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Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh, is an incredibly funny book—anyone who has ever felt like an outsider will certainly relate to Harriet.

You probably enjoyed Charlotte’s Web or Harriet the Spy at one point in your life. But do you know who edited those great kid’s books?

After covering the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Summer Conference last weekend, I caught up with the New York Public Library’s Youth Materials Collections Specialist Betsy Bird and Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blogger Julie Danielson, co-authors of the brand new book, Wild Things! Acts of Mischief in Children’s Literature (co-written with Peter Sieruta).

Q: Could you tell us more about the life and work of the great children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom? What are some of the books you recommend from this great editor?

Betsy Bird: ”Ursula’s list begins to resemble nothing so much as a Who’s Who in children’s literature after a while. She had this crazy sense of humor that went well with her ability to spot potential children’s literature talent.

I mean, seriously, who would have looked at Shel Silverstein‘s rather explicit cartoons in Playboy and thought ‘There’s the man that children everywhere will love!?’”

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Louise Fitzhugh’s classic children’s book Harriet the Spy turns 50 this year and to celebrate The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art is hosting an exhibit.

The Amherst, Massachusetts-based museum will be showcasing original art from the book from May 20 through November 30, 2014. The exhibition, which is currently on display at The Forbes Galleries in New York through May 3rd, includes original illustrations from the books Harriet the Spy, as well as the sequel The Long Secret. The exhibit will also showcase a watercolor painting of Harriet’s favorite tomato sandwich, as well as letters between Fitzhugh and her publisher Ursula Nordstrom at Harper Collins.

Random House Children’s Books released a 50^th anniversary edition of Harriet the Spy on February 25th to celebrate as well.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

We’re over the moon to have Gayle Brandeis visit TCBR. Gayle is a powerhouse mama, writer, activist, teacher, and all-around lovely person. We’re grateful to her for sharing her family’s favorite books with us.

Today we bring you the first in a series of “Top-10″ posts as part of our 10th Anniversary celebrations.  First up is a selection of “Books that Open Windows” by award-winning writer Deborah Ellis.

Deborah’s latest novel came out last month: My Name Is Parvana (Groundwood Books, 2012) is the long-awaited sequel to her acclaimed The Breadwinner Trilogy.  As well as fiction, Deborah has written non-fiction highlighting global social issues from children’s perspectives, such as war, AIDS and bullying, and giving affected children a voice.  You can read PaperTigers’ interviews with Deborah here and here.

Top 10: Books that Open Windows by Deborah Ellis

Jean Little is a wonderful Canadian author of books for young people. She has a special place in my heart because when I was a child, my parents were friends with a friend of Jean’s – Jane Glaves – and I would get Ms. Little’s books for Christmas. One of my favorite Jean Little books is Look Through My Window, where one character talks about looking through someone’s window into who they are and what their lives are like.

The following books are ten I would recommend to anyone interested in seeing what’s inside someone else’s window.

1.   From Anna, by Jean Little ~ Novel for young people about a German family who comes to Canada just before the start of World War 2. The youngest, Anna, has struggles with her eyesight, her awkwardness and figuring out where her place is in her family and in this new world.

2.   All of a Kind Family, by Sydney Taylor ~ First in a series of books for young readers about a Jewish family in turn of the century Brooklyn. As the girls go about the adventures of their lives – such as earning money to pay for a lost library book – the family celebrates the calendar of holidays. As a Protestant-raised small-town girl, this was my first window into a different religion, and set off a respect and fascination for Judaism that continues to this day.

3.   Obasan, by Joy Kogawa ~ Moving telling of a young girl’s experience in a Japanese internment camp in Canada during World War 2.

4.   Nobody’s Family is Going to Change, by Louise Fitzhugh ~ Novel for young people about a girl in New York who can’t make her father see her for who she is. She grows to learn about other kids in other families and their struggles.

5.   A Dog on Barkham Street and The Bully of Barkham Street,  by Mary Stoltz – Look at the same story from two points of view. They taught me how to look for more than one side of the story.

6.   Mighty Be Our Powers, by Leymah Gbowee ~ A powerful memoir of a woman who survived the Liberian civil war and won the Nobel Prize for her work to rebuild the country.

7.   Amazing Grace, by Jonathan Kozol ~ About homelessness and poverty in America and the power of the education system to hurt or help the children in its care.

8.   Shannen and the Dream for a School, by Janet Wilson – part of the Kids’ Power Book series for young activists, this is a profile of Shannen Koostachin and her First Nations community of Attawapiskat as they try to get a safe school built.

9.   Bury Me Standing, by Isabel Fonseca ~ A moving, detailed history of the Roma people.

10.   Grey is the Color of Hope, by Irina Ratushinskaya ~ Prison diaries of the Soviet poet who spent seven years in the Gulags. One of the few records we have about what that time and place was like for women.

