter the room.

But what about Where the Wild Things Are? Did Nordstrom, or Maurice Sendak, omit Max from the cover image for similar reasons? The situation is not quite comparable. Max, after all, is arguably the quintessential picture-book hero. The archival record does not seem to account for what happened. We know that Max does not make an appearance in any of the several Wild Things cover studies preserved at Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum & Library, which houses Sendak’s archives. But we don’t know why, and so can only guess what Sendak and Nordstrom were thinking. My guess would be this: the cover image was meant to be another open door, and a signal to readers that they were going to have to venture inside—inside the book and inside themselves — if they wished to have what the cover art promised would be a strange and wonderful experience. This was a cover to daydream over, not art to digest in an instant. And I doubt it would make it past any present-day publishing committee.

Which is not to say that a cover has to be quiet and contemplative to rate as a success. Fred Marcellino came to picture-book making in the early 1990s at the tail end of a brilliant run as America’s preeminent trade fiction jacket artist of the previous two decades. Chances are great that at some point you have been stopped in your tracks by the indelible graphics he created for Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and a host of other international bestsellers. No one knew better than Marcellino how to create a book jacket that made a big splash while also giving an incisive impression of the experience that lay in store for readers.

The funny thing is that when Marcellino turned to designing the cover of his first picture book, Puss in Boots (Farrar), a project he had dreamed of doing for years, he painted an irresistibly saucy, elegant close-up of the story’s egomaniacal cat — but forgot to leave room for the title or his name. Marcellino’s editor, Michael di Capua, came to the rescue with a bold solution that, he later reported, had been revealed to him in a dream: to leave the front cover entirely type-free. The graphically thrilling result, which set the stage for a trickster tale famous for its own surprising twists and turns, became the most talked-about juvenile cover design in recent memory. A second result was that Puss’s text-free headshot went on to inspire a Mount Rushmore of monumentally large — but overbearing and for the most part humorless — copycat jackets, especially for picture book biographies of JFK, Helen Keller, and other famous folk: the ultimate I’m-a-big-important-book covers. Which only goes to show that, whatever form it takes, the best picture book cover design is made from the inside out, as a strong, clear, highly particular response to a one-of-a-kind story worth discovering.

From the November/December 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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So, with deceptive simplicity — for who, of any age, does understand time? — did my mother, Charlotte Zolotow, begin her book Over and Over, first published in 1957.

As I write these words today, Charlotte is ninety-seven and I am fifty-nine. I see to her care. When she wrote Over and Over, she was forty-two and I was four, and she saw to mine. It is also fall, maybe her last on this green-and-gold spinning globe. At this intersection Over and Over, about cycles, seems to me celebratory, bittersweet, and comforting. Its meaning and its text — first read aloud to me by my mother before I was myself able to read — seem almost as enduring as the cycles of death and renewal themselves.

Twenty-eight years after its original publication, Over and Over was reissued in hardcover in 1985, then published again in paperback in 1995. The unnamed little girl in Over and Over, who doesn’t understand about time (and note, please, that Charlotte did not add the word yet), is at a cusp, the border between the hardly differentiated passage of days, weeks, and months and a dawning sense of memory. She hasn’t connected what makes sequential time, but she does hold pieces of it; they move, unconnected, in a dreamlike déjà vu. This happened before…didn’t it?

“She was so little that she didn’t know about Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday,” Charlotte wrote. “She certainly didn’t know about January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. She was so little she didn’t even know summer, winter, autumn, spring.” And how thoughtful of Charlotte to kindly enumerate these compass points, just in case a young listener might be in the same predicament as the little girl.

“She remembered a crocus once, but she didn’t know when,” Charlotte continued. “She remembered a snowman and a pumpkin, and a Christmas tree, and a birthday cake, a Thanksgiving dinner and valentines. But they were all mixed up in her mind.”

When the little girl awakens one morning to snow, her excitement is palpable; at least to her mother, who, slowly and gently, explains winter. But the little girl has a question: “What comes next?” She and her mother continue through seasons and holidays, noting spring rabbits, summer vacations, and “the ghosts and witches and tigers and tramps and devils” that come at Halloween. After each explanation, the little girl asks her mother, “What comes next?” Thus the book travels a full turn on the year’s wheel.

Those who study children’s literature might describe Over and Over as a concept book, for it teaches the concept of time’s passage — life’s cycles, days, weeks, and months adding up to a year, which then repeats. But that classification no more captures Over and Over’s essence than a chloroformed butterfly pinned to black velvet touches a living monarch fanning its wings on the petals of a red bergamot blossom. The essence of Over and Over is its blend: everyday and wondrous; the reassurance of routine and predictable cycles and the exhilaration of large and small miracles that come and go. Over and Over gets across a life-force: the alternating current of permanence with transition.

