Fashion and children’s literature icon Heidi struts onto the runway, leading one of her goats on a chic, to-die-for leash.

HEIDI: Hello, everyvon and velcome to da runvay! I am your host, Heidi. This is Ziegfried. Your challenge vas to design a fresh new look for some of children’s literature’s biggest icons. Von of you vill be da vinner of this challenge, and von of you…vill be out. Let’s meet da judges!

Fresh from Mr. McGregor’s garden, fashion designer and style icon Mr. Peter Rabbit!

PETER RABBIT: Hellooo, darlings! Call me P.R.!

HEIDI: From the streets of Paris, where she walked da two straight lines of classic style and wild gypsy élan, our own Madeline!

MADELINE: ’Allo, everyone!

HEIDI: Our guest judge tonight is as famous for his sleek Italian line of clothing for real boys as he is for his brutal honesty. Pinocchio!

PINOCCHIO: Grazie, molto grazie, Heidi! I am overwhelmed by the honor of being asked to be a part of this wonderful, glorious show! And to be in the presence of such prestigious fellow-judges! It’s such a privilege that I can barely—whooooops! Oh, no! No! Not on TV! Wait a minute! What I meant to say was: This will be an interesting experience! There! That’s better!

HEIDI: Let’s start da show!

Later, the three finalists have left the runway—one has flounced off—and the judges are having a little chat.

HEIDI: Judges, let’s talk about da vons vee liked. Vat did vee think about Puss in Boots’s new look for Eloise?

MADELINE: J’adore the new Eloise!

HEIDI: Puss in Boots really did a great job.

P.R.: Just taming that—to quote Eloise’s Nanny—gawd-awful hair made such a difference! The dreadlocks—fabulous! And brilliant choice keeping her in separates.

PINOCCHIO: The Princess lines—so slimming!—especially on someone with a real-girl figure.

P.R.: And now I’m asking myself, why was she wearing that puffy-sleeved white blouse and that horrendous pleated skirt for all those years? I mean, come on. Isn’t her mother supposed to be a friend of Lily Daché, for crying
out loud?

HEIDI: I haff never understood those straps on dat skirt…

MADELINE: Not to mention zose peenk bloomers!

Heidi, Madeline, Pinocchio, and P.R. all shake their heads and make tutting noises.

P.R.: Well, I would have accepted almost anything Puss in Boots came up with for Eloise, but I have to say I was thrilled with her new look. But did anyone else notice the sloppy hemline?

HEIDI: He ran out of time again, I’m thinking? Vat did you all think about the accessories?

PINOCCHIO: I was so pleased to see her out of Mary Jane shoes…

P.R.: Oh, thank god! Such a cliché! The new high tops were inspired. They said “young,” they said “active”…

MADELINE: Yes, and eet definitely said “urban,” which we want for Eloise. Very witty, I thought.

HEIDI: I don’t know…did they detract from the overall look?

PINOCCHIO: Maybe if they had been black instead of that violent cerise?

P.R.: I was just so happy that Puss in Boots didn’t trot out yet another set of boots. It was a pop of color, maybe just too loud a pop?

ALL: Maybe…maybe so…

HEIDI: Let’s talk about Cinderella’s new look for Little Boy Blue.

P.R.: Oh, my GOD! That was a disaster!

MADELINE: An absolute disaster. Zut alors! I could not look.

P.R.: I mean, can Cinderella show us anything else? It’s the same costume-y look over and over! And why on earth would you take away that classic blue that he’s known for, for goodness sake, and put him in—I don’t even know what to call that color! Was it some sort of Marshmallow-Easter-Egg-Rainbow-Brite mauve?

PINOCCHIO: I have to say, I liked the impudence of that silhouette.

HEIDI: (after a pause) Uh-oh! I think dat you are maybe not telling the whole truth?

PINOCCHIO: (flustered) Well, very truthfully, it made him look—I hate to say this—but he actually looked like a prom queen.

MADELINE: Zat is all she has shown us! Either a ball gown or zee dress for za prom. Quel horreur!

P.R.: Exactly! The challenge was not to make the icons completely unrecognizable! Or to put them in drag! It was to update their look! I was dumbstruck! He could have been on a float in the Toyland Parade! A complete miss.

PINOCCHIO: Absolutely wrong for him; especially for someone with such an earthy realism as Little Boy Blue.

P.R.: Those spangles! The bugle beads!
My god!

HEIDI: And Cinderella vas not at all interested in vat vee had to say, either.

MADELINE: Oh, and to tell us zat ice-cream pink was going to be zee new pastel blue? We are not idiots, non?

