Crossing the Money Boundary

y grandmother, who was an Appleton from Ipswich, Massachusetts, always said, “A lady should never talk about money.” I have always had an aversion to money, but as a publisher and businesswoman (“a lady should never go into trade” — that didn’t even need to be said), I’m afraid that money has become an ever-growing and oppressive reality. Not just in the business sense of having to break even or make a profit or meet the bills or pay the royalties, but in a much bigger sense. In a defining sense — what I do, what you do — the world of children’s books is ruled by money.

I suspect that most of you are not happy to hear me say this. But I would posit that the greatest, most defining boundary in our cozy little world of children’s books is money. Furthermore, I believe that if we don’t understand how defining money is, how all-encompassing its reach, how it shapes everything we do and even how we see things, then we are both its victims and its agents. I don’t think children’s books exist in a vacuum of purity. To some extent we are living on one side of the money boundary — the have side — and most people are on the other. Obviously there are all kinds of disadvantages to being on the have-not side. But I think those of us on the have side also suffer from our position, and we suffer more in what I might pretentiously call our souls.

Perhaps it is my personal history that has caused me to be so bothered by the divide, or fracture, that I see in the world. I was born and brought up in Guatemala. My mother, whose father was an archaeologist from the Peabody Museum at Harvard, had married my Guatemalan father, who was a doctor. He came from what was probably a fairly typical circumstance in the Guatemala of those days. His father was a general who threw off his wife in favor of a series of mistresses. The children were brought up by their mothers, who were sort of genteel intellectuals with no money at all. The subtle degrees of difference that pervaded Guatemalan society, from the coffee finqueros at the top to the native people — some of whom lived next door — at the bottom, constituted an exquisitely complex, absolutely visible, undeniable and real lexicon for me on class differences, despite any injunctions against speaking about money.

But to return to North America and publishing. I think most people would agree that in the past twenty-odd years, publishing has changed. It was supposed to be the gentlemen’s profession (in children’s books it was ladies, of course). Whether that was ever true I’m not sure. But at least those who made decisions about money were people for whom book publishing was their main business. At least their expectations of what they were doing were based on an understanding of how the business of books worked. And many of them could see that a great “library” list, for example, could be counted on for a steady stream of fairly profitable earnings year in and year out, and they were satisfied with that.

This was the world in which Groundwood was founded in 1978. My colleagues at Tundra, Kids Can, Annick Press, and others who began in roughly the same period were all motivated almost entirely by a cultural mission — to bring Canadian books to Canadian readers, to fill an obvious vacuum. I think it is fair to say that money was the last thing on our minds. We more or less grew up as companies through the years of the baby boomlet, which made it fairly easy, and were doing all right selling rights to our friends in the U.S. and our books to great bookstores like the Children’s Bookstore in Toronto and the other specialized stores that opened across Canada.

Then came the moment when U.S. publishers lost interest in buying rights, especially to marginal Canadian books. At home we experienced the establishment of the world’s most extreme bookselling monopoly, Chapters. Furthermore, we elected a government in Ontario that had one mandate only. Make the world easier for rich people. Do away as much as possible with the public sector, which of course includes libraries and schools.

What has happened in the United States during the same period is different but no less significant. The massive restructuring and merging of U.S. publishing companies into multimedia conglomerates has had an equally devastating impact, although in a different sense. The new owners had no idea how to run a marginally profitable enterprise. They had actually believed that by publishing books they could make a return on investment of fifteen to twenty percent, which proved illusory. In their desperate need to justify their investment, they have done a number of pretty foolish things, most notably acquiring companies only to destroy them and firing great editors who had built the very lists they were once so eager to buy.

While this was happening in the States, Canadian publishers, acting out of now rather desperate domestic circumstances, turned to the American market in order to survive. This has brought its own compromises to our publishing programs.

Certainly the need to survive has made all of us Canadians much more comfortable with business and the bottom line. Maybe this is just the process of growing up. But it is alarming that we have almost unconsciously begun to shape our lists to the new imperatives — the need for profit and the need to make ourselves palatable to the U.S. market. Will this book sell in the U.S.? Do American librarians like this kind of book? Is it just too weird, or different, or too shocking for them?

