Is Publishing Going to the Dogs?: SLJ Celebrates 50 Years

When Houghton Mifflin was fighting one of many takeover battles in the late 1970s, the head of the Trade Division called together those of us who worked there. "People always talk about the good old days of publishing, when we published real books and real authors," he said. "But they're mistaken. Today we're publishing our finest books and finest authors. That's how you will remember this time when you look back on it. These are the good old days."

He was right, of course. During that period, seasoned veterans—Scott O'Dell, Bill Peet, and Elizabeth George Speare—produced some of their finest works, and the list of the new kids on the block—Lois Lowry, David Macaulay, James Marshall, Chris Van Allsburg, and Allen Say—still takes my breath away. I think of that as my happiest time in publishing; they were, truly, the good old days.

How has children's book publishing changed over the years? Legendary children's book editor Ann Durell wrote an article for the Horn Book in 1982, "If There Is No Happy Ending," that provides a concise analysis of 40 years of that history. Durell summarizes the progress of publishing, decade by decade, beginning with the 1950s ("Publishing Is Fun"), followed by the '60s ("Let It All Hang Out"), the '70s ("Paradox," the struggle between left- and right-wing politics), and the '80s ("If There Is No Happy Ending—Make One," or I wish I could work on a manuscript again). To this progression, we can now add the 1990s "Consolidation of Houses" and 1997–2004's "Before and After Harry Potter," a phenomenon that changed the landscape of children's books.

Now, of course, every sentient being knows that the children's book publishing industry is going to the dogs. The press chronicles its demise—even in our own trade magazines and professional journals. But you don't have to be an industry analyst to diagnose its woes. Those who don't read children's books—or any books at all—often tell me what's wrong. "Every time you turn on the TV, there's some celebrity promoting his new children's book," one such nonreader complained recently.

This vision of publishing being overrun by the canines has been perpetuated for centuries. It began, in fact, in the 15th century, when Johannes Gutenberg began using movable type to produce items that seemed dramatically inferior to the handcrafted, one-of-a-kind books that had long been the norm. As a perpetually fractious marriage between art and commerce, publishing always falls short of valuing only aesthetics. So each generation takes publishers to task for focusing too much on money and too little on art.

"The new publishers also refer to themselves as business men, but they are speaking exactly. They are familiar with all the schemes that have brought prosperity to a hundred American industries, and are trying to adapt them to their own problems. Under the directions of these men, the profession of publishing is becoming the literary business." It all sounds so familiar, but Malcolm Cowley's statement about publishing appeared in The New Republic in 1929. Since the first children's book editors had only been appointed a decade earlier, it would appear that their work was already doomed.

If you've read the press about publishing over the years, you may be amazed to discover that Random House still exists, so long and so frequently has its decline been proclaimed. Likewise, the mid-list author has been reported dying for at least a half a century, even though today the vast majority of authors still stand in the middle of publishers' sales lists. Statistically they must.

However, the problems of publishing do alter with the times. It doesn't take Einsteinian intelligence to sum up where things currently happen to be going awry. As expressed over the past few months by my colleagues in the children's book field, these problems are numerous. For starters, too many books are being published. According to R. R. Bowker, the agency that keeps tabs on information about books and publishers, more than 13,000 juvenile titles appeared last year; around 9,000 of these actually were reviewed by journals. (The numbers may, fortunately, be decreasing in 2004.) That might be fine if readers were presented with 13,000 individual gems; but too many books look the same (edgy and contemporary), represent the same genre (fantasy), or are part of a series or even worse, a brand. Celebrity books abound, and there are more on the way. Narrative story line in picture books has taken a vacation, and illustrators have developed an irrational fear of white space. According to the Cooperative Children's Book Center, only a small percentage of these books show any ethnic diversity. Titles go out of print too quickly, and houses prefer publishing books for the short-term, rather than attempting to create works that will last. The viable and stable library market has been largely ignored while publishers focus on Internet sales, price clubs, bookstore chains, and the next new exciting venue.

To these reservations, I would add another, more generic, problem. We currently have an unbalanced economic structure in the children's book publishing industry. The five largest members of the Children's Book Council—HarperCollins, Penguin Putnam, Random House, Scholastic, and Simon & Schuster—produce around 65 to 70 percent of our children's and young adult books. We have too few medium-sized houses, and small publishers have to fight for their lives. Hence, 70 percent of our books need to look profitable from the point of view of a large corporation.

All of these claims happen, fundamentally, to be true. When I left Houghton Mifflin in 2001, I might well have added other, more damning, reservations. But then I embarked on a project that changed the way I looked at current affairs. I began to read the 1,000 books recommended to me as the best books of the last 100 years for children, ones I was going to winnow down for inclusion in 100 Best Books for Children (Houghton, 2004). As I read through these titles, I noted how quality survives through good and bad economic times. Great books emerged from the Depression, such as Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series. When publishers couldn't get enough paper during World War II, they still found ways to print Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings and Esther Forbes's Johnny Tremain. Although many of the small presses of their day did not survive (Vanguard, L. C. Page, Epstein & Carroll, and Parnassus Press), they stayed around long enough to establish Dr. Seuss, L. M. Montgomery, Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, and Ursula Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea. In fact, 15 percent of the selections eventually chosen for 100 Best Books for Children began as self-published or small-press titles. Our original voices, our true out-of-the-box thinkers, from Dr. Seuss to J. K. Rowling, have always depended upon smaller, independent, quirkier publishers to take a chance on them.

The inherent conflict of publishing—art versus commerce—has always been with us. But somehow literature survives. In each publishing year, we tend to focus on the issues created by commerce. With the passage of time, the weak, ill-advised, or quick-dollar books fade, and only the gems, the great books or authors, endure and stand as an emblem of their era. Art triumphs.

So in 2004 I find we have a great deal to celebrate. Two independent houses published the winners of this year's Newbery and Caldecott awards, our nation's highest honors given to books for young people. The proliferation of small presses, and the variety of what they print, exhilarates me—this year's entries include praiseworthy titles such as Lisa Tetzner's The Black Brothers (Front St.) and David Wiesner's Gonna Roll the Bones (Milk & Cookies). The large conglomerates continue to allow some imprints to operate independently. Books in translation by German author Cornelia Funke have garnered legions of fans. The writers being trained in Vermont College's Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults program will generate a decade of great books. Some seasoned veterans—Nancy Farmer, Mordicai Gerstein, and Jim Murphy—are currently doing their best work. And the talent of the newest kids on the block—M. T. Anderson, Blue Balliett, Harry Bliss, Craig Crist-Evans, Kate DiCamillo, Jennifer Donnelly, Jeanne Duprau, Katherine Hannigan, An Na, Marilyn Nelson, and Janet Tashjian, to name a few—takes my breath away.

If professionals must hunt for the gold a little more carefully among the vast outpouring of books, then we simply need to sharpen our critical skills. In fact, publishers depend upon those of us who evaluate and think about books more than they ever have. They need those who work with children to pay attention to good books and bring them to their true audience. Publishers need us to remind them about art—rather than commerce.

Surveying the current scene—with all of its problems and possibilities—we can without a doubt say, "These are the good old days."