First of all, however, we are publishing this sheet to blow the horn for fine books for boys and girls — their authors, their illustrators, and their publishers. Small and inconspicuous space in the welter of present-day printing is given to the description and criticism of these books, and yet the finest type of writing, illustrating, and printing goes into them.

We hope to make our book notes and lists interesting to boys and girls themselves, to parents, to librarians, and to teachers, and by this means we shall keep our Suggestive Purchase List up to date. We also hope to give book news not covered elsewhere, including occasional short sketches of people who have done most for children’s literature and who should be remembered. We shall be glad to answer book questions, and if we receive at any time a particularly interesting letter about books, we shall print it in The Hornbook.

We find, too, that some of our friends live far away from Boston and come to see us only once a year. To them we want The Hornbook to carry greetings and news of The Bookshop and of The Bookshop staff.

Lest this horn-blowing become tiresome to you or to us, we shall publish The Hornbook only when we have something of real interest to say; not oftener than four times a year.

You may expect the next number on the first day of Children’s Book Week, November 10, 1924.

— Bertha E. Mahony

This editorial was in the first issue of The Horn Book, October 1924.

The post The Horn Book’s inaugural editorial appeared first on The Horn Book.

But life, real life, is also a string of accidents. Bertha Mahony was thirty-three and restless after ten years as a good right-hand at Boston’s Women’s Educational and Industrial Union when she came upon the article in the August 1915 Atlantic Monthly that, as she often said, “changed my life.” With a mix of statistics and soft soap, the author extolled bookselling as a new profession for the educated, emancipated woman.

Mahony, a serious, ambitious reader, would have liked to study librarianship years earlier at the new Simmons College, but lack of sufficient funds steered her toward the shorter secretarial course instead. As Assistant Secretary at the Union, a model of privileged progressivism, she had charge of promotional materials, in addition to her regular duties, and on her own initiative she launched a four-year series of children’s plays. Meanwhile, working with the Officers, she learned how people of influence get things done: by going to the top.

The eager bookseller-to-be scouted locations, considered and discarded the Northwest (reputedly like New England but too far away), resolved to remain in Boston despite its abundance of book-shops, and decided that hers would be a children’s bookshop — a new thing and a good thing.

By mid-October she had the backing of the Officers and Board of the Union, and a target date. She arranged a private, Saturday-morning tutorial in children’s literature with Alice Jordan, the Boston Public Library expert, and besides reading the assigned books, she studied the library booklists Jordan gave her, the compilations of Caroline Hewins and Clara Hunt. By spring, she and her newly recruited assistants were ready to place orders and Mahony herself was ready to meet the people who mattered. Bookseller and children’s-book enthusiast Frederic Melcher initiated her into the trade in Indianapolis and into the activities of the American Booksellers Association at its Chicago convention. Back East, she introduced herself to Anne Carroll Moore in New York and took a second, closer look at the Central Children’s Room; braved the elevated subway to see Clara Hunt in Brooklyn; and stopped off in Hartford to get Caroline Hewins’s blessing. “It was on this occasion,” Mahony later wrote, “that Miss Hewins promised to write for our recommended purchase list a preface on John Newbery’s ‘Juvenile Library,’ a first bookshop for children in London of the 1700’s.”

Had she asked? Had she known enough of Newbery’s historical role to ask? Had she already been thinking of her bookshop, five months before its scheduled opening, as another landmark in children’s book history? Or had this ardent young woman, with her plans for promoting books as selectively and creatively as Hewins and other librarians, and her undoubted enthusiasm for Hewins’s own celebrated list, touched a sympathetic chord?

THE BOOKSHOP OPENED on schedule on October 9, 1916, in second-floor quarters adjacent to the Union but remote from the street. There, Mahony and her close associate Elinor Whitney and their staff promoted children’s books brilliantly, with a variety of programs, exhibits, and special services, and a handsome, 110-page booklist, with the Hewins preface, that was free to all comers and all correspondents. But in the aggregate not many books were sold. Was the location solely to blame or was the concept somehow questionable? In 1921, when a larger, street-front space became available next door, adult books were sold on the ground floor and the spacious, wrap-around balcony became the new and better staging-ground for children’s books. The sign over the door now read, cunningly: The Bookshop for Boys and Girls — With Books on Many Subjects for Grown-Ups.

