The Gatekeepers of Children's Literature

The "minders of make-believe" whom Leonard Marcus chronicles in this impressive volume are "publishers, critics, librarians, [and] booksellers" (ix). Authors provide the writing which these minders shape or reshape, package, evaluate, and sell, with the librarians who admit and welcome young readers also acting as influential gatekeepers in the process. In taking such an approach, Marcus foregrounds the enablers long left in the shadows by traditional histories of writing for children.

Chapter one, "Providence and Purpose," details the earliest American books for children: seventeenth-century catechisms and primers, in both English and Latin. Marcus passes through their history quickly on his way to Isaiah Thomas's late eighteenth-century pirating of John Newbery's English books for children. Reminding readers that "bookseller-printer-publishers of this formative period typically published for local readerships" (9), he treats such figures as Mathew Carey of Philadelphia and Virginia's Parson Weems (who invented the famous Washington–hatchet–cherry tree story in 1806), before moving on to their early nineteenth-century compatriots in New York City: Samuel Wood, Mahlon Day, and Solomon King. The future, however, "belonged to larger, better-capitalized firms, such as Harper and Brothers" (17); and to those like the Reverend Jacob Abbott, who churned out Rollo Holiday books at the rate of four per year, and Samuel Griswold Goodrich (alias Peter Parley), phenomenally successful at recruiting such authors as Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Oliver Wendell Holmes for his annuals. The result of their efforts was that by the 1850s, "a very substantial portion of the books being offered for sale were American books for American children" (30).

Chapter two, "Wonder in the Wake of War," explores children's monthly periodicals. Major printing houses like Harper, Putnam, Appleton, and Scribner engaged top-flight writers for the juvenile market as they embarked upon a "high stakes" expansion (39). We see Louisa May Alcott editing Robert Merry's Museum, and breaking the mold for authors writing for pay by her retention of the copyright for Little Women; we also witness the expansive McLoughlin Brothers "exploiting the new technique of two-color wood block illustration" (62). In this period, even the venerable Atlantic Monthly expanded into the children's market for a while.

Chapter three, "Innocence Lost and Found," introduces such influential figures as Anne Carroll Moore, head of children's services at the New York Public Library beginning in 1907; Franklin K. Mathiews, chief librarian of the Boy Scouts of America, promoting "ten million boys with their parents" to booksellers and publishers as "a perpetual field for exploitation" (74); and Louise Seaman Bechtel, who expanded the children's book market beyond its traditional upscale locus to "the less educated and financially less well off majority of Americans" (81).

The bulk of Minders of Make-Believe treats the rest of the twentieth century, decade by decade: "Sisters in Crisis and in Conflict: the 1930s"; "World War and Mass Market: the 1940s"; "Fun and Fear: the 1950s"; "Shaken and Stirred: the 1960s"; and "Change and More Change: the 1970s." The final chapter, "Suits and Wizards at the Millennium's Gate," gallops through the sales shift from schools and libraries to direct purchase; the development of a market for infant and toddler books; the incursion of computer technology; the dramatic increase in bookstores solely for children; the emergence of a significant minority ethnic presence in children's book plots; the treatment of social problems; and the mergers of national and international publishing houses.

Where nearly every other history of children's books and literature is literary in its approach—analysis of prose style and content, exploration of theoretical implications—Marcus focuses on the mechanics of publishing: copyright; shifts in the organization of printing and publishing processes in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; payments to authors; publishing house consolidations; magazine publishing; efficiency of plant use; book sales; and the colorful culture of book editors. These are the structures within and through which individual writers' creations reach actual readers, a subject long...