'Loose Leaf' May Fold

The Loose Leaf Book Company, a pioneering radio program that brings the best in children's books and authors to 250,000 adult listeners each week, may soon be history. Unless the hour-long public radio show receives commitments for $800,000—the show's annual operating budget—by mid-November, Executive Producer Ben Manilla says the program will be forced off the airwaves. As of mid-October, Loose Leaf, which is heard on 240 stations nationwide and hosted by radio and TV personality Tom Bodett, had received commitments for only $100,000.

In order to make Loose Leaf, which premiered in January 2000 (see News, December 1999, p. 15), as accessible to as large a number of public radio affiliates as possible, the founders, Manilla, Bodett, and literary agent Jeff Dwyer, decided to forgo the standard procedure of charging a carriage fee after the show's first year. Little did they know that the underwriting climate would soon go south. Although Loose Leaf has received funding from the agent Sterling Lord Literistic and a slew of children's book publishers—including Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Harcourt, Houghton Mifflin, HarperCollins, Hyperion, Little, Brown, Random House, Scholastic, and Simon & Schuster—Manilla says that the show needs a major corporate underwriter to shoulder most of the fiscal load.

Manilla has applied for a number of grants, and he is trying to cut a deal with a couple of major restaurant chains that would prolong Loose Leaf's life. For additional information, see www.looseleafbookcompany.org.