P.R.: I just wanted to say to her, ‘Listen, Princess, you might think you’re all that because you design for an exclusive clientele now, but please.’ Let’s be honest, who in her kingdom is going to tell Cinderella that she only designs looks fit for balls? That’s just not real life! Show us some day wear, for heaven’s sake!

PINOCCHIO: I did enjoy the flocks of songbirds that continuously fluttered around that look, though. It was really quite daring.

MADELINE: Oui, zat part did actually work. Not many designers could carry that off.

P.R.: Hell-ooo! Busy much? No one could carry that off!

HEIDI: Okay, so vee agree dat look did not so much vork. Vat did vee think about Eeyore’s look for Raggedy Ann?

P.R.: Oh, I mean, come on! Give me a break! He actually kept those red-and-white horizontal striped leggings!

MADELINE: I cannot look. My eyes are bleeding from zees leggings.

PINOCCHIO: Well, I disagree! The leggings are part of her iconic look. I wouldn’t have recognized her without them. (after a pause) I’m telling the truth!

P.R.: Well, dotted Swiss fabric was part of Heidi’s look, too, but she’s not completely bedecked in it anymore! God! We all know how I feel about leggings anyway—but those!

HEIDI: I am still wearing the dotted Swiss! You just can’t see it anymore!

Nervous laughter from all.

P.R.: Oh, my god!

HEIDI: Eeyore’s designs up to this point have been so Goth; I vas happy to see a little brightness. And dose leggings drew attention to Raggedy Ann’s gorgeous gams, but I think she’s maybe de only doll who has de legs for dat.

P.R.: Well, I was thrilled to see Rags in a simple cocktail dress and out of that boring pinafore finally.

MADELINE: I cannot remember zee last time I have seen a pinafore?

PINOCCHIO: Little House on the Prairie?

P.R.: Miss Minchin’s Select Seminary for Young Ladies?

HEIDI: Dat is like the Ice Age in fashion!

P.R.: Well, the update for Rags was well overdue. We disagree on the leggings, but the toned-down hair—

MADELINE: Zat auburn!

P.R.:—in a sleek bun? Fabulous! Could not have been more fabulous!

MADELINE: Trés chic. And—comment dit-on?—completely on trend.

HEIDI: And her makeup! Her eyes—not so button-y.

MADELINE: Zat smoky eye gave her so much more depth.

PINOCCHIO: And when we asked the model to scrooch down so we didn’t see so much of the leggings—

ALL: “…so much better!” “Miles better!” “God, yes!”

The discussion continues until a decision is finally reached. The designers are called back to the runway. Heidi addresses them while Ziegfried nibbles on his leash.

HEIDI: Designers, as you know, in fashion and in children’s literature, von day you are in and the next day—or hundreds of years later—you’re out. Puss in Boots, vee loved da new Eloise—very urban and soigné. And you were de only von to show us separates. However, while we were happy to see you step away from showing us another pair of boots, her shoes were maybe a bit too much the wrong color and were distracting. And, once again, your tailoring vas not so polished.

Cinderella, even though vee did not like to see Little Boy Blue in pink, and were hoping to not see him in a ball gown, vee did admire your commitment to your vision. Vee also thought that accessorizing with a flock of songbirds was a bold new choice.

Eeyore, your re-invention of Raggedy Ann showed us a surprisingly cheerful side of you! While vee disagreed about the leggings (P.R. can be heard in background: “God!”), vee appreciated that you left in Raggedy Ann’s signature red-and-white stripes instead of insisting on your usual palette of blacks and grays.

Dramatic pause. Throbbing music rises.

HEIDI: Eeyore, congratulations! You are da vinner of this challenge! You gave Raggedy Ann an entirely new, quirky-punk-glam look while hanging on to her signature red-and-white leggings. And, you did not give up your own individual style. Da look was modern, imaginative, sophisticated, and even a little naughty. I myself vould vear this look. Good job! You may leave the runway.

Eeyore shakes his head in disbelief and mumbles his thanks to the judges. He shambles off the stage.

HEIDI: Puss in Boots, Cinderella; dat means dat von of you vill be out!

Almost unbearably long pause. Music swells to headache-inducing levels.

HEIDI: Cinderella, you’re out! While vee appreciate your daring in using flocks of songbirds to accessorize, you showed us, vonce again, another ball gown. Vee asked you in da last two challenges to show us something new.

Also, while vee had asked for an update on da look of a children’s book icon, vee did not vant you to go so far overboard. Putting Little Boy Blue in pink, and in a dress, vas a mistake. Auf Wiedersehen! (kiss-kiss!)

Close-up of Eeyore backstage.

EEYORE: Well, it’s my first win…and it’s probably my last.

Backstage, after the hissing, braying, and sobbing has subsided, a red-faced and disheveled Cinderella spits at the camera.

