#leonard marcus

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In every generation, children's books mirror the society from which they arise; children always get the books their parents deserve.

Leonard Marcus

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Good Night, Moon: A new kind of children's book

Leonard Marcus:

In the 1920s, library service to children was a relatively new thing, and the leaders of the public library movement, including Anne Caroll Moore at New York Public Library and others, set themselves up as the arbiters of children's literature. They were convinced that they knew what was good for children and what wasn't.

And they became involved in making their views known in many different ways by giving out awards, by publishing lists, by publishing reviews in major newspapers, and on and on. But at the same time, another group of people came along who also thought they knew what was good for children and they disagreed with the librarians and they were the Progressive Educators, lead by Lucy Sprague Mitchell, who was the founder of the Bank Street College of Education, also in New York. And they went head-to-head, and probably on some level, had a lot of fun arguing with each other over these matters.

Anne Caroll Moore saw books for young children as a kind of oasis in life, a chance for children to live outside of the daily cares of modern life and to develop and stretch their imaginations. And so she favored 'Once Upon a Time' kinds of stories which were so well-suited to library story hours, whereas Lucy Mitchell thought that children were all about learning from their own experience and even from the age of two and three, they were fascinated by the things in their immediate surroundings and the cities that they were living in, the neighborhoods they were living in, airplanes, trains. She thought there was plenty of magic in that for children. They didn't need to read about castles and kings which they would probably find confusing anyway.

So that was kind of where the battle lines were drawn. And Lucy Mitchell was very systematic in the way she developed her ideas. First in the form of a new kind of storybook that she wrote herself set in the city, for the most part, and based on various observations that she and her colleagues had made at the Bank Street Nursery School.

And then she began to train younger people to write stories in the same vein, and her star protégé was Margaret Wise Brown starting in the mid-1930s. And Brown was instrumental because she was a true writer, whereas Lucy Mitchell was more of a theorist. Brown was able to bring poetry to, what Lucy Mitchell called the “here-and-now approach” to writing for young children and in books like Good Night, Moon and The Noisy Book and others to create a new kind of literature for very young children.

With time, there came to be more acceptance of these books, and as more and more Americans sent their children to preschool and/or to daycare centers or to programs like Head Start, there was a larger and larger demand for books for the very youngest ages of children and so books that grew out of Margaret Wise Brown's model, you know, the sort of, the standard that she set began to have a bigger and bigger place in the literature for young children.

Now I must read Marcus's Minders of Make-Believe, where I hope he elaborates on this fascinating story. Librarians vs. Progressive Educators--both with their own ideas about what kind of literature will resonate most with children--and out of that conflict arises a master of the artform.

Could anything comparable exist today? The only thing I can think of that comes close is Mac Barnett's Picture Book Proclamation. But that seems more like a plea against laziness and stupidity in the industry. No battle lines being drawn there. But maybe the medium could use a little more conflict. "War is the father of all things" and all that. 

[literarykids]

Book Chat Part One with Leonard Marcus

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Leonard Marcus, considered by many to be the leading authority on the history of children's books in America. He has written dozens of books, from biographies to histories to collections of interviews with authors and illustrators. 

2013 has been busy for Mr. Marcus -he wrote an article about Maurice Sendak for the current issue of Fine Books & Collections Magazine , curated the current exhibit at the New York Public Library that's dedicated to children's books, and has a biography on Randolph Caldecott slated for publication next month. During our hour-long conversation we discussed these and other topics circulating in the children's book world. Below is part one of our conversation.  

photo credit: Elena Seibert

What prompted you to put together this exhibit at the NYPL at this point in time?

The Library contacted me. They decided to do a show on children’s books because the last one they had done was in the 1980’s. A generation of children had come and gone, and the library felt that another exhibit was past due. 

I think the library has changed in many ways - and so have many other cultural institutions. There is a greater interest in making rare materials accessible to the public, not just in the literal sense of putting them on display, but presenting them in a way that’s less intimidating than in the past. 

I think of the Metropolitan Museum and the first time I went there as a teenager. There was this atmosphere of reverence, and that has since changed. All cultural institutions, as a matter of survival, I think, are making the public feel more welcome and relaxed in the presence of their treasures. So the hope for us was to put together an exhibit that gives people ways of connecting with the books in a meaningful way.

Have you noticed this trend of accessibility in other institutions where you’ve put on exhibits? 

