Tilling the Field of Children's Literature
Lillian N. Gerhardt -- School Library Journal, 7/1/1999
It's time for an in-depth study of all who work with children and their books
Illustration by Mark Matcho
Lillian N. Gerhardt, former editor-in-chief of SLJ, presented the 1999 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture at San Jose (CA) State University. The lecture, which honors Arbuthnot's contributions to the field of children's literature, appears by permission of the Association for Library Service to Children. Gerhardt's lecture will also appear in the summer edition of the Journal of Youth Services in Libraries.
Thirty years or so ago a task force of the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) was struggling to arrive at a suitable award to honor the memory of May Hill Arbuthnot. As I recall, it was the late Harriet Quimby, then coordinator of children's services at Brooklyn Public Library, who told me the task force was tilting toward the establishment of this honor lecture. Harriet said, "It doesn't seem quite fair to choose an honoree and require a lecture in exchange.Ar
Secure from any such dream of glory, I told Harriet not to fuss. "Let 'em sweat,"I said kindly.
There are a lot of farm hands sweating in what we now call this "field of children's literature." Many of these laborers don't know that library book selectors have toiled in the field for 125 years. Caroline M. Hewins got to the field in 1875 in my home state, Connecticut. This confident, well-read, 29-year-old librarian, who worked at the Hartford Public Library and was interested in children, chose a caseful of books for young readers from among the jumble issued by 19th-century American publishers. Hewins worked at this alone. No map, no compass, no library organization colleagues to cheer or discourage her. No publishers or booksellers at hand to help or hinder.
Now, 125 years later, there are many thousands of people at work in this field. Documentation is scattered or missing on how their working relationships evolved over the 20th century. These relationships affect the literary, aesthetic, and subject content, and the sheer numbers of books, now issued each year especially for children and adolescents.
As my contribution to this field, I propose a book. It's needed. It's wanted. It will be useful. I propose a cross-cultural study of the working relationships of all who are involved with children and their books. Such a study would resolve the disputes and settle the nettlesome questions growing among its workers, who include:
- the librarians selecting books in public and school libraries for children and adolescents;
- the parents and teachers who use these collections;
- the editors who edit children's books and their authors and illustrators;
- the publishers who determine which books to publish and their marketing staffs;
- the vendors who sell the books to libraries;
- the specialized review agencies that provide selection tools to libraries;
- the scholars who study children's literature;
- the library schools that introduce student librarians to this literature;
- and the administrators who direct the institutions that provide the space for the library collections in which those student librarians will be employed someday.
All of these connections began in or before the 20th century. All have a direct bearing on where we started, where we've been, where we are now, and where we're going. These are all the people whose interactions have shaped the field of children's literature, who decide what gets planted in it, and how it's harvested. I feel sure that the leaders of ALSC, the Young Adult Library Services Association, and the American Association of School Librarians will be able to persuade the leaders of the American Library Association (ALA) that a cross-cultural examination of workers in the field of children's literature is in order. Those three divisions, plus ALA's other members who began their careers in youth services, make up about 25 percent of ALA's more than 55,000 members.
This is the documentation the youth services divisions of ALA have never had. At last, a study will exist to show how libraries' necessarily selective spending has influenced the quality of what has been published for young readers; how ALA's awards sell books at the bestseller level, and how multiple purchases for collections keep these award winners in print long after adult bestsellers have had their day and disappeared from publishers' backlists; and how ALA's standards set for the selection of these awards have helped provide models for the best of 20th-century American children's literature.
We need a cross-disciplinary team of historians, sociologists, anthropologists, statisticians, and scholars of children's literature to analyze and evaluate all the forces -- social, economic, political, cultural -- that affect the selection of books for library collections and that make it possible for young people, through reading, to help them raise themselves through these always hectic times.
Imagine it: one handy book to help administrators of the institutions in which youth services librarians are employed understand one of the major reasons why these services are granted so much credibility by the general public, and why they attract so much favorable publicity for their institutions.
Now that I have outlined the cross-cultural study, identified the organization that can get the funds to undertake it, and suggested its value as an information tool, I'd have to review such a compendium. As any responsible reviewer should, I need to identify the sources of my biases and prejudices, and what I'd zero in on: the development of children's and young adult library book selection guidelines, and how these are implemented with many a trip, stumble, and fall from the most stringent of lofty literary goals.