According to Eulalie Steinmetz Ross, Mahony’s biographer, she had decided that “a children’s bookshop per se was not theoretically sound, isolating young readers as it did from the main stream of literature.” Maintaining that children’s books were part of the literary mainstream was an article of faith with Mahony, her contemporaries and successors, so she would probably not have demurred. But offstage, in a letter, her explanation is more acute: “People want to take care of their own book needs while shopping for their children, but more important still, the children themselves like the presence of grown-up books in a nearby space.” Mahony understood and appreciated people.

For the future of children’s books, no less, it mattered. During the Bookshop’s first Christmas, Anne Carroll Moore stopped by with Caroline Hewins to look over the premises before she gave Mahony her support, privately or publicly. She was enthusiastic, Mahony was exultant, and the two struck up a friendship, with professional ramifications, that endured as long as they lived.

For the cause of children’s books to prosper, there needed to be someone to create the kinds of books that Mahony and Moore could wholeheartedly support — good new books to supplement the classics and substitute for the “trashy” series that Moore threw out of her libraries and Mahony refused to stock. On a visit to New York in 1919 Mahony called on Louise Seaman, the newly appointed children’s book editor at Macmillan, when she was still in makeshift quarters. Seaman, a constant traveler, lost no time in visiting the Bookshop. And another lifelong friendship was cemented.

In the children’s book community of New York, Moore and Seaman were bound to be thrown together, but they were not bound to be friends — Moore was considerably older, Seaman considerably more sophisticated. But Moore (b. Limerick, Maine, 1871), the nineteenth-century New England woman, liked nothing better than to take a taxi back and forth across New York’s new bridges, while Seaman (b. Brooklyn, New York, 1894), Vassar graduate and progressive-school teacher, was passionate about old books, ancient civilizations, and growing roses.

To these three partisans, children’s books were vehicles of imagination, and they promoted them in imaginative, enhancing ways — with sundry booklists and other printed ephemera, with a round of exhibits and programs and special events. But it was Mahony who had the most latitude, the greatest resources, and a knack for connecting books to life that amounted to a creative genius. Bookshop exhibits extended from historical French children’s books to child art; programs ranged from poetry afternoons for adolescents to lectures on educational psychology for adults. Among the booklists was a panoramic state-by-state listing of selected titles in the order of the states’ entry into the Union, entitled “All Aboard on the Old 44” and keyed to Hader illustrations for Cornelia Meigs’s Wonderful Locomotive, the “Old 44.” Traveling with books, in Mahony’s company, could take you almost anywhere.

WITH THE HORN BOOK, she could go further. On a holiday in England in 1924, Mahony and Whitney decided to follow their promptings and start a magazine devoted entirely to children’s books. As an organ of the Bookshop, it would carry a Booklist, called just that, with brief notices of recommended new books. But it would be much more than a guide to good reading — a function Mahony and Whitney’s all-encompassing Realms of Gold soon came to perform. Rather, it would be an expression, and extension, of the Bookshop itself. A grander way, prospectively, to blow the horn for good books.

When the first issue appeared in October 1924, congratulations poured in. “I am so thrilled, excited, entranced, inspired . . . by the Horn Book that I want to send it to everyone I know,” wrote Louise Seaman, enclosing a check for eight subscriptions (at fifty cents each). Anne Carroll Moore carried around a copy and brandished it at meetings, to urge librarians to subscribe. Seaman had further reason to rejoice the following March on publication of her tribute to one of her authors, Padraic Colum, “Stories Out of the Youth of the World,” an article that Mahony had undoubtedly solicited. One hand washed the other, for decades. Mahony liked to have authors and illustrators write about themselves, and especially about the wellsprings of their work. She liked to have their editors, more than anyone else, write personality-pieces or overviews. That there might be a conflict of interest, that this might amount to unpaid advertising, never occurred to her. Everyone concerned had the same interest: the promotion of good books. And when the Horn Book produced its magnificent August 1928 issue celebrating Louise Seaman’s ten years at Macmillan, with articles on her authors and illustrators as well as on Seaman herself, Mahony was surprised and hurt at being criticized, by other publishers, for including fourteen pages from the current Macmillan catalog as a demonstration of the Seaman touch. They suspected her of being bought.

