On publishing children's books

Some of you know I’m now a children’s book publisher. Founding and building Tenley Circle Press has taught me much about the business, and publishing my two picture books, Ben, the Bells and the Peacocks (2006) and A Book for Elie (2009), has readied TCP to publish two more books this year, Mary Jane Mitchell’s Witchful Thinking! and Sue Ruff’s Artie and Merlin, both due out in early fall 2009.

Along with many of you, I’ve been following the scary downturn of the book business in general. At the same time I’ve been alert to positive signs that assure me that the love for new children’s books persists.

There have always been naysayers, even among the proponents of the best in children’s literature. Witness Jill Lepore’s fascinating New Yorker piece, “The Lion and the Mouse: The Battle That Reshaped Children’s Literature,” about the genteel 1940’s flapdoodle between New York Public Library’s Children’s Librarian Anne Carroll Moore and E.B. White over the publication of Stuart Little.

Nevertheless, children’s book publishing is ingrained in the American experience. For a comprehensive and gripping chronicle of this national compulsion, read Leonard Marcus’s Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature.

Some argue convincingly that America’s real love affair is with capitalism and the commodification of all things, childhood and creativity included. They insist that what matters is mainly expressible numerically, in the form of quantifiable outcomes. In the book business the critical quantifiables are print-run size, per-copy cost, expenses, receipts, sales volume, inventory, profits, losses, and bottom line.

But many of us believe that happiness and its pursuit lie less in measurable outcomes than in immeasurable ones.

For me the pursuit of such happiness lies in making books in the company of others and putting them into the waiting hands of young readers. This belief was confirmed recently at a meeting of the Children's Book Guild of Washington, D.C., at which longtime editor and publisher Richard Jackson explained his decision to defer retirement in order to publish more new and beautiful books for children. At its core, Jackson insisted, the children’s book business isn’t about business. “It’s what the story wants,” Jackson said. “Not what the market wants.” The province of writing for children and reading with them, he said, is “moral imagination,” a place where the “Luminous meets the Numinous” and the writer and reader meet over the music and poetry of words and the beauty of moving illustrations. Jackson based much of his talk on Moonshot, Brian Floca’s forthcoming book about the Apollo 11 mission, which Mr. Jackson edited for his own eponymous children’s imprint, a division of Simon & Schuster.

With compelling watercolor illustrations and a text that is both good science/history and good poetry, Moonshot perfectly exemplifies why many of us cannot get enough of children’s books. Writing, Richard Jackson explained, is all about making readers "feel the facts." When writers “let loose the anchor" of research and information, those facts will “come to the reader as a story." Art, he said, has the power to “deal creatively with reality” and more importantly to evoke "the rhapsody of experience."

Here’s "to feeling the facts," to “letting loose the anchor” of the everyday, to creating the meeting place for writers, artists, and readers at the convergence of the Luminous and the Numinous, at the intersection of creativity and reality, to evoking “the rhapsody of experience”!