CINDERELLA: Well, those (bleep)ing judges are just, plain wrong! They clearly have a very old-fashioned idea of what fashion is. Bunch of (bleep) (bleep)ing (bleep) fuddie-duddies! (Bleep)! I can’t believe I’m out! Little Boy Blue looked fabulous! Especially in that off-the-shoulder neckline! Everyone looks fabulous in ball gowns, and looking (bleeping) fabulous is what fashion is all about! They have no (bleep)ing imagination! [Crying now.] You have to be visionary! I cannot believe I lost to that (bleep)ing (bleep) ass! My Fairy Godmother says that everything happens for a reason, so I’m thinking I’m out because I’m too much of a threat! Don’t worry, I am certainly not going to stop designing! I’ve already submitted sketches for the next Toyland Parade’s “Bears of Fairytale Land” float. With my genius, those Bears are gonna look (bleep)ing magnificent!

Roll credits.

ANNOUNCER: Stay tuned for “The Housewives of Fairytale Land!” Will Snow White and Red Riding Hood resolve their quarrel? Is Sleeping Beauty really going to change her name back to Briar Rose? Can the Little Mermaid cope with the pressures of life on Land? And how are the new couple, Tinkerbell and Captain Hook, fitting in to Fairytale Land?

Close shot of Tinkerbell.

TINKERBELL: I don’t belong here with these crazy-(bleep) people. They’re all exactly alike: beautiful, obedient victims—not one of them had a real job before she was married! It’s like the (bleep)ing Stepford Fairytale Wives around here! Sick of it!

—Elizabeth Thomas

Illustrations by Lauren Kim.

The post Project Child’s Play appeared first on The Horn Book.

At nine, Bumble-Ardy is older by far than either Mickey or Max, and he bursts on the scene of this brightly lit faux melodrama with a Dickensian backstory of parental neglect and an outsized craving for birthday cake and kisses. Who could begrudge the slobbering little wise guy his boorish (boarish?) behavior? Why, the whole world, of course.

Loosely based on a two-minute animation Sendak created with Jim Henson for Sesame Street in 1971, Bumble-Ardy revisits his long-standing preoccupations with childhood outsider-hood and saving-grace resilience, but with a new twist of extravagance taken straight from the operatic playbook of Giuseppe Verdi.

We talked about all this at the artist’s kitchen table in a conversation recorded on May 12, 2011.

LEONARD S. MARCUS: It looks as though you had fun making your new book, Bumble-Ardy. Even the title suggests that.

MAURICE SENDAK: Actually, I didn’t. It was a very difficult time. I was working on it when my partner and friend was dying of cancer. We set up a room in the house to be like a hospital room. Eugene died, and then I had bypass surgery. I was doing the book to stay sane while all this was going on.

LSM: It’s a book about someone—a pig-child—who insists on having a birthday party even if he has to give it to himself.

MS: Well, one of the beauties of being an artist is that you can create a whole new world, with circumstances that are better in your invented world than they are in the real world.

I had been reading a fabulous book (The Man Verdi, by Frank Walker) about Verdi, whom I adore. Verdi was in his late seventies and had written what he said would be his last opera, Aida, when from out of nowhere a young poet called Arrigo Boito came into his life. Boito had composed a wonderful opera about Mephistopheles and was going to write another opera about Nero, and he gave himself up to Verdi in collaboration. A whole new world of Italian music was springing up, and Verdi was seen as old. Boito got Verdi all excited about the possibility of doing another opera, another kind of opera. In fact, Verdi composed his two best operas, Otello and Falstaff, in his eighties. And so I thought that if I were going into old age I would want to do what Verdi did, which is to write extraordinary things, and to really find myself. I’ll be eighty-three shortly, and I want to be renewed. We all want to be renewed, don’t we? Bumble-Ardy was a step toward renewal.

LSM: How do you see the hero of the story?

MS: Bumble-Ardy is a very wicked little child as far as I’m concerned. He’s not to be trusted. He’s never given permission to have a party, but he has one anyway, even though sweet Adeline doesn’t want anybody to come to the house, to drink her special drinks. Adeline is a simple, ordinary woman—wonderful and healthy and strong—and she loves him in spite of everything. Does he love her? “You bet!” he says, as if that were an appropriate answer. But can any child love who has been so mishandled by his original parents? Thank God that Bumble-Ardy’s parents are dead so we don’t have to wonder what they did to him. We only know that they were famous, and famous people have unhappy children for the most part. They don’t have the time to take care of them. So he’s a troubled pig-boy, a kid you’ve got to watch.

LSM: Maybe Adeline expects too much. I thought he gave the perfect answer when she becomes upset with him and, desperate to calm her down, he says, “I promise! I swear! I won’t ever turn ten!”