The Seaman issue came in at eighty-five substantial pages. In addition to the Macmillan material, there was a review of Bambi, still interesting today, by a well-known natural scientist; an article on the art of silhouette by John Bennett, whose new book, The Pigtail of Ah Lee Ben Loo, was illustrated with his silhouettes, and a companion-piece on Bennett’s inspired way with children by his editor Bertha Gunterman; a three-page send-off for Realms of Gold by its co-editor Elinor Whitney; and, in conclusion, a dozen pages surveying “Other Children’s Book Departments Since 1918,” their editors, and some of the books on each fall list. Coward-McCann was publishing Millions of Cats, and one of the “unusually interesting” illustrations is on the back cover.

THE MAGAZINE WAS METAMORPHOSING, slowly and then quickly, from an oversize bookshop newsletter into the all-but-official journal of “the new children’s book movement,” as Frederic Melcher called it. The subscription price doubled, to one dollar; the quarterly became a bimonthly, with ads. But the significant changes were internal. In 1932 Bertha Mahony married a wealthy furniture-manufacturer whose home was in Ashburnham, in central Massachusetts, beyond daily commuting range; she began to divide her time between Ashburnham and Boston. In 1934 she and Elinor Whitney resigned from the Bookshop to concentrate on the Horn Book, and it acquired its own good right-hand in the person of Beulah Folmsbee, an all-around professional who ran the office, handled subscriptions and advertising, designed the magazine, and got it out. In 1936 the Union, unable to replace Mahony and Whitney at the Bookshop, sold it into oblivion; Elinor Whitney married prep-school headmaster William Field, and withdrew from month-to-month operations; and Bertha Mahony Miller and Elinor Whitney Field, with their husbands and Horn Book printer Thomas Todd, assumed ownership of the magazine (upon William Miller’s putting its finances to rights).

To Anne Carroll Moore and other old Horn Book friends, this was a new beginning, both a casting off of fetters and an embarkation upon stormy seas. Moore was contributing advice, suggestions, admonishments, and articles right along; she put together an issue honoring Marie Shedlock, the fabled English storyteller, and wrote about Kenneth Grahame and other English personalities she’d known. In 1936, learning that the Horn Book was floating loose, she offered to donate to the cause — “if you think it would strengthen your subscription appeal” — a revived version of her old “Three Owls” column of critical commentary. At sixty-six, Moore was four years short of mandatory retirement, with its loss of entitlements; as a Horn Book fixture, she was sure to get review books and due respect. The magazine, in turn, got a splash of vinegar, a crusty voice.

Louise Seaman had meanwhile married corporate lawyer Edwin DeT. Bechtel; had sustained a horseback-riding injury that hadn’t healed properly; and in 1934 had resigned from Macmillan — all the better, it turned out, to learn about children and books. Especially young children and books. American picture books were in a state of infancy but growing faster than the ability to assess them soundly. The pictures were not traditional illustrations and not to be judged by traditional norms: Bertha Mahony Miller’s most aesthetic friend, Marguerite Mitchell, who had run the Bookshop gallery, could not see anything good in Marjorie Flack’s Angus books, for instance. Picture book texts were a new form of writing altogether.

Among the books by progressive educators that Louise Seaman Bechtel published at Macmillan were two unorthodox geographies by Lucy Sprague Mitchell of the Bank Street School, then called the Bureau of Educational Experiments. Much impressed with Mitchell’s work, Bechtel contributed to the second Here and Now storybook, Another Here and Now Story Book (1937) and took a special interest in the Writers Laboratory that Mitchell started, where Bechtel met and became friends with Margaret Wise Brown. The immediate consequence was an article on Mitchell by Brown and a Bank Street colleague run in tandem with a featured review of Another Here and Now Story Book by Bertha Miller — who admits to “doubting” the first book — in the May 1937 issue of the Horn Book. In effect, Horn Book star treatment for one of Anne Carroll Moore’s least favored people.

Bechtel herself wrote two keystone articles on the newest of the new, “Gertrude Stein for Children” and “Books Before Five.” She took on the comics, in 1941, when that was the hottest topic in children’s bookdom. She wrote major pieces about Elizabeth Coatsworth, Helen Sewell, Rachel Field, and others she’d worked with. When she went to Egypt, she discoursed on the year’s Egyptian books; when she delivered a paper, as she was often asked to do, it usually saw print in the Horn Book. She was a fluent, eloquent writer, vastly informed, and a balance to Moore in her outlook and tastes. But she was enough like Moore to write a lovely appreciation of Walter de la Mare — and Moore was enough like her to also like Gertrude Stein.

