From the January/February 2010 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Editorial
Effective Coloration

ike most of my color-blind brethren (and they are mostly brethren), I’m used to explaining to the able-eyed that my condition does not mean I see in black and white. Your gray is my green; my blue is your…green. I’ve learned never to buy a tie alone, but I am not the reason the 2008 Caldecott committee chose The Invention of Hugo Cabret as its winner.

Nor can I claim pride of ownership for this full-color and freshly designed issue of The Horn Book Magazine. That honor goes first to our designer Lolly Robinson, who tactfully engaged the editorial staff in understanding what we wanted The Horn Book to look like. And, more to the point, what we wanted it to be. With the advice and support of Horn Book publisher Andrew Thorne, Lolly led us through various page designs, fonts, headline treatments, and colors, showing us that what a page looks like should begin with what it means to say, and that color is not just decorative but elucidating. We hope you find it so in these pages.

January/February issue traditions are still here: our coverage of the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards; our “Fanfare” choices for the best books for children and young adults published last year. To celebrate both our new color capability and our good taste in books, we asked five of the illustrators honored on “Fanfare” to contribute short essays with their thoughts about color. (Incidentally, the idea to link brief topical musings by authors and illustrators to a particular theme in each issue was the brainchild of Associate Editor Claire E. Gross, who is leaving us this month for the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign. Claire will join some very good Horn Book friends there — Betsy Hearne, Christine Jenkins, Deborah Stevenson — and the association should be a mutually rewarding one.)

We are starting a few new traditions, too. Beginning with this issue, Leonard S. Marcus will be contributing the column “Sight Reading,” about illustration and picture books, with that favorite picture-book reviewer word retro in his sights first. (Maybe he’ll take up friendly next — when was the last time a set of “friendly” watercolors offered to buy you lunch?) Leonard is well known for his many books about children’s literature (most recently Funny Business: Conversations with Writers of Comedy) as well as his series of interviews, in these pages, with publishing legends. And Megan Lambert, an instructor at the Simmons College Center for the Study of Children’s Literature and the mother of five children, is the debut essayist for the new column “Books in the Home.” While most Horn Book readers are librarians and teachers, this column will consider what happens between children and books when we go off-duty. Near the end of the issue you will find “Impromptu,” a collection of miscellanea that we will — as the title suggests — make up as we go along.

We’ll be adding more newness throughout the year, so stay tuned. It is not — it is never — too late for you to tell us what you need, and what you think: printed on paper is not synonymous with set in stone, so please let us know what we could be doing better.

—Roger Sutton

From the January/February 2010 issue of The Horn Book Magazine