How to use this Page

In honor of Black History Month, we are daily posting key articles from the Horn Book archives about the African American experience in children’s and young adult literature. Up today: Augusta Baker’s “The Changing Image of the Black in Children’s Literature,” a speech she gave in 1974 in honor of the Horn Book’s fiftieth anniversary, and an excellent summation of how far African American children’s literature had come since she compiled her first bibliography on the topic in 1938. I hope you enjoy Baker’s astute survey and all the valuable contributions website editors Elissa Gershowitz and Katie Bircher are uncovering, each tagged HBBlackHistoryMonth16.

Roger Sutton
Editor in Chief

The post From the Editor – February 2016 appeared first on The Horn Book.

Last month, while reading and re-reading books for The Horn Book’s annual “Fanfare” discussion, I teased followers of the Read Roger blog with mention of a book that had me excited for YA publishing all over again: “Granted, the half-dozen books I have to get through before [the meeting] are themselves already separated from the herd, and granted that you can still find plenty of formula in YA publishing, but at this minute I am feeling very proud of all you YA writers and editors and publishers.”

The book — now it can be told — was Nova Ren Suma’s The Walls Around Us, which is just one of several excellent YA novels to make our list of the best books of 2015, beginning in this issue on page 12. While I had known before reading it that the book was being passed around the Horn Book offices with fervent recommendations, I confess that overhearing the words ballet and horror had made me quietly resolve to ignore it if I possibly could. My mistake, and one fortunately rectified via professional obligation.

The Walls Around Us, along with A.S. King’s I Crawl Through It, Neal Shusterman’s Challenger Deep, and Tim Wynne-Jones’s The Emperor of Any Place, all also on the Fanfare list, are recommended for high school readers. This is not to say that younger readers should be steered away from these titles, simply that the books’ complexities will probably be best and likeliest approached by sixteen-year-olds rather than the twelve-year-olds who, twenty-five years ago, were in the sweet spot of YA publishing. And by complexities I don’t mean sexual material; while contemporary YA does sometimes make me blush, none of the four books I mention is notably juicy in that regard. Rather, the challenges they present are narratorial, each of them employing shifts in point of view, register, and timeframe, along with an elastic sense of realism, to tell their stories. While these novels are very different from one another, they are united in the generous trust they have in their readers to navigate the unexpected: a helicopter you can only see on Tuesdays (I Crawl Through It)? An island where you’re haunted by your future descendants (The Emperor of Any Place)? Is he on a boat, or what (Challenger Deep)? Wait, who’s dead (The Walls Around Us)? These writers do not hold our hands through the strangenesses but instead encourage us, through confident prose, to stay with them because we don’t want to be left behind.

We have known for a while that many, maybe most, readers of contemporary YA are adults. Nothing wrong with that in itself, of course, and these four books are evidence that such readers are not necessarily looking for something easy. (I believe I have said in the past that they were and herein Take It Back.) But, except insofar as their dollars might allow YA publishing to take risks, I don’t care about adults reading YA, do you? And what I love best about our Fanfare YA choices is that none of them is an adult book in disguise; each one approaches young adulthood from the inside — even if it’s from the inside of an invisible helicopter.

From the January/February 2016 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Editorial: Climbing the Walls appeared first on The Horn Book.

As a result of the baby boomlet of the late 1980s, we saw subsequent picture book publishing grow, not just in sheer numbers of new titles but in the expansion of the traditionally preschool genre’s reach into books intended for older children and even adults. In this edition of What Makes a Good…? we go back to basics and back to preschoolers, starting things off with five questions for a grandmaster of the picture book, the 2011 Laura Ingalls Wilder Award winner Tomie dePaola.

Roger Sutton
Editor in Chief

From the December 2015 issue of What Makes a Good…?

The post From the Editor – December 2015 appeared first on The Horn Book.