Now, as Charlotte approaches a hundred years, she and the little girl in Over and Over stand at similar cusps. The little girl is leaving babyhood, the timelessness of life’s beginning, to enter childhood and the eventual time-bound phases of adulthood; Charlotte is in the process of returning to a state unbound by time. All the things she has seen, done, and experienced in her long, interesting life are, as Over and Over put it, “mixed up in her mind.” She too is dreamlike. Sometimes people, objects, and ideas she remembers break from the depths and float up. Sometimes she communicates what has surfaced to me and her other caregivers, usually without context. But unlike the little girl, she does not ask, “What comes next?” It seems this is no longer an important question.

That things are “mixed up in her mind” does not, at this point, upset her; rather, her glimpses of déjà vu delight her (and those of us who hear them). Charlotte has shown me that one need not go to a yogi’s cave in India to “be here now.” Just get old enough. You lose the past and its wounds, as well as the future, with its anticipated losses. There’s just now. And now, for Charlotte, who is not in pain but is safe and warm in her own home, surrounded by people who love her and look after her well, with frequent visits from a much-loved black-and-white cat named Tumbleweed who sleeps with her…now is generally a wondrous place to be.

Still, the past does surface. Many afternoons, during the week each month I spend with her, I’ll go out on a walk. If she’s awake when I leave the house, I reprise a version of the lines from her book Do You Know What I’ll Do? In that book, an older sibling tells a much younger one, “Do you know what I’ll do on my walk? I’ll look at the clouds and tell you the shapes when I get home.” If Charlotte’s awake when I return from the quiet streets of her small suburban Hudson River town, I’ll say, “Charlotte, do you remember those delicate, airy white wildflowers that’re called Queen Anne’s lace?” A smile will break over her face, like sun coming up over the horizon, lighting the hills. And she’ll reply, with some variation of “I didn’t…until you reminded me of it just now.” When I describe people, and the dogs they are walking, or children getting ice cream from a truck, or a cat glimpsed in a window, her response is simply, “Awww…” smiling; a response which conveys, “How adorable! How marvelous!”

This peaceful state has continued for about two years. Oh, how she suffered before that, when she began to lose linear time! She yelled at me, and everyone around her, a lot. Everything infuriated her. Bed rails. The wrong flavor of ice cream. “I KNOW that!” “Don’t do that!” “You don’t understand me, you never have!” “The coffee wasn’t even hot, they brought me lukewarm coffee! If they brought you cold coffee, wouldn’t you be angry?” A brutal phase. We went through seventeen caregivers in three years. I found notebooks and calendars she’d kept earlier, in which she’d written “Monday THEN Tuesday Wednesday wedsday remenber THINK CHARLOTTE think” and similar disjointed self-reminders, some written many times. That phase of aging is heartbreaking; elders have not yet let go, but though they grip furiously, they know that they cannot keep holding on. I saw my aunt, Charlotte’s older sister, go through a similar phase. They were both so angry at what they perceived as pending helplessness. I grieved for and with my aunt and with Charlotte. I tried to be patient. If you know that control of your own life is slipping away, I came to understand, you try to control everyone else’s.

I could not have anticipated that things were about to change.

As I said, I spend one week each month with Charlotte, in her home — the same home in which I grew up, and where she still lives. Her bedroom is now downstairs, not upstairs. And she lives not alone, as she did from age sixty to eighty-two, nor with two children and a husband, as she did when she was a young wife and mother. Her days are shared with round-the-clock caregivers, Jamaican and African. Young, Charlotte loved the music of Vivaldi and Telemann. I made an effort to have CDs by these composers played for her, especially when she was waking up. But now she seems, improbably, to much prefer the music of the Senegalese singer Yossou N’Dour, introduced by Hawa, her Mauritanian-Guinean caregiver.

How can I tell? I never saw Charlotte dance to Vivaldi or Telemann or, for that matter, dance at all. But now — even though she is bed-bound and can no longer stand, I have seen her sit forward some mornings, when she is partially raised in her hospital bed, and simply sway, smiling. Sometimes she even lifts her arms, moving them in time to the marimbas, the gentle acoustic beat, N’Dour’s voice singing in words neither of us understands. Moving in time to. Time again: these moments are in time yet out of it. I am amazed. My mother?

As brilliant and insightful a writer as she was, Charlotte was also (when she was in what we call, perhaps wrongly, her “right mind”) often demanding, perfectionist, tense, and driven (you don’t write more than a hundred children’s books and become vice-president of a major New York publishing house without being driven). To see her now swaying, smiling… and to ask her, “Are you happy?” and hear her say, “Yes,” and not, “Yes, but…” is an undreamt-of privilege and surprise.

Charlotte divorced her husband (my father, show business biographer Maurice Zolotow) in 1969; they remained friendly, however, until his death in 1991. As for the children, they grew up and moved away, as children do. Charlotte’s son, my brother, Stephen, grew up to be a professional poker player. I stayed, loosely, in the family business: literature.