MS: Yes, I like that! For me that’s the best line in the book. He thinks that’s really a promise. He’s definitely an unhappy child.

LSM: It seems that you were looking back at some of your earlier books in this one. “Some swill pig” sounds a lot like “some swell pup.” And one of the party guests—although you have made him a pig—bears a striking resemblance to the Oliver Hardy bakers of In the Night Kitchen.

MS: That same pig appeared in another project I worked on just a few years ago, a staging of Peter and the Wolf, which I translated into Yiddish and sang on a stage in New York City. Thank God very few people knew I was doing it! But the kids in the audience loved it—even though it was all in Yiddish. Instead of a wolf it was a pig: “ein Schwein.” That is the pig that you say looks like Oliver Hardy. I liked him so much in my Peter and the Wolf that I wanted him for this book, too.

LSM: The colors in Bumble-Ardy are among the warmest and brightest of all your books.

MS: It was not a conscious choice but, yes, there is a palette in this book that is different from that of my other books. It’s Verdi-esque. Verdi was such an enormous help to me as I worked on the book. I had lost my sister recently, too, which meant that my whole family was gone. I was the baby of the family. There were five Sendaks and there were five Wild Things, and now there’s only one Sendak, and he’s about to bite the dust, too! Life, as I said before, was very difficult at that time and so it was natural that there would be a change in the look of things. Also, I was very impressed with my own strength in doing this under the circumstances in which I was living.

LSM: There is a house without walls in We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, and Bumble-Ardy lives in one, too. Do you see the two books as somehow linked?

MS: I never thought of Bumble-Ardy in that way. But I still have that same deep feeling for children who are in dire trouble. I see  Bumble-Ardy as a lonely, unhappy kid who is doing the very best he can to be in the world, to have a party. I was ungainly. I was heavy. I probably looked like a little pig. I don’t know. You can start making up any kind of story if you want to, as you well know.

LSM: The party scenes in Bumble-Ardy look like something out of a Coney Island sideshow.

MS: That big face on the midway at Coney Island. I loved that! We lived only two subway stations away from Coney Island, and we used to go to the boardwalk and beach there very, very frequently—my mother, father, sister, brother, and I. For my father the one calamity was that my brother and sister and I never learned to swim. My father, who was very macho, was a strong swimmer and was terribly disappointed to have children who didn’t swim. Once when my mother was sitting in a beach chair—I can still see the big umbrella—she called to my father, “Throw them in! Throw them in! They’ll swim!” So he did. Then he looked down, and there were the three Sendak children lying perfectly still underwater, not fighting for life! So he had to schlep us up and dump us on the sand. He was deeply resentful and disappointed that he had three dopey kids who just lay there. They weren’t fighting to live. Somehow that got into this book, too.

LSM: Did you like to play dress-up?

MS: No, that wasn’t one of my things. All I liked to do when I was a kid was draw. My childhood was like my adult life: drawing pictures with my brother, putting the comics up on the glass window, and tracing the characters onto tracing paper or drawing paper and then coloring them. That and making things was all we ever did. My brother and I built the entire New York World’s Fair of 1939 in miniature out of wax. The floor of our room was covered with little waxen buildings. Nobody else could come in.

LSM: Maybe that was your real goal.

MS: Oh, it was fantastic. My brother, who was older, was the gifted one, much more talented than I. Most of the work was his. I was his assistant.

My sister at that point had her own room. She also had innumerable boyfriends. I had a yo-yo collection that was beyond belief, and the reason I had it was mostly that I would stand in the doorway of the living room watching
her and her boyfriend. Finally she caught on how to get this kid out of
the way. Give him a yo-yo!

Then one day my sister abandoned me at the 1939 World’s Fair, and that incident is the essence of In the Night Kitchen. The book is a reenactment of standing in front of the place where bread was baked by little men in white caps—Oliver Hardy–type men—as they waved to you, and the smell of bread and cake pouring out of the building. I was standing there with hundreds of other people waving back at the little midgets dressed like bakers when I turned around and my sister was gone! The next thing I know I’m screaming and crying and policemen are taking me to a big place with tons of kids who had all been abandoned like me. At least I was old enough to give them a name and an address.

LSM: How could she have done that?

MS: She was with a date. She had had to take me but she didn’t think twice about leaving me. I was allowed to call my mother from the police station, and my mother was crying, and my sister was already home, and I said, “She did it to me, she did it to me!” Then I got into the police car and I was being driven home and I said, “Please put on the siren when you get to the corner of West 6^th Street.” And the police were so eager to calm me down that they did turn the siren on, and when they stopped in front of the building everybody was looking out the window, calling, “Moishe, Moishe, poor little Moishe!” And then I went upstairs and the first thing I did was point to my sister and say, “She did it on purpose!” Later I heard my father clobbering her. It was a great day! If they had asked me I would have become a policeman then and there. Then everyone could have been spared my meshuggeneh books.