People are already fighting about Starbucks’s holiday cups, there were Christmas tree ornaments on sale at CVS this morning, and The Horn Book is pulling together Fanfare, our list of the best books of the year. While I see that Publishers Weekly has already published its list of bests (which is really rushing the season, IMHO), rest assured that Fanfare will be finished and in your inbox on December 9th in plenty of time for gift-giving (and -getting!).

Roger Sutton
Editor in Chief

The post From the Editor — November 2015 appeared first on The Horn Book.

I want to thank the Horn Book, Simmons College, and Boston Globe staff who worked so hard to make this year’s Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards and Horn Book at Simmons Colloquium: “Transformations” a big success. You can see a photo album of the events on our website, and look forward to the January/February 2016 issue of the Horn Book Magazine for coverage of the weekend (including, for the many who have asked, Susan Cooper’s inspiring keynote speech). Next year marks the fiftieth anniversary of BGHB and we are planning for a big celebration!

Roger Sutton
Editor in Chief

The post From the Editor — October 2015 appeared first on The Horn Book.

When I was walking around the ALA exhibits in San Francisco earlier this summer, I kept running into publishers eager to show me their “narrative nonfiction.” I knew this was a concept (see Elizabeth Partridge’s article “Narrative Nonfiction: Kicking Ass at Last” and more on narrative nonfiction from The Horn Book) but apparently it had become a Thing — a new genre, perhaps, but a new sales hook, definitely.

In hopes of helping you sort through the raft (and the hype!), The Horn Book brings you “What Makes Good Narrative Nonfiction?,” the debut issue of our new quarterly newsletter What Makes a Good…?, based on a popular feature in the Horn Book Magazine. Each issue will provide brief reviews of recent exemplary titles in a genre, an interview with a noted author (here Steve Sheinkin, the much-awarded historian for young people), and tips on selection from Deborah B. Ford, director of library outreach for our sister company the Junior Library Guild.

While children have been reading narrative nonfiction since at least The Story of Mankind (the first Newbery winner…in 1922!), renewed attention to the genre has stemmed, prosaically, from the Common Core State Standards, and, more happily, from the success of adult books such as Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City and Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit. These books demonstrated a renewed enthusiasm for the terrific stories to be found amongst the real world, and it is heartening to see that the interests of young readers will be met as well. Kids have never been ashamed to declare their allegiance to good storytelling, and a true story — what a wonderful paradox of words, yes? — provides both the stimulus of narrative and bragging rights to the facts: I know something that really happened.

Roger Sutton
Editor in Chief

From the August 2015 issue of What Makes a Good…?

The post From the Editor—August 2015 appeared first on The Horn Book.

I’m happy to announce that Susan Cooper will be keynoting “Transformations,” the 2015 Horn Book at Simmons Colloquium, to be held at Simmons College on October 3^rd, following the presentation of the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards the evening before. Susan, who won the BGHB Fiction Award in 1973 for The Dark Is Rising (and wrote about transformations in the May/June 2015 issue of The Horn Book Magazine) will be joined by Candace Fleming, Marla Frazee, and others in consideration of the theme, and we would love for you to join us. You can sign up for early-bird registration here; your ticket will also secure you a spot at the invitation-only BGHB ceremony on October 2^nd.

Roger Sutton
Editor in Chief

From the August 2015 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

The post From the Editor – August 2015 appeared first on The Horn Book.

I’m just back from ALA in San Francisco (conveniently also home to my two adorable grandchildren), where the term I kept hearing throughout the exhibit halls was narrative nonfiction (last year it was bullying). As is so often true of these trends, the term meant different things to different people, with definitions ranging from “like Steve Sheinkin” to “informational books with a beginning, middle, and end” to “Core Standards–ready with a story besides.” Me, I just kept thinking of Henrik Van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, but I suppose reinvention is what keeps us young!

