Both the whole language movement and the call for multicultural education brought trade books into the classroom; No Child Left Behind, with its emphasis on standardized testing, not so much. (Who had time?) With the introduction of the Common Core State Standards into most of our nation’s schools, what books are we going to see where?

The initiative’s name — specifically, the “Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects” — seems oddly chosen, given that the term “common core” is best known to us from the University of Chicago’s Great Books program, where a set of classic texts provided the core of undergraduate education. The new Common Core program does not include a list of required reading at all. Instead, it encourages teachers to use a variety of texts, increasingly complex in form and content as the student goes from year to year, to teach a variety of similarly progressive skills in reading and critical analysis “in order to help ensure that all students are college and career ready in literacy no later than the end of high school.” (The entire document can be found here.)

A key distinction of the Common Core is its emphasis on the reading of nonfiction texts. Where other standards initiatives have taken great care in requiring students to read classic fiction, folklore, and poetry, the Common Core requires increased use of (again, increasingly complex) informational texts as a student progresses through the grades, culminating in grade twelve with a 70–30 percent split between informational and literary “passages,” a ratio devised by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. I love the attention to nonfiction and increased reading across the disciplines; I’m all for increasing complexity. I worry that the mention of “passages” means a return to those oh-so-scientific SRA boxes of the 1960s, where we read from large cards, color- and type-size coded to reflect “increasing complexity,” each one printed with a “passage” appended with reading comprehension questions that taught us only how to game the test.

The success of the Common Core will be in the implementation, of course. As nonfiction author and genre expert Marc Aronson wrote to me, “I love the ELA CC Standards because while we have all long praised ‘critical thinking,’ these standards emphasize critical reading of nonfiction. Instead of asking students ‘what happened when?’ we will now be asking ‘why does this author claim that happened then, and how come that author sees it differently?’ I feel like I’ve died and gone to history heaven.” But Aronson also worries that time- and money-pressed schools will turn to prepackaged, Lexile-stamped, “Common Core Ready!” educational series and packages rather than using the truly Core-adhering books he and our other fine nonfiction authors create. I worry, too: whole language and multiculturalism and books-in-the-classroom all brought forth as many cynical publishing efforts as they did first-class books.

But here is where we are going to try to help. Next month will mark the debut of our new quarterly digital newsletter, at this point rather unimaginatively titled Nonfiction Notes from the Horn Book, a companion to our popular free monthly Notes from the Horn Book. Nonfiction Notes is also free and will highlight those new and recent nonfiction books that we believe truly speak to the Common Core’s “vision of what it means to be a literate person in the twenty-first century.” Current subscribers to Notes will automatically be signed up for the new quarterly; stay tuned for more information as we have it.

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That book did of course win the 1964 Medal, a very nice cherry on top of Sendak’s five previous Caldecott Honors (which would be joined by two more in later years). For Sendak, the best part of Where the Wild Things Are’s success was the financial security it brought (“It bought me my house,” he told me) and the freedom to do the projects he liked: “I took good advantage of [its] popularity to illustrate books that I passionately wanted to do without having to worry if they were commercial or not.” While the publishing economy of today might have encouraged Where the Wild Things Went and Where the Wild Things Went Next, Sendak mostly left the (considerable) spinning-off to others in order to to do what he wanted in a career that would include big books and small books, color and black-and-white, books by himself and books by others, opera and ballet design. Most Caldecott Medalists can’t afford to rest on their laurels; Sendak could, and didn’t.

When I look through the roster of Caldecott winners (seventy-five as of this year), I see dozens of fine books, but only three classics: Make Way for Ducklings, The Snowy Day, and Where the Wild Things Are. And of those, only the third has made the leap from the children’s bookshelf to become, as well, a touchstone of twentieth-century American art and culture. Maurice would sometimes complain about his other work being overshadowed, but come on, I would say, that’s huge. If sometimes he knew this and sometimes he forgot, what matters most is that it didn’t make one bit of difference either way to his work.

When I was speaking at the Eric Carle Museum recently, someone asked me if I thought Where the Wild Things Are could be published today. It’s an impossible question, because that book gave artists and publishers and librarians and children a new way to read. Its belief in an audience that could compose its own music for three wordless spreads and draw its own picture on the final page was generous. Its messages—that you can imagine without restraint, yell your head off, and still be altogether worthy of love—remain.

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But as a librarian, I understand that digital reference sources, done right, have it all over print. The online Britannica is no less authoritative, arguably more so because it is more quickly updated than print. It’s still browsable and inspiring of serendipity: having secured a trial subscription for the purposes of writing this editorial, I’m having trouble keeping myself on task. Wikipedia without shame! Less expensive (given you have the means to access it, which is a big given) than print and more compact—what’s not to like?

Here is the question for children’s book people, though. Does the thought of a kid whizzing his or her way around an electronic reference source give us as much satisfaction as the picture of a kid doing the same thing with a printed book? I thought not. Whether librarian, teacher, publisher, or writer, when we say that at least part of our shared goal is to promote the “love of reading,” what we have always meant is the “love of books.” (Some books.) What will our goal be once books no longer provide our common core?

This is partially a question about e-books. Yes, e-books are books, and libraries want to buy them and enthusiastically promote their circulation to library patrons, who demonstrably want to read them. But publishers complain that they need “friction” to ensure that library borrowing doesn’t take too much of a bite from consumer purchases, and libraries are put into the position of licensing rather than acquiring e-books, just another borrower in the chain. However, this economic tussle is only an early warning sign of the real problem that librarians and (as Stephen Roxburgh argued in the March/April 2012 Horn Book) publishers face: thanks to the leveling power of the internet, electronic literature doesn’t need either one of us, at least as we currently understand our respective missions.