Canadian spelling disappeared from our books without a second thought. But I am sure that, unconsciously, the content of our books has also begun to change. We want to sell to Barnes and Noble, too. And what about School Library Journal? Will they like this book, we begin to wonder. When will disguising Canadian content simply become too bothersome? Shouldn’t we just publish American books? After all, overt Canadian content does not seem to interest the majority of Americans. There are notable exceptions, of course. Brian Doyle, one of the most Canadian of authors, has been warmly embraced by many Americans, something no U.S. editor ever predicted. Tim Wynne-Jones, Ian Wallace, Martha Brooks, and Sarah Ellis are other critical exceptions. But none of these authors has been able to achieve the kinds of sales in the U.S. that their literary prestige would have delivered had they been Americans.

While observing my own publishing behavior in the face of the new money reality, I have also watched with interest what is happening in U.S. children’s publishing and what strikes me as the increasing level of comfort with the world of money there. To be absolutely honest, I have been surprised by the degree to which the U.S. library market, which I had always considered to be a bastion of quality, seems to me on closer look to be shaped, infiltrated, and influenced by money. And children’s book publishing, which depends on that market, strikes me as being both the cause and the victim of this situation. Perhaps more disturbing is that I’m not sure people are aware of the extent to which money pervades what we do in what is now ineluctably North American children’s publishing.

I have to confess that I was shocked (is that too strong a word?) when I realized that people not only knew who was on the Newbery and Caldecott juries, but that these jurors were regularly taken out to eat by the very publishers whose books they would be judging, sometimes accompanied by the authors whose books stood a chance of winning. Apparently this is true of the Notable Books committees and others as well. It’s normal to want to be nice to one’s customers. But shouldn’t prize committees, like members of the International Olympic Committee, avoid even the appearance of being influenced? Where is the line between convivial sharing of interests or friendly get-togethers and buying support?

Recently, the Coretta Scott King, Pura Belpré, and other ethnically based awards were taken to task in an article in the Horn Book for being not about quality but about ethnicity. But aren’t the Newbery and Caldecott awards, which are held up as representing the acme of quality, open to question themselves? Can an entire system that depends on how much you are able to spend, on meals, on freebies, on free books, on advertising, lay claim to be operating in the pure realm of “literary quality”?

In my experience of the world, money, like power, is a corrupting force, especially when it is not acknowledged. And comfort with being comfortable — when is that just normal and when does it insidiously begin to affect how one sees and what one does about what one sees?

If this money boundary exists within the North American children’s book world, think about the whole American continent, North and South. Sometimes, when I am standing in my booth at ALA feeling sorry for myself, I think there can be nothing poorer than a Canadian publisher. (Then I remember that Canadian authors and illustrators are even poorer.)

But imagine what it would be like for a Mexican publisher and his or her authors and illustrators to try to participate in the U.S. El Dorado. I know the books of Mexican publishers quite well, and I admire them. In fact, I try to translate as many as I can. After all, there are an awful lot of Hispanics living in the U.S. who need books of their own, too. But how could a Mexican publisher, whose resources are far more limited than mine, get a booth at ALA, pay to mail free books, give dinner and lunch parties for librarians, advertise — do all those things that are necessary to achieve even a modicum of visibility? To have their books even entered in the array of books being looked at and assessed for their “quality”? And yet are these books any less worthy or potentially less important for many children living in the U.S.? I don’t think so.

If this is true for Mexicans, whose economy is growing and who live right next door, imagine how it is for a publisher in Ghana or India, or Iran or Malaysia. And think how few of their books cross the money boundary to be laid out on the same table as the Newbery, Caldecott, and Notable books for all of us to look at.

Where does the responsibility for this lie? Are these publishers simply too incompetent to bring their products to the English-speaking marketplace? Is the market right, by definition? Is a cultural work more deserving because by virtue of its language and the dollars behind it, it becomes an artifact of world culture? Many of us routinely deplore this idea in the case of Disney, for example. But is it that different — although obviously to a lesser degree — with books?

Many U.S. acquiring editors don’t bother to go to Bologna any more to look at what the world is doing. Why not? Because it is “too expensive,” and the books they used to buy there “don’t sell.” And yet these are the richest publishers in the world, and this is the richest market in the world. Money insidiously makes its way into people’s attitudes as they learn to live within a culture in which money becomes the measure of success.