Van Loon won the first Newbery Medal in 1922, too early for us to have included his acceptance speech in the Horn Book Magazine‘s pages. But this year’s winner’s speech (by Kwame Alexander, along with those for the Caldecott, Wilder, and Coretta Scott King awards) are all in our current July/August issue, itself graced with a cover created by 2015 Caldecott Medalist Dan Santat. I think it’s quite one of the most spectacular issues we’ve published; go here for information about how to get a copy for yourself.

Roger Sutton
Editor in Chief

The post From the Editor – July 2015 appeared first on The Horn Book.

The Academy of American Poets chose wisely back in 1996 when they designated April as National Poetry Month. A book of poetry is the perfect choice for outdoor reading in spring. You can open to one page and put your hands back in your pockets to warm while you read. You can pay attention to all the tiny things popping up about you without losing your place. You can stop reading and just look at the shape of the words on the page while you take in some bird talk. While poetry is often compared to (and paired with) music, I think its artistic equivalent is more like sculpture: the poem stays in one place while you wander around it, taking in not just its shape but how it sits in the world that surrounds it. So pick up a poem and find a bench.

Roger Sutton
Editor in Chief

From the April 2015 issue of Notes from Horn Book.

The post From the Editor – April 2015 appeared first on The Horn Book.

Inadvertently or not, ALA heeded the call of the zeitgeist when it honored six books (out of ten in toto) by people of color in the 2015 Newbery and Caldecott medals and honors, announced last month at the Midwinter conference in Chicago. The winners were Kwame Alexander (African American) for Newbery and Dan Santat (Asian American) for Caldecott; the honor recipients included women of color Jacqueline Woodson for the Newbery and Yuyi Morales, Jillian Tamaki, and Lauren Castillo for the Caldecott. This is all wonderful news.

Yet another honoree represents diversity of a different kind: Cece Bell, who won a Newbery Honor for the graphic-novel memoir El Deafo, is deaf. At that same ALA conference, ALSC held a day-long institute about diversity in books for young people. While speakers were careful to note that diversity included identifiers beyond ethnic group, more than one opined that what we were “really” talking about on this day was the depiction of people of color in children’s and YA literature. While that topic is more than enough for a day’s work, is it, “really,” all we are talking about?

Cece Bell presents one valuable exception; the five men whose work is profiled by Barbara Bader beginning on page 24 present another. No one would claim that these men were invisible; among them, they have fifteen Caldecott or Newbery citations and three Laura Ingalls Wilder medals. (Sendak takes the lion’s share while Remy Charlip, always ahead of the curve, has none.) And coming of artistic age at a time when such things were secret — or at least private — they all were gay. Tomie dePaola, God bless him, alone among them is still alive and flourishing: witness his glorious cover portrait of himself among brothers, convened in a party by noted hostess and self-proclaimed genius Gertrude Stein. (Who wouldn’t pay to see Jim Marshall try to make Gertrude Stein laugh? I bet he could and she would.)

Jokes about Frog and Toad being more than friends aside, none of these men ever wrote explicitly about being gay — first, one assumes, because of the strictures of the times and, second, because they created books for very young children. What enabled them to do so with such heart and intelligence? Only Arnold Lobel had children, but they all could, as Bader writes, “think big on a small child’s level.” Does their being gay have anything to do with this? I think yes.

Much is made by diversity advocates of the need to have cultural insiders create books that convey a culture with empathy, authenticity, and respect. True enough. But don’t outsiders have something to offer as well? The five artists Bader profiles grew up in an era in which gays and lesbians could not even look to their own families, never mind the wider community, for affirmation. Gay kids grew up alone, attentive to all the ways in which they did not belong. It tends to make one an extremely good observer, the first step in becoming an artist. Never underestimate the payoff of a lonely childhood.

I am certainly glad times are different now. Out gay artists, along with all those represented in the alphabet soup that is queer identity today, create picture books and novels and nonfiction for young people that forthrightly address a spectrum of sexuality and gender identity, and fewer people blink every day. But may these same artists also remember their rich legacy and continue to create wild things and clowns of God, friendly frogs and hippos, arm in arm in arm in arm to touch the imaginations of our children all.

