I recently picked up Philip Nel’s 2012 dual biography of ­children’s literature luminaries, Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed ­Child­ren’s Literature, and was immediately riveted. Nel did amazing due diligence: eighty interviews! Nearly six hundred (unobtrusive) footnotes! Research at three...

My connection with the Horn Book dates back to the regime of Ethel and Paul Heins. Perhaps because I was so young at the time, it seemed like the Red Sea parted whenever they arrived — always together, ­inseparable — at any children’s book gathering. Though they were small, tweedy,...