Two friends in the U.S. publishing world have said things to me in the past few years that I never believed could come out of their mouths. One told me that she never goes to Bologna anymore (and she was a pioneer there) because she is too besieged by foreign publishers and agents trying to get her to buy their books. I asked whether she didn’t feel she learned something by being there, just looking at what book-people in other parts of the world were doing. “I have nothing to learn from them,” she said.

Another person said to me, “Anyone who hasn’t made money in the past ten years in children’s books is completely incompetent.” Well, this was an arrow to my heart. But I also couldn’t believe my ears. Neither of these people would ever have said anything remotely like this twenty years ago.

Does it matter? Absolutely. Money ultimately builds a wall between us and the rest of the world. It coarsens our perceptions; it deadens us. Just as I can find myself walking without a qualm past a street person in Toronto who is asking for spare change, we have become so complacent and comfortable with what we are doing that we can walk by all kinds of exciting, innovative, but different and maybe uncomfortable work being created outside our privileged world and not even bother to look. This might be described as the you-don’t-interest-me-therefore-you-aren’t-of-interest syndrome.

Can we really lay claim to knowing what is the best work for children being written and illustrated in the world? Can we confidently state that we actually have any idea what is being done around the world and how what we do stacks up against it? Think of Europe. Have any of you read Mats Wahl of Sweden, Monika Pelz of Austria, or Alicia Vieira of Portugal? These are leading authors in their respective countries. They are widely translated into many languages. But not English. Is language the problem, or have we become lazy, or do we simply live far too comfortably within our own cozy world? Are we really the best?

IBBY (the International Board on Books for Young People) is one of the few places where such questions are discussed more or less frankly and openly, which isn’t always comfortable or easy but is always invigorating. A Pan-African congress is planned for 2004. Will we be there in person and with support? I was dismayed to see how few U.S. children’s book people came to the 2000 IBBY congress in Cartagena, where all the riches of Latin American book publishing, to say nothing of its cultures, were so brilliantly and effectively displayed.

How can we cross the money boundary to actually understand who we are in the world and really look at each other outside the money system? Being there is one way.

But comfort with our own condition and the sneaking suspicion, born of Protestantism, that we somehow deserve our own good fortune can render us oblivious. I don’t think this is acceptable. (On the other hand, perhaps I’m exaggerating a bit here. When I was sent to stay with my grandmother in Cambridge after I was suspended from Concord Academy for being “negative,” my grandmother said, “Patsy, you always go too far.”)

ONE OF MY HAPPIEST days in the past six months was when I returned from Bologna to find Brian Doyle’s manuscript for Mary Ann Alice on my desk. He hadn’t written a book in a long while. When I read it I was even happier, because it was great. I felt a love for Brian washing over me — the kind of love a publisher can feel for a favorite author whom one feared was lost — a prodigal-son kind of feeling. The other day, without telling Brian, I drove up to Low to visit the Paugan Dam, one of the subjects of the new book. I had never been along the Gatineau, and it was a thrill to see the covered bridge in Wakefield, the river itself, the names on the tombstones, the church in Martindale — all of Brian’s world. Again I felt suffused with love and affection and gratitude for this book, and I thought that for an author, writing a book is an act of love. Money only enters into it later. God knows authors and illustrators don’t make books for money, though they desperately need money to live on. But the world of money in children’s books is not their friend, nor ours.

We can’t change the whole world. But I think it behooves us to remain vigilant and self-knowing. I think we can fight off the complacency that is perhaps the greatest danger in being comfortable. The world is far richer than we know. Beyond our side of this boundary lies a whole range of experience — tragic, difficult, challenging, funny, and human — that we must discover not only for the benefit of those who do not have what we have but, just as important, for ourselves and for our children. To do this, I’m afraid (sorry, Grandmother), we do need to talk about money and understand what it does to us. We need to try to get to the other side of the money boundary and at least explore what is there. We won’t regret it.

Patsy Aldana is president and publisher of Groundwood Books. Her article is adapted from a speech delivered at the Children’s Literature New England summer institute “Considering Boundaries” on July 31, 2001, in Toronto, Ontario.