From the March/April 2015 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Editorial: The Difference That Made Them appeared first on The Horn Book.

The ALA has spoken, and this year’s roster of awards for children’s and young adult books is impressively diverse and Diverse. The forthcoming issue of The Horn Book Herald includes all the lowdown about the Newbery, Caldecott and other book awards announced earlier this month in Chicago — and 2015 Newbery medalist Kwame Alexander gets the Horn Book’s five-question treatment. Look for the Herald in your inbox next week.

Roger Sutton,
Editor in Chief

From the February 2015 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

The post From the Editor – February 2015 appeared first on The Horn Book.

Please permit me to highlight two of the titles reviewed in this issue of Notes from the Horn Book, alike only in their consideration of the friendship possible between the old and the young, and — refreshingly — their resistance of current splashy publishing trends. That The Farmer and the Clown is wordless is the only on-trend thing about Marla Frazee’s latest picture book, and unlike so many of that ilk it is not about solving a puzzle or decrypting a mind-bending meta-plot. It is instead about caring and connection between human beings, with powerful emotions evoked, through posture and gesture alone, on every page. In contrast, Naomi Shihab Nye’s The Turtle of Oman could, I suppose, be called wordful, and like Nye’s wonderful poetry, this novel sneaks up on you. Its story and characters are soft-spoken, and there’s no grand galloping plot, just the unconditional friendship between a boy and his grandfather as they prepare to say goodbye for a while. As with The Farmer and Clown, you finish the book knowing that even when the characters part, each will keep the other in his heart — and you won’t forget them, either.

Roger Sutton,
Editor in Chief

From the November 2014 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

The post From the Editor – November 2014 appeared first on The Horn Book.

When it comes to spooky stories, it’s always hard to know just how scared any given person wants to be. Maurice Sendak always said that children sent him drawings of Wild Things that terrified him; I, one the other hand, once drove a little girl screaming from a story hour with “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” We hope everyone will find just the right amount of fear factor in one of the choices reviewed above or in our annual Halloween list — “Horn BOO!” — being sent to you next week.

Richard and I are having the pleasure this year of escorting our grandchildren on their October 31^st rounds, which brings up the scariest question of all: What will I wear?

Halloween 2013. Appearances are deceiving.

Roger Sutton,
Editor in Chief

The post From the Editor – October 2014 appeared first on The Horn Book.

I hope you will join us for the fifth annual Horn Book at Simmons Colloquium, “Mind the Gaps,” on October 11^th at Simmons College in Boston. This year’s program will examine the various diversity gaps in children’s book publishing, whether they be underrepresentation of nonwhite perspectives or the decreasing proportion of nonfiction titles. The colloquium takes place the day after the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards (for which a ticket will be provided to all HBAS attendees), and speakers will include all three winners as well as librarian and 2012 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, who will give the keynote address. For more information about the colloquium and to register, please visit http://www.hbook.com/bghb-hbas/.

Roger Sutton
Editor in Chief

From the September 2014 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

The post From the Editor – September 2014 appeared first on The Horn Book.

I hope you can join Horn Book Executive Editor Martha V. Parravano and me at Fostering Lifelong Learners, a one-day conference the Horn Book, along with School Library Journal and the Cuyahoga County Public Library, is sponsoring on September 19^th at the Parma-Snow branch of the CCPL in Parma, Ohio. Martha and I will be discussing great new books for preschoolers; other speakers include Dr. Robert Needlman of Reach Out and Read, and Kevin Henkes, hero of preschoolers everywhere. The conference is free but preregistration is required.

And do not forget the annual Horn Book at Simmons Colloquium, held this year on October 11^th at Simmons College. “Mind the Gaps: Books for All Young Readers” is the theme, and featured speakers include our three Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winners as well as a keynote address by librarian and author Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, winner of the 2012 BGHB Award and the SLJ Battle of the Books Award for No Crystal Stair. More information about HBAS can be found at www.hbook.com/bghb-hbas/.