The person who stabilized the troika of Bechtel, Miller, and Moore was the Boston Public Library’s Alice Jordan, scholar of American children’s literature and a steady, persuasive reviewer. What she taught Bertha Miller about children’s books by special arrangement, she taught formally to Elinor Whitney Field and decades of Bookshop/Horn Book hands at the Simmons Library School. It was she who gave Miller her first public recognition, in the June 1929 Atlantic Monthly (the portrait on this issue’s cover appeared with that tribute); she who wrote the studies of nineteenth-century American writers that first appeared in the Horn Book in the early 1930s and eventually saw publication as From Rollo to Tom Sawyer (1948); she who touched off the Caroline M. Hewins Lectures, underwritten by Frederic Melcher, on historic New England writers and publishers, that the Horn Book, Inc., also published. And it was Jordan to whom Bertha Miller turned in 1939 to take over the Booklist when total responsibility for the magazine, along with personal concerns, overwhelmed her. For the next eleven years the Horn Book boasted short, substantive reviews — light enough for layfolk, knowledgeable enough for professionals.

Jordan and Bechtel and Moore also went on the masthead that year, along with Elinor Field, to shore up the Horn Book and its frazzled editor. This was no mere window dressing: the erstwhile colleagues became active collaborators, and Miller, to secure their advice and assistance, had to listen to Bechtel’s recital of her shortcomings and Moore’s reproaches for one dereliction or another (each endangering the future of children’s books). Pressures to change, pressures not to change.

Bechtel faulted her for New England insularity — and that, for Miller, was easy to correct. She entered into a correspondence with Gladys English, of the Los Angeles Public Library, to secure an article about Arna Bontemps and an article by him — both appeared in the January 1939 issue — and took up English’s suggestion that the Horn Book have a California issue timed to the forthcoming ALA Los Angeles conference. She started a new department, Hunters Fare, in which a librarian would answer readers’ (alleged) questions about books, and recruited Siri Andrews, then of the University of Washington, to take a turn conducting it. She invited Eulalie Steinmetz Ross, in charge of children’s work at Cincinnati, to speak frankly about Horn Book policies and practices — and Ross did. Andrews later became part of the Horn Book inner circle, and Ross became Miller’s biographer.

OVERALL, SHE HELD TO HER COURSE. And with Beulah Folmsbee to faithfully execute her projects, Alice Jordan to depend on for reviewing, and counselors near and far, she was poised for a decade of enormous productivity. It might be her last — she could not stave off retirement much longer. In the Horn Book she moved away from literature pure-and-simple and toward controversial subjects. Under the auspices of The Horn Book, Inc. — “our little close corporation” — she published the books that would keep her original vision alive and intact, notably Paul Hazard’s lyrical Books, Children and Men and the imposing volume widely known as “Mahony,” Illustrators of Children’s Books: 1744–1945. Both books had their roots in the Bookshop and exude its cultural aura. Serene and good-mannered, they seemed ageless a decade after their publication.

Miller worked devotedly on these books for many years — the same years she was reaching out to working librarians on the West Coast, in the Midwest and the South, and monitoring the news of the world for its relation to children. When she stepped down from the Horn Book editorship in 1951, she left it suspended between the timeless and the timely. And why not?

From the September/October 1999 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Realms of Gold and Granite appeared first on The Horn Book.

Tchrr-r-r-r! The phone would ring. I’d answer, and after a considerable while I’d hear a faint little quavery voice, as if someone were calling me from beyond the Pleiades…“E-li-i-izabeth?”

It would be my dear friend Bertha Mahony Miller, calling from Ashburnham, Massachusetts, about seventeen miles from Mason, New Hampshire, where I lived then (and still do), about something very important — always something important! Could she come over right now to talk about whatever it was?

“Why, of course, Bertha!” I’d say. What other answer could there be?

In an unbelievably short length of time, a great big automobile, with no driver visible above the steering wheel, would swerve into the parking place at my house and stop with dramatic suddenness. The driver’s-side door would open, and out would step a demure little smiling white-haired lady in a pale blue dotted-Swiss dress with a neat lace collar, wearing a stylish navy-blue straw hat and lugging a giant-size briefcase, or perhaps a purse roomy enough to hold a couple of picture books plus a thick sheaf of typewritten pages.