But this is also a question about the independence of readers. In libraries, even those kids who wouldn’t talk to a librarian if their lives depended on it rely far more than they know on the professional expertise provided by the library’s staff, systems, and policies. Readers’ advisory is found as much in the shelving as it is in a friendly chat. When we are reading online, however, we are far more on our own, for good (we can read what we want when we want it) or ill (finding what we want to read can be an adventure beset by false leads, commercial interests, and invasions of privacy).

What can children’s book people become? I reveal my fantasy of what we could make of the future on page 16 of this issue, but in reality what we need to do is to redefine our gatekeeping role. Along with giving up any notion that the only real reading is book reading, like the online Britannica we have to believe in our own expertise and convince others that our knowledge is worth attending to. We’ve spent more than a century dedicated to the idea that some reading is better than other reading, an elitist position we can defend by pointing to decades of excellence in books for youth. Publishers and librarians together, we made that happen. Let us continue to do so.

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As the articles in this special issue on “Books Remixed” demonstrate, books, reading, and readers are always changing, both definitionally and individually, as an original text is transformed across media and its readers become viewers, listeners, players, and co-authors in the experience of story. Does Dead End in Norvelt remain the same book? Gantos’s words don’t change, but my reading does. At the Horn Book we are free and easy with ARCs, bending, marking, (sometimes) throwing them. A finished book becomes part of our library, and we treat them better: we’ve liked it enough to keep it. An e-book, at least for me, is always competing with the dozens of other books on my iPad as well as the ready temptations of the web and of electronic Scrabble. It’s like you have the whole world in your hands, and while God might have had no trouble staying on task, I do. Beyond that, we dismiss generations of work by type designers if we think those do-it-yourself typeface choices (basically, bigger and smaller) and standard screen sizes don’t affect our reading. I direct readers to Jon Scieszka and Molly Leach’s article “Design Matters” (HBM March/April 1998; www.hbook.com/1998/03/creating-books/design-matters) in which they showed us that

And beyond design and device—delivery. If you asked people at the Midwinter conference of ALA in Dallas this January what they thought might win the Newbery Medal that weekend, you got a variety of opinions. But if you even so much as mentioned e-books, you heard a concerted earful about OverDrive and Amazon and the Big Six publishers, and the difficulty—nay, impossibility—of getting these players to deliver digital books to school and public libraries in a just and efficient manner. Fair enough and true enough, but not nearly far enough. Local libraries will need to redefine themselves as location ceases to matter. Publishers (and reviewers!) will need to stretch their competencies or become satisfied with a smaller piece of pie. Reading isn’t going anywhere, but the current revolution in how people read is only a harbinger of the change in what people will be reading as the digital realm evolves its own idea of literature.

•   •   •

FYI: Several of the articles in this issue will, as usual, also be available online, but this time they will feature enhancements such as embedded videos (it is a special issue on media, after all). Visit us at www.hbook.com.

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Imagine a picture book world where such principles governed, a place where artists, publishers, reviewers, librarians, and teachers kept this proclamation pinned to their walls and close to their hearts. To my mind, however, they largely already do. So why, then, did these twenty-two authors and illustrators put together their pennies to buy a full-page ad in The Horn Book? I think it is because there is a disconnection between what is in our hearts and what we are publishing for children. And let me urge you back to page 57 again. This is not just about picture books: I challenge you to find anything there that is not equally pertinent to fiction and nonfiction published for youth.

I was lucky enough to spend a day in September with Maurice Sendak and his “Sendak Fellows,” four illustrators nominated unawares and selected by Sendak to spend a month with him, and given studios, support, and advice. Here was the Proclamation in action. The four artists—Ali Bahrampour, Denise Saldutti Egielski, Frann Preston-Gannon, and Sergio Ruzzier—had a month to work on what they wished, whether it was a painting, a portfolio, a new book, a contracted manuscript, a resurrected project, or nothing at all. I saw tentative sketches and nearly complete dummies. The light-filled house where they stayed and worked, the presence of enough peers for camaraderie, and the example of Sendak, someone who was living the principles of the Proclamation since before its signers were born (I peg signer Jon Scieszka as the token old guy, and he’s my age), were prods to both freedom and industry.

Over lunch with the Fellows and me, Sendak described how his career grew, from illustrating picture books and chapter books by other people to books of his own, the first of which (Kenny’s Window) was not commercially successful but whose promise nevertheless encouraged his publisher to sign him up for another one and another one, with Where the Wild Things Are not appearing until seven years later. “Are illustrators still allowed this kind of growth?” he asked. Glum faces around the table answered him. I was reminded of what my friend Elizabeth Law once told me, that while there is support for and attention paid to first books, it’s the second ones that really need the help.

But if we all agree that a book “should be fresh, honest, piquant, and beautiful,” then why are “imitation, laziness, and timidity poisoning a great art form”? (If in fact they are—safe and formulaic books have always been with us.) Who is allowing this to happen? It’s easy to blame greedy-guts publishers, but I can’t think of one house that doesn’t publish something each season out of sheer love. Yes, they should do this more often. But we—librarians, teachers, parents—have to do our part. We may pride ourselves on our ability to find for a young reader “another one just like it!” but if we stop there we’ve left the job half done. If we want artists and writers to take risks, and publishers to do the same, we have to read, and promote reading, with the same spirit.

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