| From
the September/October 2003 year issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
The Little Old Lady from Chicago
 ometimes
irony takes a while to catch up with you, but even back in 1980
Zena Sutherland’s considered opinion of the Horn Book
made me laugh. I was a student in Zena’s fabled children’s
literature course at the University of Chicago’s Graduate
Library School, and she was giving us her summation of the strengths
and weaknesses of the various review journals. “The Horn
Book,” she said, “is known as ‘The Little
Old Lady From Boston.’” After an exquisitely timed beat
she added, “And it’s run by a little old lady
from Boston, too.” (Some of you may think it still is, but
Zena was referring to Ethel Heins; while I didn’t know that
Zena and Ethel were the same height and Zena the elder, I did know
that all jokes aside, Zena had a healthy respect and liking for
Ethel that was returned.)
We publish in this issue Paul O. Zelinsky’s
Zena Sutherland Lecture, the twenty-first in a series that began
in 1983 (with a speech by Zena’s great friend Maurice Sendak,
whose memorial drawing is reproduced here), and the first since
Zena’s death in June of 2002. Zena would have loved this speech,
its spirit of inquiry and its interest in the workings of the human
brain. She told me that she had entered library school with a firm
plan to become a medical librarian, and it was only due to happenstance
— and the precise prose and shrewd judgment of the “book
cards” she wrote for a children’s literature class taken
on a whim — that she began working at the Bulletin of
the Center for Children’s Books. My personal debt to
Zena is incalculable: she gave me my professional life. Indeed,
through her decades of editorship of BCCB, her authorship of Children
and Books, and the careers and scholarship of her students,
everyone with a stake in children’s books is better off for
her work.
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