My predispositions may be traced to the fact that I was born head first at the bottom of the Great Depression and lived in West Haven, CT. West Haven was the small shoreline town where Eleanor Estes set her novels about The Moffats. My public library, with the twin, umbrella-shaped trees outside its main entrance, was the one where Rufus M. struggled to sign for his first library card, with the required clean hands.
My mother was a full-time housewife. Mama's Bank Account could have been written in our kitchen. My father was a wheelwright in a factory, who counted himself lucky to get 15 hours of work in a week; some weeks, there were none. They were both first-generation Americans from the wave of immigrants that arrived in the U.S. during the last quarter of the 19th century. They'd both been forced to leave school by eighth grade to help support large families.
My connection to a cultural heritage began long before I learned to read by way of the most wonderful lies told to me by my aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors. I started kindergarten in 1937, convinced by these storytellers that I had descended from kings in Ireland and barons in Germany. My classmates were also fallen aristocrats -- uncrowned queens of Belgium, disinherited counts of Italian states, and some who knew that the Mayflower would never have made it across the Atlantic without sailors bearing their family names. These genealogies were suspect fiction, of course, but helped improve our posture.
I began studying library practices and library book selection dicta under my mother. I doubt if she knew that her methods reflected those of librarians in the 1930s. First she studied me so thoroughly I was sure she could read my mind. She chose books and stories to read to me from a small household collection of children's books and talked with me about what we read. Those from Hurlburt's Favorite Stories from the Bible set off many a serious conversation. She saw to it that most of my birthday and Christmas gifts were books.
When I learned to read in first grade and whipped through Dick and Jane faster than Shirley Temple could tap dance, Mother laid down her book selection philosophy:
- I want you reading every day. Turn off that radio. Books are better for you.
- Show me what you're reading and I'll help you with the hard words.
- You will not bring any trash reading into the house.
The last law was emphatic. I'd begun by second grade to mine the trash barrels of our neighbors for such high-interest/low-vocabulary materials as confession magazines, movie fan magazines, and comic books. Mother railed against these. She said I had better things to read. She said I was wasting my time. She warned me I'd never remember anything worthwhile from such trash. Mother was almost right. I remember I had the first issue of Superman whenever I hear that a copy has sold for thousands of dollars, but not a thing about his birth. I can't remember the long line of Joan Crawford's broken engagements or discarded husbands. But I do remember one confessional story.
Attracted by a full-color photo of a woman with a black eye clutching a beautiful puppy, I read and remembered vividly that she said she first realized the intensity and depth of her husband's love when he belted her in a jealous rage for kissing the dog before kissing him on entering their apartment. My library's book selectors and my mother had a lot to worry about in those days besides small budgets.
As I said before, I doubt that Mother knew that she was a children's librarian-manquA", but consider this library book selection dicta:
- study the children to learn their interests;
- supply a range drawn from the best and most beautiful children's literature for their reading pleasure, information and character development;
- read the books before you give them to or use them with children;
- read to the children and discuss what you've read;
- and keep the stock down.
I never had the chance to ask my mother how she'd arrived at her philosophy and methods, because she died just before my 10th birthday in 1942.
As a student librarian in the early 1950s I took my first course in children's literature. I heard the echoes of my mother's voice as well as Hewin's. I've lived and worked through 66 years with all of these forces in play without such a cross-cultural survey at hand, so I can't easily explain and document how these forces fixed it so my young neighbor's library book was brought home with a bookmark that promotes a corporate hamburger joint's discount rates. Or why that book introduces a social and political issue adults are quarreling about. Or why it was selected for a limited book collection from among the 4,000 new general trade titles issued last year for young people, many of them from publishing departments now called Book and Merchandising Departments.
Inquiring minds among all the field hands of children's literature need to know more about how this happened -- without having to chase all over hell's half-acre in order to document the purposes and results of all their sweat -- for the sake of the children first and the resulting literature produced, sold, and selected for them a close second. The next century looms without a good planning document.
Thank you for listening to the longest editorial I ever wrote about the selection of children's literature for library collections.