LSM: Might there be a little bit of Ursula Nordstrom in Adeline, who steps in almost as a mother to give Bumble-Ardy the things he needs: not everything he needs, but nonetheless an awful lot of what matters?

MS: Could be. She gives him the basics: love and consideration. And she forgives him at the end. I have to say that that was not in my mind. But I’m grateful that it was in your mind because it makes a kind of sense. Even to the big body, the clumsy affection. It was clumsy, but it was real affection. How could I have lived without Ursula? It’s amazing that that happened. God, I had great people in my life. Bumble-Ardy looks like a happy book. That’s the funniest thing about it. But this was survival. I was working very hard to survive.

—Leonard S. Marcus

The post It’s My Party: An Interview with Maurice Sendak appeared first on The Horn Book.

In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11th ten years ago, there were many books published for children and teens about the tragedy. Some were informative, and at least two transcended the moment: Maira Kalman’s Fireboat and Mordicai Gerstein’s The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. But there was a persistent strain of “helpful” books—bibliotherapeutic tales, frequently allegorical—designed to somehow assist kids in coming to terms with the event. Readers know books don’t work like that: as I said in an editorial many years ago, not only is there not a book about overcoming one’s fear of lawn mowers (a query that had been sent my way), there’s no reason to think a book would provide the cure.

We know this, but we forget this; witness the recent furor sparked by the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed about YA books (“Darkness Too Visible,” June 4, 2011), wringing its hands in worry that Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls was going to make previously well-adjusted girls start hurting themselves. And the right-minded replied No, Wintergirls will save girls from hurting themselves. Neither is true: books aren’t that kind of magic. While reading helps us—even saves us—during dark days writ large or personal, it’s not like The Match Game. You want to learn about 9/11, you want to fix a lawn mower; yes, books will help. You want to feel better (or worse, or more deeply)? Read something you love.

•    •    •

Without suggesting that you drop this magazine right now to go over and take a look, there’s a lot to love about our sister publication School Library Journal (our little sister, as I frequently remind SLJ chief Brian Kenney). But the thing I love most is their Heavy Medal blog, helmed by Nina Lindsay and Horn Book Magazine reviewer Jonathan Hunt. Running from the beginning of September through the end of January, Heavy Medal (http://blog.schoollibraryjournal.com/heavymedal/) concerns itself with ALA’s Newbery Medal: Nina and Jonathan parse the rules, wrangle the definitions, and put their magnifying glass over some likely contenders. They frequently disagree, beginning a lively conversation that is continued both in the comments on the blog itself and elsewhere in the kidlitosphere. With a combination of rational, elucidatory discussion and trash talking, Heavy Medal is complete catnip for our kind.

In a spirit of sororal (there’s a word you’ll never find in SLJ) cooperation (heh), this month we’re launching a companion blog, Calling Caldecott, in which our designer Lolly Robinson and Horn Book reviewer Robin Smith are taking on all things picture book: as the blog’s tagline has it, “What can win? What will win? What should win?” You couldn’t ask for better conveners: Lolly has been paying close attention to picture books for thirty years and served on the 2005 Caldecott committee (the Kitten’s First Full Moon year); Robin is a veteran second-grade teacher and was a member of the 2011 committee (A Sick Day for Amos McGee). But this blog needs you, too, so get yourself over to www.hbook.com/blogs/callingcaldecott and join the fun.

—Roger Sutton

The post Editorial: What Books Can Do appeared first on The Horn Book.

On the library scene, Moore and Jordan had counterparts at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh and elsewhere. For all of them, bringing children and books together was a Cause, not just a career.

This series focuses on three notable librarians of the succeeding, or second, generation: Virginia Haviland (1911–1988; see  January/February 2011 issue), Augusta Baker (1911–1998; see May/June 2011 issue), and Mildred Batchelder (1901–1998).

Nobel or Pulitzer, Newbery or Caldecott or Batchelder—fame is an award in your name. In time, it may be the one thing you’re famous for.

Mildred L. Batchelder presided over children’s and young people’s affairs at the American Library Association, in one form or another, for thirty transformative years. At her retirement in 1966, her librarian constituents established a prize in her name for the best translation of a children’s book each year—a fit recognition of Batchelder’s long and serious interest in books as cultural bridges. Whatever else the prize may have accomplished, it’s kept Batchelder’s name current.

To keep knowledge of a career alive—especially the career of someone who might be described as a functionary, with mainly offstage achievements—takes something more: it takes a biography. Batchelder’s Boswell is Dorothy J. Anderson, who worked with Batchelder at ALA headquarters and made her the subject of a PhD dissertation at Texas Woman’s University in 1981. Interviews with Batchelder herself are the chief source of information—and “Batch” was known for speaking her mind.

