Children's Book Publishing: An Interview with George Nicholson

GD: What was the field like when you started out and when was that?

GN: I started in 1959. My first job was with Western Publishing Company, with the division called Artists' and Writers' Press, which in fact was the editorial staff for all Golden Books and for a number of projects that were done for other companies—Harper & Row and for a variety of textbook houses like the Charles Merrill Company. Artists' and Writers' Press had been formed in the forties to produce Golden Books for Western, which was at that time just a printing company in Racine, Wisconsin. It was mass-market children's book publishing which referred then as now to a form of distribution, rather than to the quality of content. And if you look back at the children's books published in the thirties and forties, in fact many of them remain classics to this day. Garth Williams, Rojankovsky, all sorts of extraordinary people, many of them European emigre's, began to work in children's book illustration and Golden Books published many of them. It was an extraordinary house.

But the general attitude in those years was that there was a great separation between the quality of what we did at a place like Western and what Harper & Row did under Ursula Nordstrom. Harper was unquestionably the great children's publisher of the fifties and sixties. Many of the people I worked with felt that when we grew up we would go to Harper, or someplace like that. But Western was a superb place to learn your craft, because it was a printing company, and I plunged in immediately. One of the first projects I did was the Golden Encyclopedia of Art, and I wound up clearing permissions for a year, writing the museums and galleries, that sort of thing, so I really learned how to put a book together.

Also, because I was continually involved in printing, I would go to Racine, Wisconsin or Hannibal, Missouri, or Poughkeepsie, New York, where the major plants were, to oversee the books I was involved in. As a very young person, then, I was pushed immediately into actual book production. I was initially much more interested in New York City than I was in children's books as such, and I had taken the job because it was the first offered to me in New York. In those years you had to have "New York experience." As time went on, though, I began to enjoy what I was doing, partly because I really got involved with children's literature, and in a project with Science Research Associates in Chicago, who were designing what were essentially anthologies. They were boxes of individual readers, 64 in each book, all excerpted from standard works of literature. So for the first time since my own childhood I began to read widely in children's books.

After I was at Western five years, I had the opportunity to come to Dell, to start a children's book department. I had no idea what a huge situation it would become. We already had Laurel Leaf but it existed by and large to do reprints of public domain and original anthology lines for secondary schools. We did very little fiction. Then we started Yearling. Gradually, by the time I left Dell in 1970 to go to Holt, Rinehart & Winston, both lines were flourishing as fiction lines, and to this day, I would say 90 percent of Yearling and probably 85 percent of Laurel Leaf are fiction.

GD: What were they before?

GN: Yearling always was because it began in 1967. Laurel Leaf was originally public domain fiction, by and large, and anthologies of poetry and short stories and plays.

When I came to Dell, there was a vast gulf between mass-market, meaning distribution and sometimes content, and so-called "quality" trade. And, of course, trade, which I wanted to get involved with, did not mean what I thought it meant at Western, which was sales in bookstores. In fact, for children's books, the trade...