“Oh, E-li-i-i-i-izabeth!” Her blue eyes would twinkle. “I have an entirely new idea to share with you. I can hardly wait to know what you think!”

Up into the woods we’d go. Bertha would always prefer, weather permitting, to talk over a matter of import in the woods rather than inside a house. Out would come a brand-new book, just off the press, or several clipped-together typewritten pages — an article, an editorial for the next issue of the Horn Book, or simply an idea, a plan, a broader view. The talk would always be about imagination, originality, beauty of expression, inspiration, depth of concept; about truth, about things waiting to be which had not yet been. There we would sit on two mossy rocks with birds flitting hither and yon, and now and then a butterfly, with pine boughs moving gently according to each passing breeze, talking about the world and children, about dreams, high hopes transformed into actualities through words and pictures — Bertha’s specialty.

I didn’t know her when she had brown hair. I didn’t know her before she married William D. Miller and became mistress of that beautiful estate in Ashburnham, with its rambling house, its 
classic tiered gardens outside, its wealth of books inside. I didn’t know Bertha until she had fly-away white hair (such as I have now—wouldn’t she be surprised!). She was a year older than my father, yet I never had the slightest inclination to think of her as belonging to the “older” generation. I thought of her as my contemporary, even though the year The Bookshop for Boys and Girls opened in Boston was the year I entered first grade in Highland Park, Illinois. Publication of The Horn Book Magazine commenced the year I graduated from eighth grade. Not until after I graduated from college and had spent a year studying art in France, then another year in New York trying to find a place for my work, was I introduced to Bertha through a happenstance that I described at length thirty-five years later in the October 1969 issue of the Horn Book. I told about how my mother, having just presented my watercolors at a Newbury Street gallery and having received a disheartening verdict, was plodding doggedly ahead on Boylston Street when she suddenly stopped, fascinated, before the window of The Bookshop for Boys and Girls, and ventured inside to see more. She met Beulah Folmsbee and then Bertha, and the outcome of this happenstance was Bertha’s curiosity to see what was in the portfolio that Mother was carrying, followed by Bertha’s insistence on an exhibit of those watercolors and more, at the Bookshop: my first one-man show, the first stepping-stone on the path to my future, and the beginning of a significant and unique friendship that was to last for thirty-five years.

Rich years they were, holding unforgettable experiences: the Caldecott Medal, for instance, in 1945. Bertha wrote to me in May of that year:

I hope you will see that the amplifier at the dinner is fixed just right for you when you speak, and that you will “speak” your paper, not read it. I want the audience not to miss a bit of it.

The intensity of her interest reached beyond her own plans and projects in behalf of children and their reading. When I was involved in trying to create a children’s room in our small public library here in Mason — painting old discarded furniture in bright Czech folk style, trying to create something out of nothing, fairy-tale-fashion — Bertha would come with cartons of new books sent by publishers for Horn Book reviews, along with window curtains trimmed in rick-rack and peasant-design braid, sewn by herself. She would bring important people in the children’s book world to see the new room, to show them what could be done to bring reading to the children of a small town at no cost.

When I was painting the murals-that-never-got-finished at the Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center in Greenfield, New Hampshire, Bertha would bring armloads of picture books for the children as well as such people as the Cronans (the storytellers of Boston) to delight them. Not only did Bertha coax me to write about this magic mountain place for the Horn Book, but when we gave a Christmas pageant, the first in which most of these handicapped children had ever taken part, Bertha insisted on publishing the story of it in book form: a small volume entitled How Far Is It to Bethlehem?

She had no children of her own; yet in a rarer, more long-lasting sense, all children everywhere were hers.

Now and again I happen to meet someone I’ve never met before, and in some mysterious way, the conversation may lead to a mention of the Horn Book.

“The Horn Book, did you say? Do you know the Horn Book?”

“Know it!” exclaimed the person I met just the other day. “I love it! To me, the Horn Book is indispensable!”

Wow! Did you hear that, Bertha, wherever you may be, beyond the Pleiades, perhaps? I somehow know you heard.

As for you, dear beloved Horn Book: Happy seventy-fifth birthday to you! May you continue to thrive and to be indispensable for many and many a year to come!