Mildred Batchelder was born in the old industrial city of Lynn, Massachusetts, northeast of Boston, in 1901, the first of three daughters. Her father was a prosperous businessman, a sportsman, and a genial host. Her mother, a former teacher, took the girls to lunch and the theater in Boston. The Batchelders lived well. But both parents had high expectations of their children, and gave them responsibility accordingly.

In Batchelder’s childhood, “the most exciting place in the world” was “Rocky Island” off the Massachusetts coast—a complete island at high tide, surrounded by saltwater marshes at low tide—where the family spent every summer. There, it was up to Mildred and her sister Ruth, three years younger, to fetch a hundred-pound block of ice from shore. The two little girls also had the freedom to set off on long rowboat journeys to “secret places.”

It sounds like an idyll, out of a children’s book. Could Batchelder actually have been a “small and sickly child,” as she describes herself? Yes: this is the genesis, it appears, of the woman who was afflicted, in midlife, with a painful and crippling form of arthritis and bore it with so little fuss that people hardly noticed her physical condition.

Cut, then, to the New York State Library School at Albany. Batchelder had gone to Mt. Holyoke College, an exacting Seven Sisters school, where she felt unprepared academically and socially. She decided to become a librarian, she told Anderson in her frank, self-mocking way, because she liked seeing college catalogs addressed to “Mildred Batchelder, Librarian” when she was helping in the high school library.

After a one-week course in school librarianship from one pioneer, Mary Hall, a slightly longer course in public-library children’s work from another, Clara Hunt, Batchelder signs up for a month of practice work under Effie L. Power in Cleveland—site, she’s heard, of some of the best children’s services in the country.

Power’s plan for the month reads like a syllabus: one week in the central library; a week in each of two contrasting branch libraries; attendance at the long monthly book selection meeting; an assortment of social events.

Batchelder had gone to Cleveland uncommitted. In her life-story, there’d been no reminiscence of childhood reading, no tribute to a beloved book. The month in Cleveland, with its enthusiastic, humorous, bookwise librarians, decides her. “How could anyone not rush into work with children after an experience like that?”

It’s not, of course, the equivalent of professional experience. So Batchelder takes a giant step when, with her new library degree, she goes to Omaha as supervisor of children’s work at the main library, four branches, and thirty-two grade schools. (“Mildred Batchelder would be a good gamble,” Effie Power had assured the director.)

She’s systematic, energetic. Early on, she develops a quasi-professional training class for her staff. She’s enterprising. For Children’s Book Week, she puts out a multi-page booklet extolling the library’s collections and encouraging parents to build home libraries. A second year, she adds a special event in concert with the Woman’s Press Club of Omaha. This is the mid-1920s, when children’s library work outside the major cities was still in its infancy, and Batchelder herself was only twenty-five.

She’s also making contacts, keeping touch. Long before the term came into use, Batchelder was an assiduous networker. She sends a copy of her Book Week pamphlet to Clara Hunt, and reaps praise for her interesting, unusual book selections. She depletes her savings to attend a distant ALA meeting. On a trip home to Massachusetts she takes a detour to Toronto to meet Lillian Smith, the distinguished head of children’s work. “She was tremendously impressed,” Anderson writes, “with the way Lillian Smith personally helped little libraries throughout Canada in their book selection, the way she trained staff, and the way she encouraged other organizations to recognize children’s library work.” Augurs of Batchelder’s own later endeavors at ALA.

After three years, she decides to leave Omaha—having done, she tells the director airily, “all I can here”—and takes a position as children’s librarian at the St. Cloud (Minnesota) State Teachers College (now St. Cloud State University). It’s the first such position in Minnesota, an uncommon position anywhere; but for Batchelder it has promise. “Meeting with teachers and children in groups and individually, [she] worked out innumerable ways for them to involve the library in what they were doing.”

In what would become a pattern, she promptly writes an article for Elementary English Review describing the program—the first of many, many articles in professional journals and compendiums that publicized her ideas and beliefs.

But she and the college librarian had disliked each other from the start, and given Batchelder’s forwardness, it was hardly surprising that she was fired after the first year.

Her next position, at the Haven Intermediate School in Evanston, Illinois—a progressive school in a well-to-do, progressive community—gives her the opportunity that she had envisioned at St. Cloud: to make the library the center of the school.

Batchelder tells everyone—not only children—about children’s books. She passes along word of new books to teachers, gives talks about children’s literature to young mothers. And, again, she puts her views in writing: while “the classroom teacher has only one year…to create interest in reading,” she writes, “the librarian continues her contact with a particular child from the first grade until…high school.”

