Balderdash!: John Newbery and the Boisterous Birth of Children's Books by Michelle Markel (review)

It's fair to assume that any child viewing and listening to this title already takes children's books for granted. "Lucky, lucky reader," says this book to that complacent child. "Be glad it's not 1726," when all the good stories were for adults, and child readers were stuck with "preachy poems and fables, religious texts that made them fear that death was near, and manuals that told them where to stand … and scores of other rules." Enter John Newbery, who first worked for a printer and then became a publisher with an interest in producing books that would entertain as well as enlighten children. Markel's breathlessly enthusiastic text and Carpenter's rowdy, emotive cast turn Newbery's profitable publishing trend into a gala affair, extolling the innovative approach of A Little Pretty Pocket Book, The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, and the instructive adventures of Tom Telescope. Unfortunately, a modern audience, relying on Markel's précis of Newbery titles and Carpenter's scenes of eighteenth-century Londoners immersed in their books, might wrongfully assume that contemporary readers will all find those early works scintillating and that men, women, and children of all social classes were universally literate. An author's note sets some of the record straight, while also touching on themes of more adult concern, such as the educational philosophy of John Locke, and Newbery contemporaries who also published children's books. A selected bibliography will lead interested adults to additional materials, but it is left to readers to hunt down Newbery works and give kids a taste of what "beginning readers" looked like circa mid-1700s.