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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Cindy:
Cinder (Feiwel, 2012), the first book in Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles series. This futuristic Cinderella story is a mix of fairy tale, sci-fi, and romance — perfect for a wide female readership and certain to spark discussion and anticipation of future installments. Watch your back, Hunger Games, this series could be the next big thing. My second choice for mothers and daughters to read together would be Kekla Magoon’s 37 Things I Love (in no particular order) (Holt, 2012) for its honest first-person portrayal of a teenage girl’s coming of age as she deals with death, hope, love, and friendship.

Elissa:
Amelia Lost: The Life and Disappearance of Amelia Earhart by Candace Fleming (Random/Schwartz and Wade, 2011). It’s suspenseful, informative, and accessible; readers will come away with a fresh view of the feisty, pioneering woman and the events leading up to — and following — her disappearance.

Kitty:
Libba Bray’s hilarious and sharply observant Beauty Queens (Scholastic, 2011). A planeload of beauty pageant contestants crashes on what looks like a deserted island. The scope of the plot is mind-boggling — the girls are ultimately pawns in a massive global conspiracy — but the quieter message about the power unleashed when teen girls think society isn’t watching will resonate across generations. Bray’s narration of the audiobook edition is a tour-de-force performance.

Katrina:
The mature topics in Girl in the Mirror (Persea, 2013) by Meg Kearney will appeal to older teens (and give mothers a jumping-off point for discussion), but it’s as much about mother-daughter bonds and connection to family — both adopted and birth in this case. Ideal for girls with adopted, single-parent, or other unconventional family backgrounds. Its verse narrative will likely be a new and exciting format for teens and moms to explore together.

Katie:
The women in Wren’s family manifest magical powers when they reach puberty. Wren uses hers to bring her boyfriend Danny back from the dead, but then meets (living) Gabriel, who’s drawn to her gift. Although romance takes center stage in Amy Garvey’s Cold Kiss (HarperTeen, 2011), Garvey weaves female familial relationships as intricately as Wren creates her spell. The complex dynamics between three generations of magical women (think a YA Practical Magic) add depth — and plenty for teen girls and their moms to discuss.

Martha:
How about A. S. King’s Ask the Passengers (Little, Brown, 2012)? Protagonist Astrid is taking a class in the Socratic method at her close-minded, small-town high school, and so she spends the year “asking questions and not rushing to answer them” — an illuminating time for her, and an ideal springboard for book discussion. Is she gay? Or just in love with one particular girl? Once she determines her identity, should she hide it, like her best friend? Astrid makes some pretty crucial choices in the book, and readers will be right there to see why, and how; through the interspersed airplane interludes (Astrid spends a lot of time looking up at the sky and sending questions and love to the passengers on airplanes) readers get glimpses into other lives, just as full of struggle and conflict and not-easy answers as Astrid’s life is. Finally, seeing as this is a mother/teen daughter read-together, Astrid’s relationship with her (nightmare of a) mother would certainly provoke discussion…

Roger:
I think Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name Verity (Hyperion, 2012) would be an excellent choice; it’s the kind of YA book that makes a great adult crossover. While the story — a WWII thriller about two young women — is plenty exciting on its own, the narrative structure is tricky and would be fun to talk about.

Shara:
Pearl (called Bean) and her best friend Henry are comfortable with their respective familial dysfunctional in Pearl (Holt, 2011) by Jo Knowles, but the revelation of long-kept family secrets exposes the corrosive effect that silence can have on relationships. Homosexuality, friendship, and romance are just a few of the topics tackled by this dramatic novel.

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Developer Nosy Crow utilizes a choose-your-own-adventure narrative structure, which has recently become a trend in children’s digital applications, to encourage interactivity and nonlinear story exploration. As Red sets out to deliver a basket of goodies to Grandma, she encounters a hungry wolf and several forks in the road along the way. A combination of three paths (out of eight total) leads to the final destination, each path featuring a mini activity that Red must complete in order to obtain items that she will ultimately use to battle the Big Bad Wolf in the denouement at Grandma’s house. Each time you play, you can try a different combination of paths and activities, thus changing the final outcome. An easily navigable map in the upper right corner allows you to backtrack and try different paths if you don’t like the way things are going.

Mini activities include simple tasks such as picking flowers, collecting jars of water, and pouring honey, to name a few. Each activity employs an interactive element: tilting the device from side to side, blowing into the microphone, and dragging items here and there using the touch screen technology.

