New York Times: 2008 June 15
Laura Miller
When my second-grade teacher was growing up during the Great Depression, she discovered what would become her favorite book at the Cleveland Heights Public Library. Unfortunately, by the time she’d finished reading “The Hobbit” and persuaded her parents to buy her a copy, they couldn’t find it in the bookstore. Undeterred, she checked out the library’s copy over and over again, determined to make one of her own by pecking out the entire text with two fingers on the family’s manual typewriter. How many authors who write for adults can boast of having a reader so utterly devoted to their work?
Leonard Marcus’s “Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature” is the story of the apparatus that conjured such readers into existence: the children’s librarian who chose to order “The Hobbit”; the publisher (Houghton Mifflin, Marcus’s own) who brought it to market, the stores that were out of stock (possibly because of paper shortages). He even has a few words for the parents who, in the mid-20th century, increasingly saw books as an investment in their children’s future. What probably strikes many people as the most fascinating aspect of the history of children’s literature in America — the children, and the literature itself — takes a back seat to editors and reviewers, printers and magazines, libraries and bookstores.
Studies of books for young people are a recent phenomenon. “Children’s books,” Marcus writes, “may well have mattered so little to historians of past generations precisely because the books mattered so much to children. With their place firmly fixed in the foreground of young people’s intimate lives, few scholars thought to look further or to ask what the books might possibly mean as commercial or cultural artifacts, much less as works of literature and art.” “Minders of Make-Believe” primarily views them as commodities — ones that went from a trifling sideline to a $3.4 billion industry and have on occasion become the focus of fierce cultural battles.
Marcus orders his account chronologically — from primers to Potter, so to speak — beginning with the first children’s book published in the colonies, “The New-England Primer” (1689) and concluding with J. K. Rowling’s record-breaking series, the only books of any kind to have their release dates celebrated at midnight festivals nationwide. No doubt this structure is meant to emphasize how much children’s book publishing has changed in the past 320 years, but in truth, the industry has been peppered with the same kinds of minor crises that have characterized adult trade publishing over the decades. Budgets are cut in lean years and fattened during booms. Outrage flares when a publisher fires a revered editor in a “spectacular act of administrative shortsightedness” and then the editor is hired a month or so later by someone else. Authors grumble about their contracts. Experts worry about the degradation of the public’s taste and the distractions of other media. And someone is always around to reminisce about how much more noble and idealistic the business was 30 or 40 years ago.
One thing that did distinguish children’s publishing in the early 20th century, however, was the predominance of women in the industry, as editors, critics and librarians. The first editorial division devoted exclusively to children’s books, the Department of Books for Boys and Girls, established by Macmillan in 1919, was headed up by Louise Seaman, a former schoolteacher and graduate of Vassar. Like teaching and missionary work, Marcus notes, working with children’s books was considered one of the “‘mothering’ professions” to which women were supposed to be uniquely suited. Once “Minders of Make-Believe” gets to the period after World War I, it’s taken over by a procession of formidable grandes dames, each armed with “a Seven Sisters degree and the well-honed social skills that implied.” These were among the first women to attain positions of significance in the men’s club of book publishing.
Despite the relative uniformity of their backgrounds, the doyennes of the children’s book world did feud on occasion. One major divide lay between children’s librarians, epitomized by the daunting Anne Carroll Moore, the New York Public Library’s first children’s director, and progressive educators, led by Lucy Sprague Mitchell, who ran the experimental Greenwich Village school now known as Bank Street. The librarians endorsed “timeless” fairy tales and folklore as the gold standard in children’s fiction, while Mitchell and her camp advocated contemporary stories in settings familiar to young readers. “Little Red Riding Hood,” Mitchell protested, was “brutal,” “Cinderella” was “sentimental,” and far too many of the traditional tales were filled with “the strange, the bizarre, the unreal.” Virginia Haviland of the Library of Congress referred to the disagreement as the “controversy raging over ‘milk bottles’ versus ‘Grimm’ for the preschool child.”
In the picture book world, a schism separated the champions of the “book beautiful” from the producers of cheap and cheerful items like the Little Golden Books series, which tended to be sold in five-and-dime stores to the stressed-out parents of whining kids. The quality of the paper, printing and binding in children’s books was a particular obsession for librarians and high-minded booksellers and editors, to the degree that these worthies often seemed to lose track of the books’ intended audience. Marcus writes of an editor at Viking during the inflation-straitened 1970s, who, “in fear and trembling,” was obliged to ask Robert McCloskey if he would permit the reprinting of “Make Way for Ducklings” without a dust jacket. McCloskey consented, though the experience “soured” him. Anyone who’s ever seen a 4-year-old handle a book will wonder why it had a dust jacket to begin with.
Libraries and librarians were perhaps the mightiest force in the children’s book world until the cutbacks of the 1970s and a boom in parental book-buying during the 1980s knocked them from their throne. In their heyday, children’s librarians imperiously banished series fiction (like the Tom Swift and Rover Boys books and, later on, Nancy Drew) from many collections, as well as the Little Golden Books — some of which number among my own childhood favorites. The prejudice against series, the most popular of which were formulaic adventure stories churned out by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, was so virulent that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical novels about her pioneer childhood were repeatedly shut out of librarian-administered awards competitions like the Newbery Medal, merely because they seemed series-ish. (Eventually, the American Library Association created a lifetime achievement award in Wilder’s name and presented her with the first one in 1954.)
Although the titans of the genre, from Wilder and Dr. Seuss to E. B. White and Maurice Sendak, make brief appearances in “Minders of Make-Believe,” this is finally a publishing history, the sort of book whose typical event might be characterized as “And then she went to Scribner. ...” Marcus, a charming and nimble writer, makes a valiant effort to keep things interesting, but the editorial shake-ups and new printing technologies will be of interest primarily to historians and people in the industry. It’s the editor’s lot, alas, to subsist on reflected glory. The most interesting thing about even the most esteemed individuals that Marcus covers are the authors they discovered and the books they published, and there’s not quite enough about either in “Minders of Make-Believe.” The effect is a little like hanging around at a perfectly nice party while there’s a terrific one going on just down the hall.
Laura Miller is a staff writer for Salon and the author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia,” which will be published in December.
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