Thomas
Todd
photo | audio
Thomas Todd, publisher emeritus of the Horn Book and longtime resident
of Littleton and Gloucester, Massachusetts, died September 9, 2007.
He was eighty-nine years old.
Tom Todd’s association with The Horn Book spanned decades,
but at first it was more a matter of family tradition than personal
passion. Had his father, also named Thomas Todd and the owner of
one of Boston’s most renowned printing companies, not taken
on the printing chores for Bertha Mahony’s new magazine in
1924, it’s unlikely that the younger Thomas, thirty years
later, and then his son, Duncan Todd, seventy years later, would
have found themselves on the masthead.
Not that Tom Todd wasn’t a literary man. A proud son of Dartmouth,
class of 1940, he was a careful reader, a nimble writer (his employee
handbook should be assigned to human resources departments the way
Strunk and White is required of college freshman), and a shrewd
judge of page design. A lifetime in the printing business —
which he inherited from his father — can produce the most
informed sort of book lover. It’s just that books for children
were, well, for children, and after he raised his own four, he was
not inclined to look back.
Yet in his later years, in that deeply satisfying
way in which life sometimes imitates art, Tom grew into his own
sort of classic character, a blend of Homer Price and Mr. Putter.
He took special care with all new hires, charming them with stories
of his childhood roguery, then chilling them with cautionary tales
of people who neglected to save enough in their youth. He was a
vibrant, kind, and lovely man. Thomas Todd wasn’t well known
in the children’s book world, which suited him just fine,
but he understood its heart.
Anne E. Quirk, Publisher
Thomas Todd 
listen
From a 1988 interview, Thomas Todd talks about his father, Bertha
Mahony Miller, and the editorial he wrote that made an unnamed editor
"hopping mad."
4:11
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