Roger Sutton
Editor in Chief

From the August 2014 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

The post From the Editor – August 2014 appeared first on The Horn Book.

What’s an award without the occasional scandal to make sure everybody’s paying attention? Marisa Tomei winning the Oscar. Wicked not winning the Tony. Rush Limbaugh being named Author of the Year.

That last should not have been a surprise, though. The Children’s Book Council’s Author and Illustrator of the Year awards, part of their Children’s Choice Book Awards program, are chosen by amateurs. I say this not to deride Mr. Limbaugh’s win but because it is literally true: the five candidates for each of these two awards are chosen on the basis of how many books they have sold; the winner is determined by an online free-for-all vote. It really is a popularity contest.

I’m confident enough in Horn Book readers to believe they can dismiss this as just so much gimmickry and nonsense that means nothing. We watch the People’s Choice Awards on TV because we like to see celebrities in fancy clothes, not because we think the awards themselves are actually important. (Not that we necessarily think the Academy Awards are important, either, but they do have demonstrable effects beyond one starry night.) Does anyone remember who won last year’s Author of the Year award? No offense intended to that winner — Jeff Kinney — but the fact that we don’t automatically think, “Ah, yes, the 2013 Author of the Year,” when we hear his name means that the award is superfluous. (We already know he sells a lot of books.)

Not so the distinguished Newbery and Caldecott medals, whose prestige and influence we honor in this, our annual ALA Awards issue. These awards generate gossip and parsing and debate and drama — all good things — but have remained admirably if boringly scandal-free. But I am afraid that ALSC’s recent attempt to keep the awards that way is only going to bite itself in the butt.

While previously content to merely caution award committee members not to violate the confidentiality of committee discussions, at ALA’s Midwinter Conference earlier this year the ALSC Board of Directors approved revisions to its “Policy for Service on Award Committees.” The policy now states that “[committee] members should not engage in any print or electronic communication outside of the committee regarding eligible titles during their term of service.” If this seems little to ask, remember that any book with text is an “eligible title” for the Newbery Medal and that “any print or electronic communication” means not just The Horn Book and SLJ, etc., but also blogs, Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter, and professional listservs. Oh, and your e-mail.

Of course I have a vested interest here. I’m sorry that I and the other Horn Book editors may no longer serve on ALSC award committees. By swearing to refrain from public commentary on the books we read, when such commentary is exactly what the public is counting on us for, we are being asked to stop doing the job that presumably brought us to the attention of ALSC in the first place. But the larger problem is that ALSC is asking all of its award committee members to neglect their professional responsibilities for a year in favor of an awards program that needs more fresh air, not less. No librarian worthy of the name should ever put herself in the position of not being able to promote good books.

This is lawyering up with a vengeance, and it does the awards no good, putting them in a critical vacuum. And as far as keeping the discussions untainted by outside pressures goes, it is laughable, given that committee members are allowed to publish unsigned opinions — the perfect basis for a whisper campaign — and remain free to revel in the attentions of publishers eager to wine and dine them. ALSC is fixing a problem that isn’t a problem with a solution that is only going to create problems of its own. That’s a scandal just waiting to happen.

From the July/August 2014 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Editorial: Don’t Speak! appeared first on The Horn Book.

On May 31^st, I announced the winners of the 2014 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards at the BookExpo convention in New York. The awards will be bestowed at a ceremony on October 10^th at Simmons College; the next day brings the Horn Book at Simmons Colloquium, “Mind the Gaps: Books for All Young Readers.” The colloquium will feature BGHB honorees and others in a day’s discussion of what’s missing or scarce in contemporary books for young people, and how some of these gaps might be closed. We will tell you more about our plans for the day as they develop, but early-bird registration for HBAS (with a complimentary ticket to the BGHB awards the night before) is now available.

Roger Sutton
Editor in Chief

From the June 2014 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

The post From the Editor — June 2014 appeared first on The Horn Book.