No matter which paths you take, the story concludes with a no-holds-barred, girl vs. canine showdown that ends with the inevitable butt-kicking of the maniacal Big Bad Wolf, wherein he gets his just deserts through a variety of humorously humiliating defeat sequences, while the victors, Red and Grandma, just get desserts — the only things devoured in this version of Little Red are the treats from the picnic basket.

Available for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad; $4.99. Requires iOS 4.3 or later.

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- more picture books about outdoor play
- biographies of sports heroes
- heroines of historical fiction
- YA adventure stories on audio

Subscribers to the free monthly Notes from the Horn Book newsletter also receive its supplement Nonfiction Notes — sign up here. For more recommended books and author/illustrator interviews, see the newsletter archives.

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It was the little black velvet drawstring purse that caught my eye. The strip of antique-y eyelet cloth on which it sat was a quaint touch, to be sure, but the purse was what beckoned me. The purse, its mysterious contents, and cloth were secured with a black grosgrain ribbon around Holly Black’s newest book, Doll Bones (Simon/McElderry, May 2013), and the whole curious package was giving me a come-hither look from Katie’s inbox. I had to know what secrets the purse was keeping.

And then there was this…Katie warned me: “Don’t look in there. It’s creepy.” Just the invitation I needed.

here’s lookin’ at you

Promotional doll-eyeball lapel pins? Creep-tastic! I wore one for an hour or so, and no one noticed. Not a single person. So I ramped it up a notch and added the second one, then purposefully stood in front of my coworkers and made small talk. I thought the eyeballs would be good conversation starters, but after the initial laugh and question about where I got my accessories…awkward silence. Or they wanted to get back to work. Whatever. I know cool when I see it. And it looks right back at me…lifelessly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Many of the books in this issue of Notes implicitly enjoin us to look up from the page and head out into nature (or, as my mother would say, “put down that book and go out and play!”). As I write this, we’re just coming off of Screen-Free Week, an annual effort in which young people and adults alike are encouraged to turn off their TVs, computers, and game consoles in favor of non-virtual recreation. “Read a book instead!” has always been at the top of the list of approved alternatives — but what if your book is on a screen? As digital editions take an increasing piece of the publishing pie, we are all being challenged to rethink what we mean by “book” and “reading.” I can now go outside and take an entire library along with me in my pocket. I wonder what Screen-Free Week — not to mention my mother — would think about that?

Roger Sutton
Editor in Chief

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Get outside
Peep and Ducky by David Martin, illus. by David Walker, Candlewick, 1–4 years.
Phoebe and Digger by Tricia Springstubb, Candlewick, 3–6 years.
Everyone Can Learn to Ride a Bicycle by Chris Raschka, Schwartz & Wade/Random, 3–6 years.
It’s Our Garden by George Ancona, Candlewick, 5–8 years.

Get moving
Becoming Babe Ruth by Matt Tavares, Candlewick, 4–7 years.
You Never Heard of Willie Mays?! by Jonah Winter,  Schwartz & Wade/Random, 4–7 years.
Hoop Genius: How a Desperate Teacher and a Rowdy Gym Class Invented Basketball by John Coy, illus. by Joe Morse, Carolrhoda, 4–7 years.
Daredevil: The Daring Life of Betty Skelton by Meghan McCarthy, Wiseman/Simon, 4–7 years.

Historical fiction starring girls
Sugar by Jewell Parker Rhodes, Little, Brown, 8–12 years.
Bo at Ballard Creek by Kirkpatrick Hill, illus. by LeUyen Pham, Holt, 8–12 years.
Hattie Ever After by Kirby Larson, Delacorte, 10–14 years.
One Came Home by Amy Timberlake, Knopf, 10–14 years.

Teen audiobooks
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, read by Morven Christie and Lucy Gaskell, Bolinda/Brilliance, 14–17 years.
Eve & Adam by Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate, read by Jenna Lamia and Holter Graham, Macmillan Audio, 14–17 years.
Pandemonium [Delirium trilogy] by Lauren Oliver, read by Sarah Drew, Listening Library, 14–17 years.
A Confusion of Princes by Garth Nix, read by Michael Goldstrom, Listening Library, 14–17 years.

These titles were featured in the May 2013 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

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