#17 Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh (1964)
83 points

Obviously. – Denise Rinaldo

More brilliant and sophisticated than most any adult novel, and yet still captivating for my 7 year old. – Lee Behlman

I don’t know which I like best, the people on Harriet’s spy route, the fact that she makes up a middle initial, or the realistically painful way her classmates treat her when they find out she’s been spying on them. And let’s not forget Ole Golly, who makes Mary Poppins look like a complete fraud. Harriet is one of my favorite book characters of all time. - Kate Coombs

There are certainly dated elements, and elements that are so NYC-specific that I think my fifth grader brain must have rolled right over them when I first read it. Even so, there isn’t a girl who could read this an not immediately want to grab a notebook and start up her own neighborhood spy route. There’s a lesson about gossip and secrets and friendship and just plain old growing up at it’s heart, but’s it’s Harriet’s self imposed “job” that’s so thrilling. Harriet M. Welsch was a take charge gal, and I wanted to be just like her. I think, or at least I hope, kids still feel that way reading it today. – Nicole Johnston

“Harriet, you are going to have to do two things, and you don’t like either one of them: 1) You have to apologize. 2) You have to lie . . . But to yourself you must always tell the truth.”

Any summaries I find of this book tend to sound a little trite, so I guess I go with the one on the book itself. “Harriet M. Welsch is a spy. She’s staked out a spy route, and she writes down everything about everyone she sees – including her classmates and her best friends – in her notebook. ‘I bet the lady with the cross-eye looks in the mirror and feels just terrible.’ ‘Pinky Whitehead will never change. Does his mother hate him? If I had him I’d hate him.’ Then Harriet loses track of her notebook, and it ends up in the wrong hands. Before Harriet can stop them, her friends have read the always truthful, sometimes awful things she’s written about each of them. Will Harriet find a way to put her life and her friendships back together?”

You can get quite a bit of backstory on Harriet the Spy from the letters of her editor Ursula Nordstrom. In Leonard Marcus’s Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom we learn that “Prior to the publication of Harriet, LF [Louise Fitzhugh] had been known as the illustrator of a send-up of Eloise called Suzuki Beane, by Sandra Scopperttone.” I have searched in vain to see a copy of Suzuki Beane for years, by the way. Apparently there is a copy lurking within my library. Someday I shall request it and see what all the fuss was about.

In a letter to Charlotte Zolotow, Nordstrom mentioned the beginnings of Harriet the Spy in this way. “Anyhow, if you hadn’t called my attention to that Fitzhugh unpublishable picture book we would never have drawn Harriet the Spy out of Louise.” She related the full story of Louise’s life and writing in a later letter to Joan Robbins. You see Zolotow, then a senior editor at Harper, had showed Nordstrom some sample pages from Fitzhugh of what would become Harriet’s words about her classmates. So they brought in Louise to explain to her what they wanted the book to be. “Louise sat sullenly, hands jammed into her pockets, while we expressed enthusiasm over what we’d seen . . . After at least an hour she looked up and said, ‘So you’re not really interested, are you?’ We a

Marketing yourself.  Yeah, forget the hokey-pokey.  We know what it’s really all about in this game.  You poor authors and illustrators.  Isn’t it enough that you sweat and strain to create the highest quality literature for the generation that will inherit the earth after we are dead and gone . . . and now you’ve gotta go and publicize your own book yourself?!?  Who’s the yahoo who made THAT rule up?  I feel your pain, and so in an effort to help you I shall direct you, today anyway, to someone who shows that the best way to bring attention to yourself is to be creative, low-key, and involve a lot of other folks.  The author of Will Work for Prom Dress, Aimee Ferris (she of many names) has for the past few weeks been “posting daily photos of ‘mystery YA authors’ in their angsty teen best (showcasing a range of tragic teen fashion choices), as well as a few truly surly anti-prom shots on http://willworkforpromdress.com/ in anticipation of my upcoming book release on Feb 8.”  She’s calling it the “Promapalooza” and promises that in the future weeks there will be serious cases of “Man Perm” an “Agent Week” and much much more.  What she has up already is pretty impressive though.  I’m not giving away who the cute gal in this photo I lifted from her site is, but I will say that she has a picture book out this year (and she’s definitely not me).

• New Blog Alert: One of my favorite children’s book illustrators is now penning one of my favorite children’s book blogs.  Meghan McCarthy participates from time to time on the Blue Rose Girls blog, but I always secretly hoped she’d strike out on her own someday.  She has one of the more distinctive personalities, and her penchant for what kids like gels with what I like.  So it is that she has begun Children’s Books: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly and it does not disappoint.  Between talking about the mounted heads of Dr. Seuss to comparative studies between YouTube videos utilizing Post-It Notes (I am SO stealing one of those for Video Sunday) Meghan is constantly interesting and never dull.  Just like her books.

• Speaking of Blue Rose Girls, we’ve all heard of authors and illustrators talking about getting “the call” that told them they’d won a Caldecott or a Newbery.  But an agent talking about getting “the call”?  I’ve never heard of that one before.

• Well, geez.  I was all set to tell you about Ward Jenkins and his crazy contest to convince enough people to “Like” his Facebook profile page for the upcoming picture book Chicks Run Wild.  He said that if 300 people “liked” it he’d wear a chicken suit.  The happy ending?  It hit 333 as of this post.  Didn’t need my help.  Chicken suit-up, Ward my man.

• All sorts of folks have been sending in images of dads reading to their kids to James Preller’s 11 Comments on Fusenews: Laika Chow!, last added: 1/19/2011