A few years back I was sitting in an attorney’s office with Stephen. Charlotte’s royalties were being discussed. “Well, some of her books,” said my brother, who is highly literate in finance, “are always going sell, like Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present. They’re — what would you call them, cash cows?” I looked at him, bemused, and said, “In the trade, we call them ‘classics.’” Though straight faces and a flat emotional affect are de rigueur in both poker and law, both my brother and the attorney half-smiled.

A classic, by definition, endures.

The point at which Charlotte’s Over and Over protagonist steps into the river of time is winter: the first event discussed is snow; the first holiday, Christmas. The girl and her mother travel on through Valentine’s Day, Easter, spring, summer, seasons, and celebrations. Finally, after Thanksgiving, seemingly replete with the wonders of the year, the little girl asks, “Does anything come now?”

“‘Oh, yes,’ said her mother. ‘The next thing that comes is a very special day. Your birthday!’”

Birthdays: mine is late November — yes, after Thanksgiving, like the little girl. My mother’s is in June.

Charlotte dozed during the first part of her last birthday party. So perhaps when she asked me, “What did I miss?” she may have meant while she was half-asleep that day, listening as people came and went, as food was eaten and bottle caps flipped, as laughter and conversation rose and fell. But I chose a different context. “Well, Charlotte,” I said, “It’s your ninety-seventh birthday today, we’re on your porch for the party, and let’s see…you wrote many, many books, and you helped hundreds of other people write their books. And you read thousands of books. You were married, you had two children, you had a lover…You had a garden, and you traveled all over America and went to Europe several times. You were head of a department. You went to great museums. You had a poodle named Cleo and now you have a cat named Tumbleweed. You ate Chinese food and French food, and Italian and Indian food, and now, today, you’re eating African and Jamaican food…I don’t think you missed much!”

Charlotte started smiling as I began this recitation, and her smile grew wider and wider as I continued. She began to laugh. When I finished she said, “Good!” Not long after that, we brought out the cake and, with help, she blew out the candles.

When the little girl does that in Over and Over, she makes a wish. “‘What did you wish?’ everyone asked her. ‘I wished for it all to happen again,’ the little girl said. And of course, over and over, year after year, it did.”

So ends Over and Over, a book that will last, I believe, as classics do. But Charlotte herself will not and cannot last. I will grieve all the harder, I think, yet also be better able to let go, because of the surprise of our time together now; a gift following a relationship which, though close, was always conflicted.

When a parent dies, a life ends, and another life is permanently altered. Something that was is no more. It can’t all “happen again.”

And yet. I will be left, when Charlotte goes, not only with her books and the cycles themselves that she enumerated so well but with something she said to me recently. It was late. We were having a long, rambling conversation, which happens rarely but occasionally. I never know if such a conversation will be our last, since there are days when Charlotte does not speak at all. We were in the dark, me sitting by the hospital bed in the room that had once been the family living room but is now her bedroom.

Charlotte has lost many teeth. She speaks softly and slowly, so to hear her I had to lean in closely and listen with full attention.

Here is what she said that night: “Since I’ve had all the days…and they…were wonderful…I want you…to do the same.”

This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage. Click here to read the classic Horn Book article Making Picture Books: The Words by Charlotte Zolotow.

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It had been nearly five years since my last lunch with Lee Kingman Natti, but it felt like just last month. Her home in Gloucester is an oasis reflecting Lee’s lifelong involvement with artists and writers, as well as her own art. We sat looking out at the granite quarry that holds their water supply — and that Bertha Mahony Miller‘s father used to manage — and I heard about recent visitors. Not only have they had to deal with beaver and escaped piranha, but just last week Larry David was there scouting a movie location.

The Horn Book has been part of Lee’s life for more than 80 years. In 1929, when she was nine years old, she won a contest and had several book reviews published in the Magazine. An early patron of the Bookshop for Boys and Girls, Lee recalled those days in our 75th anniversary issue. After working at Houghton Mifflin in the 1940s, she served on the Horn Book Council editing several of our books and writing The Illustrator’s Notebook. Somewhere in there she also wrote more than thirty picture books and middle-grade and YA novels. Her daughter is the illustrator Susanna Natti and her granddaughter Kate was a Horn Book intern a few years back.

During her time at Houghton, Lee Kingman was Virginia Lee Burton’s editor and joined the Folly Cove designers creating linoleum blocks printed on fabric. It was through Burton and her husband George Demetrios that Lee met Robert Natti, her future husband — hence the move to Gloucester where she became Burton’s neighbor. Since my last visit, Lee has been creating bas relief fabric constructions of nature scenes that remind me of Salley Mavor‘s work. We should all be so industrious!

Table mat printed from one of Lee’s Folly Cove designs

Linoleum block for the table mat

It was a beautiful day for a drive and I want to thank Roger for letting me slip out of the office. This is one of those in-between weeks for me — the craziness of the September Magazine is over and I’m waiting for the fall Guide to hit my desk. There are some November Magazine details that need my attention, but it seems wrong to design a snowy magazine cover on such a warm summer day!

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