Back in 1998, the Horn Book Magazine published a special issue devoted to picture books. With articles about picture book history, reviewing and writing picture books, and a baker’s dozen of first-person “Studio Views,” it became a children’s lit classroom staple and is easily the most requested special issue we’ve produced.

We ran out of copies of the Picture Books issue many years ago, although I am happy to say we have now put it online. I am also very happy to present you with this year’s special issue, Illustration (which includes one of the original Picture Books issue articles, “Design Matters” by Jon Scieszka and Molly Leach — now in color!). Note the broadening of theme: just as picture books themselves expanded beyond their traditional preschool audience in the 1980s, so have illustrators gone on to stretch the very definition of the form. While the selection of the 500-some-paged Invention of Hugo Cabret for the 2008 Caldecott Medal will probably always be a controversial choice, there is no doubt that it, along with the entrance of comics and graphic novels into the realm of children’s book respectability, makes us all think more broadly about what we mean by a “picture book.” Not to mention the resurgence of illustrations in middle-grade fiction, from Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid and Lincoln Peirce’s Big Nate to the winners of this year’s Newbery Medal (Kate DiCamillo’s Flora & Ulysses, illustrated by K. G. Campbell) and Scott O’Dell Award (Kirkpatrick Hill’s Bo at Ballard Creek, illustrated by LeUyen Pham). Illustrators are showing up everywhere in books for youth these days, and we’re delighted to bring you another thirteen Studio Views (also in color!) from members of the present generation.

The New York Times’s report that picture books were in trouble (“Picture Books No Longer a Staple for Children,” 10/7/10) was being debunked as soon at it was printed. Publishing has always been a game of trending, tacking, and correcting course as interests change and populations shift. But perhaps the alarm did force us all to make a little bit more noise about a genre whose virtues were being out-shouted by blockbuster/doorstopper YAs. And noise was something we had all become very good at since 1998, when social media meant AOL. Defenses of the picture book flew through cyberspace, campaigns to tout their use were disseminated among blogs and Facebook and Twitter. Such dialogue (and surely it’s time for a better word when it comes to conversations that routinely involve thousands of people) continues, as you can see on our Calling Caldecott blog and all the other virtual spots where pixels dance in defense of paper. While technical advances in the creation of illustrations have (as Julie Danielson shows us) made mixed media a term even more mysterious than ever, to my mind the children’s book community, fostered by the internet, has had a far greater effect on picture books than have the latest advances in Photoshop.

Are we in a picture book boom? No, and I am glad about that, because the last picture book boom that ran from the 1980s into the 1990s wasn’t pretty. I must immediately correct myself to say that it was too pretty, with lots of big, beautiful, empty books whose pictures forgot they had a job to do. I woke this morning to Facebook scoldings about an Oregon Department of Education report that too many of the state’s kindergartners were not academically prepared for first grade, that is to say, they did not read well enough. To echo another social media meme, Leave the Kindergartners Alone! It’s our job to read to them; it’s their job to look at the pictures; it’s the pictures’ job to join the story with the imaginations of those who read it and those who hear it. As the many examples in this special issue demonstrate, that job continues to be performed admirably.

The post Editorial: As Pretty Does appeared first on The Horn Book.

“If this book doesn’t win the Caldecott Medal I’m going to kill myself.” I heard that from Zena Sutherland, quoting Ursula Nordstrom, while Zena and I were at Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum in 1982, viewing an exhibition of the complete original art for the book in question, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.

That book did of course win the 1964 Medal, a very nice cherry on top of Sendak’s five previous Caldecott Honors (which would be joined by two more in later years). For Sendak, the best part of Where the Wild Things Are’s success was the financial security it brought (“It bought me my house,” he told me) and the freedom to do the projects he liked: “I took good advantage of [its] popularity to illustrate books that I passionately wanted to do without having to worry if they were commercial or not.” While the publishing economy of today might have encouraged Where the Wild Things Went and Where the Wild Things Went Next, Sendak mostly left the (considerable) spinning-off to others in order to to do what he wanted in a career that would include big books and small books, color and black-and-white, books by himself and books by others, opera and ballet design. Most Caldecott Medalists can’t afford to rest on their laurels; Sendak could, and didn’t.