Making a name for herself, she’s also making new, strategically placed friends. Carl Milam, executive secretary of ALA, has a daughter at the Haven School, and Batchelder becomes a regular guest at the Milam home. Visiting ALA headquarters, teaching summer courses at Indiana University, she extends her acquaintances. As hospitality chair for the school library section at the 1933 Chicago ALA conference, she meets colleagues from all over; by year’s end, she’s a member of the executive committee: an insider and a prospective leader. At the 1934 Montreal conference, the idea for the school library program is hers.

Montreal is memorable for another reason, too. Hearing a “very distinctive, lowish, strange” voice, Batchelder turns around and beholds the magisterial Anne Carroll Moore—a small figure, she recalls to Anderson almost fifty years later, with “weird looking hair and [a] dull old red dress on her thin body.” “Oh, you old witch,” she thinks, the start of a lasting aversion. For persons who came to know and admire them both, there were many similarities between them, from absolute confidence in their own judgment to the ability to charm when they wanted to.

After eight years, the highly regarded Haven School librarian made it known that she was ready for “bigger challenges,” and in November 1935 Carl Milam named Batchelder ALA’s first school library specialist.

What did that mean? During Batchelder’s thirty years with ALA, the organization went through a number of reorganizations, and each time Batchelder’s responsibilities and prerogatives shifted. But in many respects the die was cast at the outset when she functioned, along with children’s library specialist Jessie Van Cleve, as an investigator, reporter, and adviser.

Together, Batchelder and Van Cleve attended local and regional conferences. They looked in on school and public libraries in New Orleans, Detroit, Cleveland, and Columbus, Ohio, and set up meetings with school, public, county, and parish libraries. In some cities, school and public libraries had had no previous contact with one another; at a time when school library development lagged far behind public library children’s work, coordination was a top priority.

Another was affiliation with other national groups interested in children. On a visit to Washington, Batchelder and Van Cleve established contacts with such organizations as the National Education Association and the National Congress of Parents and Teachers. There was the prospect of joint undertakings; at the least, libraries would be in the picture.

To foster school library development, Batchelder compiled statistics demonstrating the lag, identified librarians in the vanguard, and highlighted their work in ALA publications and on-site consultations elsewhere. One library staff member recalled her vividly: “She was so authoritative and full of suggestions…some of the staff dubbed her ‘Mother-God.’” As Anderson scrupulously reports, Batchelder’s style was not to every taste.

She knew no boundaries for children’s books, no limits for librarians as champions of books. What were Latin American children reading? With the assent of executive secretary Milam, letters went out to ministers of education in Latin American countries, and Batchelder was dismayed when the answer was mostly textbooks. She also decried the portrayal of Latin American countries in American children’s books. And she found an all-embracing cause: “Librarians,” she wrote in her report, “believe that the best children’s books of all countries should be made available to the children of all countries.”

The Latin American Project, as it came to be called, began in the late 1930s when European prospects were bleak and American attention turned to our putatively Good Neighbors to the south. But Batchelder pursued it with equal zeal after World War II, when she was also engaged in projects for European reconstruction. Internationalism was a cause she could advance, on her own hook, from whatever ALA post she held.

When Jessie Van Cleve died early in their partnership, Batchelder succeeded to her position. Both had devoted half their time to Booklist; thereafter, Batchelder worked full time as chief of the school and children’s library division, which embraced young people’s work. But because children’s work in the public libraries had its own strong leadership, Batchelder continued to focus most of her attention on school libraries.

In that area, she was a visionary.

Being in Chicago also meant being in the orbit of the University of Chicago graduate library school, its galaxy of scholars, its programs and publications. For the Chicago compendium The Library of Tomorrow (1939), Batchelder was asked to contribute a chapter along with such notables as the director of the New York Public Library, the Librarian of Congress, Carl Milam, and Lillian Smith. Whereas Smith wrote in inspirational generalities, Batchelder titled her piece “School Library Service: 1970,” and created a place, peopled with students: “In addition to the students searching for books for personal needs, a 10th grade teacher, a 7th grade boy, and a girl from the primary grades were each assembling books to take to their classrooms…” A small girl, bearing poetry books, “was also looking for transcriptions of A. A. Milne and Robert Louis Stevenson reading their own poems. Milne records were supplied, but to the girl’s surprise, Stevenson had lived before the day of radio recording.”

And so it goes, for a day in the school library of the future—foretold with humor, drama, and the attention to audiovisual resources for which Batchelder also became known.

In the immediate postwar period, revolt against authorities perceived as authoritarian struck ALA and other professional associations. Carl Milam, under fire, resigned in 1948. For the next three years, the restive school library section agitated and plotted for the status of a division, separate from the children’s and YA librarians. And once they were up and running, they summarily fired Batchelder: they had their own leaders now, and those leaders (if not the entire membership) wanted to run their own show.

