Niche Marketing and the (Shallow) World of Crabtree

A niche, according to my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, is a "shallow, ornamental recess or hollow." By extension, a niche market defines a small sector "adapted to the character, or suited to the merits, of a person or thing." When applied to educational publishing, however, a niche market is not small. Think Wal-mart. According to its website, the Crabtree Publishing Company is "a publisher of children's non-fiction books and has been in business since 1978," and the "company began building its reputation as a quality children's book publisher with its series about the early pioneers, called Early Settler Life, which has become a mainstay in public and school libraries as well as historic sites and museums across North America" ("Tell Me about Crabtree Publishing").

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, formerly CCL/LCJ, might be expected to have little to do with books intended for the school non-fiction market. So an explanation is required to account for the reason why books by an educational (rather than a trade) publisher are reviewed here at all.

One fall, not so very long ago, I contacted Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer, hoping to reprise a joint venture that had been quite successful when I'd tried it with CCL, on two occasions, several years ago.¹ At the time, CCL was housed at Guelph University and I was a professor at the University of New Brunswick, teaching children's literature to undergraduates in education. I'd designed the exercise to offer students access to Canadian children's books, a chance to make critical judgments, and a real-world alternative to the essays used in academic assessments of their work. I also wanted students to familiarize themselves generally with reviewing journals. People who are learning to be teachers should, after all, be able to use the tools of the trade. Journals provide access to, and value judgments about, children's books. Ideally, teachers want to induct children into literate life and a literate community. That's the theory, anyway.

With CCL/LCJ becoming Jeunesse and me being relocated to an Ontario university, it seemed a good time to try a similar exercise. I didn't think that the rationale had changed: teachers still needed, I assumed, access to children's books and information about those books. And I was looking for something that would engage the fourth-year concurrent education students that I was teaching. When I spoke with Perry, he told me that he had "boxes and boxes" of books from the Crabtree Publishing Company in his office. The "boxes and boxes" made their way back to Ontario from Manitoba (carbon footprint not withstanding). I wanted, fervently, for this exercise to be...