Well, I’m very involved with the Eric Carle Museum- I’m on the board of trustees – and I think that having a museum dedicated to children’s books is a sign in itself of a break with tradition. In the past, museums would not have considered children’s book art worthy of exhibition. Certainly not anything contemporary - perhaps old Victorian books that had acquired a certain patina. The Carle is dedicated to contemporary art that, to some extent, presents itself as museum for people of all ages. It makes provisions for the very young who might want to sit on a bench and be read to, or go into a room and create their own art. That is indicative of a shift of how museums view themselves and their role in society. 

Does this also reflect a shift in the way parents read and share books with children?  

I think that parents today belong to the best-educated generation in the history of the world, so I think they are very book-conscious. They’re also more aware of how books are made and perhaps their children are as well. Now artists and writers and can be encountered at story hours, museums, bookstores. 

Some parents, I think, are eager to expose their children to a wide range of books, it’s a way of encouraging children in their own creativity. One of the hallmarks of Eric Carle, who works primarily in collage, is that he creates the kind of art children do when they are in preschool. One of the unspoken messages of Eric Carle’s art is that, his work is not too different from art that children might create on their own. 

That approach reminds me of what Mo Willems and Hervé Tullet spoke about during a recent talk at Books of Wonder in Manhattan

Mo Willems is all about making art that children can do themselves. It’s about demystification. I think that’s a really big theme in the museum world right now, and especially with my exhibit at the NYPL, the goal is to take things off the pedestal and to make people feel that, when we’re talking about culture, we’re talking about ownership, and that everyone can partake in it. 

Some books on display at the NYPL were quite scary – the Grimm books, for example – and some contemporary parents might say ‘I’m not going to read that to my child.’ Yet on the flip side, there exists a genre of violent vampire and zombie books that many parents share freely with their middle-years children. Do you notice any sort of disconnect, or are we watering down children's literature? 

Well some are for it, some abhor it. One good thing about the present is that there is such a range of books available. On the one hand we have a deeper awareness of child psychology than was reflected in the books published for children one hundred years ago. Fifty years ago there was still a desire to shield children from the darker parts of life. Then there are people like Maurice Sendak who really brought a new and frank insight into the equation, which had an impact on books of all kinds.

On the other hand there are intense commercial pressures brought about by the fact that publishers have consolidated, as well as booksellers. There is a rush for the lowest common denominator – the least offensive book that will appeal to the greatest number of people.  So those pressures work against each other. Sometimes one wins out, sometimes the other does. I think that defines the current situation. I see a lot of very safe books, certainly when you look beyond the book world into the film world, such as with Disney, where the financial stakes are so much greater, to come up with something that’s palatable rather than emotionally satisfying.  

Parents must fit in here somewhere. 

I think parents need to know that it’s their responsibility and it can also be a great pleasure for parents to be involved in their children’s reading. There’s been some tendency to leave book choices to the experts, or alternatively to leave the child with a handheld device and then leave the room let the child to fend for himself or herself. That’s perhaps the worst of all choices, because, in my opinion, the book you choose matters, the experience you have of the book matters even more. And for a young child, that experience needs to include an adult who can mediate the story, and assessing it with a loving attachment.

You don't sound like you are against the use of technology, rather in favor of its judicious employment.

I’m not against technology, but it’s no substitute for a parent. And in certain respects, paper books function more effectively than e-books do. I think that these are two art forms that are going to both develop and each will put pressure on the other to do better at what it can do best. A Kindle, for example, can’t change its format. Every picture book has to be exactly the same size to fit in the screen, and that is a real problem for creator of picture books, whereas the trim size and other physical aspects of the book have always been considered expressive elements. But that’s not to say that some brilliant person couldn’t take an e-book – which is really a form of animation – and do something on an aesthetic level that someone working in a picture book format could only dream of doing. 

  I’d like to talk a little about your writing. You are a historian and a critic of children’s literature.. You wrote reviews for Parenting magazine for twenty-one years and write the “Sight Reading” column for Horn Book. Which came first, the historian or the critic? How and when did the two fields meet?

When I was a senior at Yale, I wrote my thesis on the history of American children’s books, but no one at Yale was studying this. The first two history professors I approached to be my advisors both said no because they saw no value in writing the history of children’s books.

But the third professor I approached said yes. It was David Brion Davis, a historian of slavery and western civilization. He told me that the South had, in part, justified slavery by speaking about the slaves as if they were a child-like people. The image of a child was used to manipulate as well as rationalize the public perception of slavery. 