However Batchelder felt, she was not one to skip a beat. For a 1953 issue of Library Trends devoted to school libraries, she wrote a long, substantive article on—ironically—“Public Library Influence on School Libraries.” Expanding on the theme of complementary strengths, she pointed out that “public libraries have materials on various sides of a question.” Intellectual freedom had become another of her active pursuits.

To pinpoint her activities in the succeeding years is almost to pick at random, or to put in a thumb. In the international sphere, there were projects to make select foreign books available for American purchase and to identify suitable books for translation. On the domestic front, there was a campaign to gain passage of the groundbreaking Library Services Bill. In her own speaking and writing, Batchelder pressed for reforms to broaden the education of children’s and school librarians.

But always and forever, she was interested in people—talented, capable, zealous people, both to fill library posts (ALA was a clearinghouse) and to replenish the ranks of ALA committees, chairmanships, offices.

At the 1957 New York Library Association conference, Dorothy Broderick was a novice trying vainly to get a book selection discussion going when “a pert little lady, dressed in black, and carrying a cane” came to her rescue with a pithy remark. A dialogue ensued…and “An Entangling Alliance Was Born,” as Broderick titled her tribute to Batchelder on her retirement.

In a recent conversation, Broderick also recalled Batchelder saying, of her, “I want that one!” Did she recruit or dragoon others that way? I asked. “Everyone.”

As a culmination of her international work before retirement, Batchelder secured a five-month leave of absence, in 1965, to study the problems of books in translation more closely. She had made her first European trip in 1961, as a delegate to the International Federation of Library Associations meeting in Edinburgh, where translation of children’s books was on the agenda. She’d used her contacts with foreign publishers to make the ALA exhibit of children’s books at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, an international array—one seen by unaccustomed multitudes.

Her 1965 trip, to eleven countries, was both a triumphal tour of the European children’s book world, with return visits to persons she’d hosted in Chicago and invitations from prominent authors, editors, librarians, et al., and an investigation into the perplexities of translation. On her earlier trip, she’d been dismayed to discover multiple copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the shelves of children’s rooms almost everywhere. She’d been surprised to learn that Swedish children’s librarians looked askance at the Snipp Snapp Snurr books, while Dutch librarians had no use for Hans Brinker. Now, she could explore corrective measures. How to make sure the books selected for translation were each nation’s best?

As soon as she finished delivering her impassioned report at the ALA conference that summer, a translation award in her name was proposed—a choice, made-for-TV moment. It was highly unusual, too, for such an award to be named for a living person—and consequential, in the aftermath, for someone as thoroughly alive as Batchelder.

Once the retirement festivities were over, she was free to go where her inclinations led.

Charlemae Rollins, the crusading African American children’s librarian in Chicago, was an old Batchelder friend and concern—someone whose mistreatment in the South Batchelder had vehemently protested. When the third edition of Rollins’s historic booklist, We Build Together, came out in 1967, the Batchelder name joined the roster of illustrious contributors.

For a time at ALA, she had tended to library-trustee affairs. In 1969, at the behest of the American Library Trustee Association, she researched and wrote a comprehensive handbook that amounts to what-every-trustee should know.

As a member of the committee for the May Massee Collection, established at Kansas State Teachers College (now Emporia State University) shortly after the celebrated editor’s death, she provided a meticulous critique of the proposed catalog.

But her longest and deepest commitment, in the children’s book world at large, was to the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota. Before her retirement, she had proposed that the Kerlan add foreign-language editions of the Newbery and Caldecott winners at the core of the collection. Soon, she decided that Batchelder winners should join them, and she not only donated her burgeoning collection but also solicited contributions of the foreign-language originals. In time, she drew upon her vast knowledge of individuals and institutions to petition for anything that might advance children’s book research at the Kerlan.

She also promoted the Batchelder prize—or “the Batch,” as she called it—in a variety of ways, including suggesting books for possible translation. (To her great regret, she had only schoolgirl French.) As always, she wrote articles and spoke. On one such occasion she was interviewed by a reporter for the Evanston Review. How could librarians keep up with foreign books, it was implied, as well as all the others? “They must read more and faster,” Batchelder replied. Enthusiastically: “It can be done.”

—Barbara Bader

Heartfelt thanks to Dorothy Broderick and Mimi Kayden for reminiscences and to Heather Wade at the May Massee Memorial Collection, and to Karen Nelson Hoyle at the Kerlan Collection, for research assistance.

A special shout-out to Dorothy J. Anderson, not only for her indispensable dissertation but also for passing along the touch-true Evanston newspaper story with its disarming photo.

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