When I look through the roster of Caldecott winners (seventy-five as of this year), I see dozens of fine books, but only three classics: Make Way for Ducklings, The Snowy Day, and Where the Wild Things Are. And of those, only the third has made the leap from the children’s bookshelf to become, as well, a touchstone of twentieth-century American art and culture. Maurice would sometimes complain about his other work being overshadowed, but come on, I would say, that’s huge. If sometimes he knew this and sometimes he forgot, what matters most is that it didn’t make one bit of difference either way to his work.

When I was speaking at the Eric Carle Museum recently, someone asked me if I thought Where the Wild Things Are could be published today. It’s an impossible question, because that book gave artists and publishers and librarians and children a new way to read. Its belief in an audience that could compose its own music for three wordless spreads and draw its own picture on the final page was generous. Its messages—that you can imagine without restraint, yell your head off, and still be altogether worthy of love—remain.

Like you (I’m guessing), I felt my soul give a little lurch at the news that Encyclopaedia Britannica was getting out of the book business to go online, all the time. Part of my reaction was nostalgia—when I was a child we owned the first four or five volumes of some encyclopedia that my parents had picked up as a supermarket premium, and I would browse them endlessly. As any devotee of the Guinness World Records or the Farmers’ Almanac can tell you, it’s fun to pinball around within the structure a reference book gives you: it has rules so you don’t have to.

But as a librarian, I understand that digital reference sources, done right, have it all over print. The online Britannica is no less authoritative, arguably more so because it is more quickly updated than print. It’s still browsable and inspiring of serendipity: having secured a trial subscription for the purposes of writing this editorial, I’m having trouble keeping myself on task. Wikipedia without shame! Less expensive (given you have the means to access it, which is a big given) than print and more compact—what’s not to like?

Here is the question for children’s book people, though. Does the thought of a kid whizzing his or her way around an electronic reference source give us as much satisfaction as the picture of a kid doing the same thing with a printed book? I thought not. Whether librarian, teacher, publisher, or writer, when we say that at least part of our shared goal is to promote the “love of reading,” what we have always meant is the “love of books.” (Some books.) What will our goal be once books no longer provide our common core?

This is partially a question about e-books. Yes, e-books are books, and libraries want to buy them and enthusiastically promote their circulation to library patrons, who demonstrably want to read them. But publishers complain that they need “friction” to ensure that library borrowing doesn’t take too much of a bite from consumer purchases, and libraries are put into the position of licensing rather than acquiring e-books, just another borrower in the chain. However, this economic tussle is only an early warning sign of the real problem that librarians and (as Stephen Roxburgh argued in the March/April 2012 Horn Book) publishers face: thanks to the leveling power of the internet, electronic literature doesn’t need either one of us, at least as we currently understand our respective missions.

But this is also a question about the independence of readers. In libraries, even those kids who wouldn’t talk to a librarian if their lives depended on it rely far more than they know on the professional expertise provided by the library’s staff, systems, and policies. Readers’ advisory is found as much in the shelving as it is in a friendly chat. When we are reading online, however, we are far more on our own, for good (we can read what we want when we want it) or ill (finding what we want to read can be an adventure beset by false leads, commercial interests, and invasions of privacy).

What can children’s book people become? I reveal my fantasy of what we could make of the future on page 16 of this issue, but in reality what we need to do is to redefine our gatekeeping role. Along with giving up any notion that the only real reading is book reading, like the online Britannica we have to believe in our own expertise and convince others that our knowledge is worth attending to. We’ve spent more than a century dedicated to the idea that some reading is better than other reading, an elitist position we can defend by pointing to decades of excellence in books for youth. Publishers and librarians together, we made that happen. Let us continue to do so.