I was also writing about images of childhood as they played out in books for children. In other words, what philosophies or religious ideas were being expressed in books for children; What assumptions were being made about childhood by the authors who were writing about children, and how these assumptions were being transferred to another generation. So Davis saw at least one thread connecting his work with what I wanted to do. He was wonderful to work with.

I was also interested in writing poetry, so I went to the Poetry Writer’s workshop in Iowa for two years. Soon enough I realized that I wouldn’t be able to make a career out of being a poet, so I came back to New York and did the next respectable thing, which was to get a job in publishing. By coincidence I landed at Dover publishing, which is a publishing house dedicated to reprints. One of their lines was a list of facsimile reprints of 18th and 19th century children’s books, often these books in original form were sought after by collectors. If someone couldn’t afford the original, they could purchase a facsimile from Dover.  Each book would include a historical essay about the book and where it fit into the history of things. My boss personally oversaw that list. I had landed in the office of someone who shared my interest in children’s books. When I left he gave me the position to write the historical essay for the next book due to come out. So that’s how I began to publish about the history of children’s books. 

Then, having always wanting to be a writer, I felt there was still a lot left to be said about the subject. When I discovered Goodnight Moon in a bookstore and I was the only one there who had heard of it, I decided it might be interesting to write a biography of the author of that book.  I felt that this was a work of poetry, so writing about Margaret Wise Brown combined my interests in poetry, biographies as a genre, and poetry in one fell swoop.  It took me ten years to write that book, and in the process I learned about writing biographies and met writers, illustrators, editors, publishers who had been around during the golden age of children's book publishing in the 1930’s and 40’s, when Brown published Goodnight Moon.

So I started with that book.  Then, Brown’s editor at Harper allowed me to go through her files, and while there I also saw what a great letter-writer Brown was, which led me to publish a volume of her letters called Dear Genius. 

Check back soon for Part Two!  

[literarykids]

Maurice Sendak, Leonard Marcus and Google’s Wild Doodle

            If you saw the Fine Books Facebook page on Monday you may have been enticed to guess who will grace the magazine’s summer cover.  A hint to seek out that day’s Google Doodle (see below) would have led you to Maurice Sendak, arguably the twentieth century’s preeminent illustrator of children’s books.   Google created the Doodle because Sendak would have celebrated his 85th birthday on Monday.  (Sendak died last May.)

            Leonard Marcus, a leading authority on children’s books and illustrations, has written a story for the summer issue discussing Sendak and his work. Marcus is also the author of Show me a Story! Why Picture Books Matter (Candlewick 2012) and recently edited a catalogue in conjunction with an exhibition of over 200 of Sendak’s previously unpublished art and sponsored by the New York Society of Illustrators.

            Bill Clinton dubbed Sendak “The King of Dreams” when he awarded him the National Medal of Art in 1996.  The Brooklyn native wrote and illustrated close to 100 titles, including perhaps most notably Where the Wild Things Are. He was awarded a Caldecott Medal and the Hans Christian Andersen Award, among many others throughout his sixty-year career. 

            Children of all ages can cite their favorite book. Mine is Dear Mili, an unpublished Wilhelm Grimm tale rediscovered in 1983 and published with Sendak’s illustrations in 1988.  The images of death and miracles are wild – abnormally vivid forests, little girls with very large feet, and psychedelic landscapes. I remember reading it as a child, and while the story itself frightened me, I could not stop gazing at those wonderful images and following Mili on her unflinching quest.  In Show me a Story! Marcus asks Sendak about Mili. His response illustrates his complete understanding of children: “…she has the same kind of trudging, hard-working quality that I love in children. They’re trudging children; they go and do what they must do.”

            A little Father’s Day tribute regarding Dear Mili: as a prized possession, I have a poster for the book, signed by Sendak, that my father stood in a long line to get at an ABA Convention the year of publication. It's the only time he ever queued up at any book convention to get a poster signed. And since Sendak was only autographing one poster per customer, my doting dad got right back in line and procured another so that my sister and I might each have one.   

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"At the Cathedral and elsewhere, [Madeleine L'Engle] led writing workshops for every imaginable demographic, acting on her conviction that storytelling had the power to draw one closer to one’s own best, most authentic self, and that everyone had a story to tell."

Leonard Marcus, author of Listening for Madeleine, speaks about L'Engle at a recent dedication of the Diocesan House to her at St. John the Divine Cathedral.

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Author Leonard Marcus expresses why picture books matter #webelieveinpicturebooks