This article, originally published in the September/October 1999 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, is part of our Caldecott at 75 celebration. Click here for more archival Horn Book material on Elizabeth Orton Jones and Prayer for a Child.

The post Horn Book Reminiscence appeared first on The Horn Book.

So I wrote to Beatrix Potter, as politely and respectfully as I knew how, telling her of my lifelong pleasure in her work, and my admiration, and asking if I might one day call on her and submit for her approval the essay on her work which I was preparing.

Back came, in a few days, the rudest note I have ever received in my life. No, she said, she certainly would not see me. “My books have always sold without advertisement, and I do not propose to go in for that sort of thing now.”

And poor Janet Adam Smith wrote a fine appreciative article for The Listener in January 1943, sending a copy to Potter. The response was not what she had hoped for. Potter told her she read the piece “with mingled gratitude and stupefaction — the writer seems to know a deal more about the inception of the Peter Rabbit books than I do!” When Smith wrote back trying to sort out the misunderstandings, she only made it worse. Potter’s second letter ends, “And for goodness sake don’t write any more rubbish about me.”

At Beatrix Potter Society gatherings, at which her life and work are analyzed (and Potter-themed food is served), one regularly hears someone ask, “What would Beatrix think of all this?” My mind immediately pictures an irate Potter up in heaven with a huge shepherd’s crook, itching to swoop it down and yank all of us off the stage. And what about this December, when Renée Zellweger stars in the film biography Miss Potter? Better watch out!

But Potter, it seems, could be gotten ’round. And it was Bertha Mahony Miller, founding editor of The Horn Book Magazine, who did it, convincing Potter to accept the idea of critical writing about her books, and even to write about her own life as it related to those books. How did Bertha persuade Beatrix that she could and should write about her books and herself? Beatrix and Bertha never met, so Bertha’s only means of persuasion was her letters. What powers of personality allowed her to break through Potter’s barriers, to dislodge the chip on her shoulder?

Bertha Mahony Miller waiting for the train to Boston, circa 1950.

On the surface, Beatrix Potter and Bertha Mahony could not have been more different. Beatrix was a shy child, born in London to wealthy parents who were fashionably distant toward their two children. As an adult, she struggled to break free from her seemingly predestined fate as spinster caretaker of her aging parents. At forty-seven, she married William Heelis, a solicitor in the northern Lake District where she had bought a farm with money from her books and a small inheritance. Although she was one of the wealthiest people in the district, she preferred to live and dress as simply as she could, wearing clogs and homespun woolens as she slogged through the muddy countryside. Bertha, on the other hand, was an outgoing child born to a humble household in Rockport, Massachusetts. Her parents were warm and attentive, but life was a struggle, especially after her mother’s death when Bertha was just eleven. Never one to be kept down for long, she dreamed up grand schemes both as a child and as a young woman living in Boston, eager to take advantage of its various opportunities. The Bookshop for Boys and Girls was a scheme that paid off in 1916, as was The Horn Book in 1924. When Bertha married at the age of fifty, she kept working at both the bookshop and the magazine, commuting to Boston by train in her stylish hat and heels.

In 1925, when Bertha first wrote to Beatrix, Bertha was passionate about children’s books, but Beatrix was just as passionate about putting Peter Rabbit and her “little picture books” behind her. Life as a farmer agreed with Beatrix, and she seems to have resented everything that came before it, as if the books were the cause of her earlier unhappiness rather than the means of escaping it. Sick of fans and fame, she told her publisher never to divulge her whereabouts, though she made an exception in 1921 when she allowed Anne Carroll Moore, legendary New York City children’s services librarian, to visit. The success of this meeting opened the door to visits and letters from many admiring Americans, though Beatrix made it clear that they were visiting Mrs. Heelis, not Beatrix Potter.

But Beatrix and Bertha had some qualities in common as well. Both women loved the outdoors, and both were attuned to children — not Childhood as a sentimental idea but the true experience of being a child, with all of its peaks and valleys. Beatrix could not have known all this about Bertha at the beginning, but something of her personality and strength must have come through in the early correspondence (and perhaps in Bertha’s Horn Book editorials).

