| From
the July/August 2006 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
Awards Inside Out
 hen
I came to the Horn Book ten years ago, it was in the midst of controversy
about the January/February 1996 editorial by Martha Parravano and
Lauren Adams, “A Wider Vision for the Newbery.”
God love ’em. The editorial’s modest
(too modest, I think) call that the Newbery winners stop resembling
each other year after year prompted all kinds of reaction, much
of it hostile, and even those who took the editors’ side sometimes
did so for reasons that were at odds with Lauren and Martha, if
not reality.
Awards discussions always get children’s
book people pumped up, both about individual titles and the awards
process itself. Even the latest venue for these debates, blogging,
will find itself doing what the field has always done through many
forums — i.e., nominating contenders and revisiting old questions
about the criteria for the various awards. (I see that the 2008
Newbery Medal chair, the estimable Nina Lindsay, has set up a blog
soliciting discussion of this year’s contenders; see our
blog, www.hbook.com/blog,
for the link.)
The Parravano–Adams editorial was by no means
the Horn Book’s first salvo into these battles —
we love this stuff just as much as everybody else does. Earlier
Horn Book editors have tossed out the occasional flare
(see Ethel Heins’s “A Cry for Laughter”
and Anita Silvey’s “Could Randolph
Caldecott Win the Caldecott Medal,” both available on
our website), and in recent years our pages turned almost incendiary
when Marc Aronson took
on the Coretta Scott King Awards.
I don’t need to tell you that such provocation
is good for the awards and, more important, good for books. But
just how those transactions work is rich in methods and ironies,
explored in heady detail in James F. English’s book The
Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural
Value (Harvard University Press, 2005). While the book can
become numbingly theoretical (I’d never seen the word disequilibrious
before and never want to again), spicing things up are many juicy
facts, such as that the Library of Congress issues a special ISBN
“by means of which booksellers could place advance orders
for Oprah’s Pick without knowing what title they were ordering”
and that porn is surpassed only by children’s literature as
a genre whose awards have a “direct and powerful effect on
sales.”
Aside from that provocative connection, Mr. English
doesn’t discuss children’s book prizes, but that’s
his problem. I’m still taken by his persuasive argument that
“critique, at least in its usual forms, is itself a fundamental
and even in many circumstances an obligatory part of the game, a
recognizable mode of complicitous participation.” He means
that critics of awards are themselves an integral part of the system
that gives an award its cultural value, and that discontent with
and scandal about an award’s choices keep that award alive.
But he says this like it’s a bad thing. Sure, critics are
in the game, but where English sees this compromising both critic
and award, we can also look at it as literature and readership in
a community where debate enriches both.
The announcement of children’s book prizes
rarely prompts the fierce rejoinders that greet winners of the grown-up
awards. Grumbling, yes, and lots of talk about changing the rules.
(Or adding new awards, but those in charge of such things would
do well to remember English’s point that “each new prize
that fills a gap or void in the system of awards defines at the
same time a lack that will justify and indeed produce another
prize.”) But there’s not the sort of scandal that, as
English says, will simultaneously decry an award’s choices
and build up its prestige. Are we too polite, too ladylike? Are
the stakes or the community too small? Or do we just have better
things to do? Perhaps the Newbery and Caldecott (for example) don’t
matter in quite the same way as the Pulitzer or the Man Booker.
I say this like it’s a good thing.
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