| From
the May/June 2004 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
Guess How Much I Love You,
Catcher in the Rye
 n
his 1971 book A Sense of Story, English critic John Rowe
Townsend essentially throws up his hands at the task of answering
the question “What is a children’s book?” He writes,
“The only practical definition of a children’s book
today — absurd as it sounds — is ’a book which
appears on the children’s list of a publisher.’”
Townsend acknowledged that this definition was workable but imperfect;
it remains so more than thirty years later.
The paradoxical nature and borders of children’s
literature have always been hard to determine. What we call children’s
literature is written by adults, edited by adults, published by
adults, evaluated by adults, and bought by adults. Children come
into the equation when it’s time to read the books (and whether
or not you consider this a passive role depends on how you view
the act of reading). In any case, the numbers seem rather skewed
in favor of the adults. These days, the adult presence in the literature
is greater than ever, as more adults read children’s books
for pleasure (His Dark Materials; Harry Potter); as more publishers
produce children’s books directly for adults (celebrity picture
books; I-Love-Baby-and-Baby-Loves-Me books); as adult characters
and themes play larger roles in YA novels; and as more marketing
is now directed at consumers, rather than at the stalwart stand-ins
for and champions of kids: librarians.
The theme of this special issue is one that came
to us literally over a period of months, as we realized that many
of our favorite critics were calling and e-mailing us preoccupied
with the line between books for children and books for adults. In
this issue, our distinguished contributors consider these undefined,
unmapped borderlines: between books for children and those for adults,
between writing for children and writing for adults, between reading
as children and reading as adults.
The line is sometimes blurred — and therefore
intriguing — because we are all both adult and (former) child.
When was the exact moment you grew up? What calculus of personal
and professional interest informs your reading of children’s
books? How much of your adult mind do you use when reading, and
how much do you — and can you, asks Perry Nodelman in this
issue — step aside in favor of the child you once were?
The borderline is drawn by adults to delineate
books for children. Adults put it there; children wouldn’t
(see the thirteen-year-old reader of Life of Pi and others
whom Tim Wynne-Jones brings to our attention in these pages). However
much critics may examine books in aesthetic isolation, and however
much a writer may say “I write for myself,” someone
(an editor, a librarian, a marketing department) is always on border
patrol. Children are the reason the border is there. Whether blurry
or bright, permeable or not, liberating or restrictive, the border
is part of what defines children’s literature. And that perilously
balanced equation of adult and child can result in unforgettable
books, wherever they are aligned along the border.
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