Why Children’s Books?
Our first publication was Disney Looking at Painting, after which any title has been a doddle to produce! Reconciling high Brit culture with the demotic of Disney was a gas. Overall, it turned out quite well, with 110,000 copies in print.
Then we met Rob DeSalle, Ian Tattersall, and Patrica J. Wynne, sciences professionals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and devised Bones, Brains, and DNA and Brain. Next, after doing The Summer of Cecily, a story of author Nan Lincoln‘s heroic rescue of a harbor seal, it seemed like a good idea to do the story through the seal’s eyes–thus Cecily’s Summer. The trick is finding the right people to do the right books and in this we have been very fortunate. Of course, you want a strong text and great illustration but you also want to create a book that doesn’t look like all the others on the shelf. Luckily for us, our writers and artists have strong stylistic senses and return to us with new, fresh material time and again. We work around their skills and the subject at hand, designing the format to suit. Authors are never wrong and artists are always right. The rest is, er, finesse!
In all seriousness, though, we maintain that the aesthetics and sensibilities of our authors, illustrators, and author-illustrators are of the most importance. Commodity publishing, or “just giving the public what they want,” is a distracting idea when what we publishers do is fall in love with an idea and work out a way to share it.
And these ways are changing. Looking at and reading books will soon be only the first step in the adventure, with website tie-ins, multimedia components, and interactive materials to follow. Hardback, paperback, audio, digital, and the rest are all zones of publishing, different ways of reaching what remains the same public. Though fads and fashions change the pitch and alter the balance of forms as time goes by, the zeal of their audiences remain a constant. It’s a case of “play it again, Sam,” as the famous mishearing of the old Bogart line goes. Only now we’re “playing it” on a new set of instruments and in a shifted key.
Amid such a constantly-shifting technology, it is interesting to note that children’s books haven’t changed substantially in content since the Victorians invented the genre. Still, reprints of old favorites are hard to come by. There are fewer and fewer “classics” now. Quality is also an issue, as older books — like the French Babar series, for instance – that had a high quality of production now appear in a tatty, cheapening form. Beatrix Potter’s long-running Peter Rabbit has fared better with Penguin, but such cases are rare.
My advice? Hoard your precious, dog-eared copies of Caps for Sale, your (original!) Curious George, the Madelines and Ferdinands and Flat Stanelys of your childhood — if you still have them. If they’ve disappeared from your parents’ house, your storage space, or been hand-me-downed to friends and family, fear not. Likely within months or minutes of this writing, you will be able to read them to your favorite tots from the screen of your Kindle.