At that time, Bertha was exceptionally busy juggling the bookshop, the magazine, and a large book project that would become Realms of Gold in Children’s Books, written with Elinor Whitney, her friend and Horn Book co-founder. Far from buckling under the pressure, she was thriving. Frances Darling recalled working at the Bookshop for Bertha during this period:

She always bubbled over with ideas — often to her staff’s despair; for a job at the Bookshop, though always exhilarating, was very often maddening. Bertha put her ideas ahead of everything. The words “a fresh look at the situation” would make us groan inwardly. But she worked longer and harder and more steadfastly than any of us, and she was never too busy to talk with us — or visitors — about books and the joy they should bring. Her standards were high; her aims were selfless; and whether it realizes it or not, the present world of books might have been quite different had it not been for Bertha Mahony Miller.

Beatrix was only one of countless people Bertha corresponded with, both in the U.S. and abroad. Some were well-known figures in the children’s book world, but many were young writers and illustrators whose first book seemed to show promise. If she wanted someone to write for the Horn Book, she knew how to approach each person with the perfect combination of insistence, insight, and flattery.

And what about Beatrix’s difficult personality? Bertha was unafraid of conflict and chose some of the prickliest and most opinionated people in her field as advisors. In a Horn Book editorial Bertha once referred to the usefulness of criticism for book creators: “. . . the artist wants and needs the resistance of the intelligent, appreciative, but honest and salty judge of his work. Commendation without this resistance of critical judgment pats an author’s work softly and puts it to sleep.” Bertha needed the salt and vinegar of Anne Carroll Moore and others to keep her fresh and to prevent the perils of complacency.

Back in the summer of 1924, Bertha Mahony and Elinor Whitney had traveled to England to gain some perspective before launching their new magazine. Here, Bertha made her first attempt to contact Beatrix Potter:

In London we had visited Beatrix Potter’s publishers in the hope of calling upon her in the Lake Country, but we learned that Mrs. Heelis hated publicity and did not like visits from Americans. So we went sadly to stay at a small inn at Rosthwaite near Derwentwater, walked about the Lake and up into the hills and coached through the region but did not see Beatrix Potter.

In 1925, as Elinor and Bertha were hard at work on Realms of Gold — a project that began as a new edition of the bookstore’s “Suggestive [sic] Purchase List” and grew into an eight-hundred-page tome covering five hundred years of children’s books — they decided to include biographical information about their favorite contemporary book creators as well. So Bertha sent a letter to Beatrix Potter. (This letter, like all Bertha’s letters to Beatrix, has been lost — hence the mystery.) At first Beatrix ignored the request for information, but when a second letter arrived, she consulted her friend Anne Carroll Moore:

There have been two letters recently from Miss Bertha Mahony of the Boston Bookshop, forwarded through Messrs Warne; and also copies of The Horn Book. The letters which ask for particulars about “Beatrix Potter” are very perplexing. I have a most intense dislike to advertisement. (And I have got on quite well without it.) On the other hand, a mystery is silly, and it invites curiosity. . . . I thought it would be best to write this for Mr. Warne, to forward through the New York branch of F.W. Co. to whom Miss Mahony had applied: —

“Beatrix Potter is Mrs. William Heelis. She lives in the north of England, her home is amongst the mountains and lakes that she has drawn in her picture books. Her husband is a lawyer. They have no family. Mrs. Heelis is in her 60th year. She leads a very busy contented life, living always in the country and managing a large sheep farm on her own land.”

I don’t think anybody requires to know more about me. In the second letter Miss Mahony asks how I came to write the books. . . .

The Horn Book is pleasantly written, I wish all such books of gossip British as well as American, — were in equally good taste.
    But I don’t want to be exploited!

Then, for some reason, Potter relented. She sent Bertha a long essay about her roots that remains one of the most frequently quoted passages of Potter’s writing. She begins by talking about her ancestors and their impact on her character (“obstinate, hard headed, matter of fact folk”). She describes her childhood experiences as they relate to her books, and her earliest memories (“I can remember quite plainly from one and two years old; not only facts, like learning to walk, but places and sentiments”). She tells about her toys, her grandmother, and her earliest attempts to write. Then, most gratifyingly, she turns to the books we all know, telling how Peter Rabbit was written as a letter for a child, how several years later when she made it into a book she could not find a publisher and used her savings to print it herself. She mentions specific characters and places in her books, explaining their genesis. She tells about her influences and her methods of writing. Near the end of the essay she says:

I think I write carefully because I enjoy my writing, and enjoy taking pains over it. I have always disliked writing to order; I write to please myself. I made enough by books and a small legacy from an aunt to buy a home at the Lakes which has gradually grown into a very large sheep farm; and I married very happily at forty-seven. What are the words in the “Tempest”? “Spring came to you at the farthest, in the latter end of harvest.” I have always found my own pleasure in nature and books.

