By Ann Durell First I want to apologize for giving such an embarrassingly fancy title for such a plain little talk. But you know how it is when someone asks you to make a speech. You say “yes” with the comfortable assurance that you will either have been killed in a plane crash or have […]
The Best Book I Ever Read
May 29, 2018 by Leave a Comment
By Ann Durell This speech should probably be called the Patchwork Principle. I have been fretting about it for what seems a year, undergoing a whole range of anxiety from vaguely uneasy to acutely apprehensive, because I wasn’t assigned a topic. Without a topic, I gnaw and discard ideas, rather like my Siamese cat with […]
High Fantasy: A Wizard of Earthsea
January 24, 2018 by Leave a Comment
by Eleanor Cameron A Wizard of Earthsea (Parnassus) by Ursula K. LeGuin received the 1969 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, given at the New England Round Table of Children’s Librarians, October, 1969. It is never important to pigeonhole works of fiction nor insist that a certain book should belong, in a child’s estimation, in this category […]
Ursula K. Le Guin’s April 1973 Letter to the Editor
January 24, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Eleanor Cameron’s remarks on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in the Horn Book may draw some fire upon her; it’s always perilous to do anything to a bestseller but adulate it. My response to her October article is one of relief and hearty thanks. It is good to have an accurate diagnosis of one’s vague […]
On Lois Lowry’s “Look” (from 1997)
May 8, 2017 by Leave a Comment
“I never walk past that place without thinking how private, powerful, and memorable a moment it is, in the life of a child, when the shape of letters takes on meaning and a door of the world opens.” It’s been twenty years, but I still remember the thrill I felt as I read Lois Lowry’s […]
Colleagues and Co-Conspirators
May 17, 2016 by Leave a Comment
by Steven Kellogg For the past fifteen years I have regularly interspersed the time I spend sequestered in my Connecticut studio writing and illustrating picture books with journeys back and forth across the country to present programs in schools, libraries, and other settings where people interested in children and their literature congregate. During that time […]
Horn Book Magazine articles in the Virtual History Exhibit
January 1, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Here is a selection of articles from our archives 1990s Barbara Bader examines six milestones in the Horn Book’s first seventy-five years: Treasure Island by the Roadside (January/February 1999) Selling children’s books off the back of a truck. Peter Says Please (March/April 1999) Beatrix Potter befriends the Horn Book. Politi for Christmas (May/June 1999) An […]
Letter from England: Dorothy Butler
October 1, 2015 by Leave a Comment
By Aidan Chambers Every year our children’s book editors give the Eleanor Farjeon Award to someone they consider has performed outstanding services to children’s books. This year the recipient is Dorothy Butler. Two of her books will shortly reach you and will richly demonstrate why our editors felt they wanted to recognize this remarkable woman. […]
