| From
the November/December 2005 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
Here and There and HCA
 s
Elena Abós conveys (see “The Ugly Duckling Goes to
the Castle,” page 681 of this issue), there is indeed something
of a magical confluence between Hans Christian Andersen and the
setting of the International Youth Library. I spent a morning at
Blutenberg Castle this past April and saw the exhibition Elena describes
— paintings by Kamila Stanclová and Dusan Kállay
for the German publisher cbj’s new edition of Andersen’s
Märchen.
My visit to the IYL was one highlight of a prodigiously
enlightening week I spent in Germany courtesy of the German Book
Office, a New York branch of the Frankfurt Book Fair that encourages
the translation and acquisition of German-language books for the
U.S. market. The GBO’s indefatigable director Riky Stock led
our small party — five children’s book editors from
New York City and me — through the ins and outs of German
children’s book publishing.
Unlike the United States, where children’s
trade publishing is centered in New York (with notable exceptions),
German children’s book publishing can be found throughout
the country, with no particular city dominating. We visited publishers
in Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Munich, ranging in size from the children’s-only
publishers Oetinger and Esslinger to the international media behemoth
Bertelsmann (where we met in a grandly scaled conference room named
for Whitney Houston). On our last day in Munich, we met with several
more publishers, primarily smaller houses from Austria and Switzerland.
In an era when the chase for the “international
best seller” has become just as much a feature of children’s
publishing as of adult, it was not surprising to see many similarities
to the States: Harry ruled, with Cornelia Funke not far beyond.
(We heard much gossip about Funke there, about her “going
Hollywood,” literally — moving to L.A., where she has
allegedly bought Faye Dunaway’s house.) Bridget Jones’s
teenage sisters were perhaps even more in evidence there than here,
with whole series devoted to “cheeky girls.”
Of course, we found differences. Books in Germany
are sold at the price fixed by the publisher, without discounting,
which results in a completely different kind of retail landscape
— and lots of bookstores. Found in those bookstores but also
just about everywhere else — drugstores, etc. — were
“Pixi-Büchern,” small, square paperback picture
books (with far more text than an American publisher would stand
for) displayed in giant plastic bowls proffered by the Pixi mascot,
who bears a passing resemblance to an oversize Keebler elf.
Throughout the trip, I became preoccupied with
the casual use in our profession of the word European as
an adjective for picture books, and not generally a complimentary
one. Lengthy texts, cool-toned full-bleed watercolors, elongated
faces and torsos, haunted eyes — you know the drill. For example,
while looking at Stanclová and Kállay’s paintings
at the IYL and later admiring the handsome edition of Andersen tales
they appear in, I thought, Gorgeous, but aren’t they a little
too . . . European for American children?
(Actually, what might be just as much of a roadblock is the book’s
lack of any notes on the selection or translation of the tales.
The frequent absence of documentation — even indexing —
in German juvenile nonfiction was quite surprising.) But then I
slapped myself. Young readers disprove our parochial assumptions
all the time, as when Scholastic was forcefully told by fans that
they should be leaving more of the “British English”
in the Harry Potter books. You can’t get more European
than Hans Christian Andersen, but you also can’t get more
deeply to the heart of things — a fact that has sent the gentleman’s
stories around the world for some 150 years.
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