At last, the gates were opened. Bertha published the piece in the Horn Book (but had to wait about three years because it was originally intended for Realms of Gold). In late spring of 1927, Beatrix had sent the Bookshop a packet of fifty signed watercolors to be sold for five dollars each to raise money to buy a piece of land that was in danger of being developed. This letter was the first item by Beatrix Potter to appear in the Horn Book, and it was given star treatment: a facsimile of the actual letter and a full-color reproduction of one of the fifty drawings.

Beatrix Potter’s 1927 letter to Bertha Mahony

Over the next sixteen years, Beatrix’s letters to Bertha contained less and less about books and more about daily life, politics, furniture, and farming. Beatrix often asked her American visitors about Bertha and wished they might meet someday. During Beatrix’s lifetime, four pieces in the magazine carried her byline, and after her death in 1943 there were three more, including two stories, “Wag-by-Wall” and “The Faithful Dove.” What may be even more remarkable is that during her life the Horn Book published several pieces about Potter and her books — pieces that she read in the magazines Bertha continued to send her. She raised no objections to these and even wrote to one of the authors (thirteen-year-old Henry P. Coolidge) to congratulate him on his piece about a visit to her house: “I was very much pleased with the way you wrote about your visit here; it was well done in every way, no word too much nor anything one could dislike; and it made me understand so well the sort of interest that the readers of the books feel when they see the real place.”

Bertha Mahony Miller in Florida after her retirement.

When Bertha Mahony Miller died in 1969, a number of her colleagues wrote about her. They commented on her energy, her ability to inspire, and her sense of humor. Those who had known her as a giant in the field of children’s books and then had met her in person were momentarily surprised to find that she was very short and spoke in a high, quavery voice. But clearly there was nothing wispy or delicate about her. Bertha learned to drive at the age of fifty. Her husband preferred large sedans, so she needed a wicker contraption on the seat of the car to allow her to reach the pedals and see over the steering wheel (or perhaps through the wheel). She loved to go fast, apparently comfortable at speeds of 70 m.p.h. on winding country roads. Her friends loved to tell stories about the many times she was stopped for speeding only to charm the policeman with her disarming honesty and a promise never to speed again. Her granddaughter tells about the time a policeman flagged her down and said, “Ma’am, weren’t you going a little fast?” to which Bertha replied, “I’m terribly sorry, officer, but you see I didn’t know you’d be there!” Others commented that Bertha’s driving was an extension of her entire approach to life. Once she had an idea, she made it happen as quickly as she could. She kept her eye on the future — on her destination — with only an occasional glance in the rearview mirror. For Bertha, looking back on one’s own childhood had some nostalgic interest, but it was much more important to talk to real, contemporary children to find out what was important to them. In the Bookshop for Boys and Girls, she had spoken to each child as an individual, listened, made gentle suggestions, and then gave them the freedom to make their own decisions.

So what about Beatrix Potter and her unusually receptive response to Bertha’s overtures? While working on this question, I visited Lee Kingman Natti in Gloucester, Massachusetts, very near where Bertha was born and raised. Lee had been a young customer of the bookshop and later knew Bertha as an editor, author, and Horn Book colleague. She had three distinct recollections. First, that Bertha never seemed to age, remaining energetic and enthusiastic into her eighties. Second, that she was very good at working with difficult people. And third, that she was nearly always able to persuade those people to do what she asked them to. All her life, Beatrix Potter hated it when people used her books to make assumptions about her childhood; it seems clear that Bertha Mahony would not have done this. She would have asked Potter to tell her own story not for nostalgic reasons but for all the children in the future who would read her books and want to know more.

This article is adapted from a talk given November 5, 2005, during the Beatrix Potter Society Conference in Amherst, Massachusetts and will be published in Beatrix Potter in America: Beatrtix Potter US Studies I, available from www.beatrixpottersociety.org.uk.

The post Beatrix and Bertha appeared first on The Horn Book.