Talk, Talk : A Children's Book Author Speaks to Grown-Ups Read online

  Talk Talk

  A children’s book author speaks to grown-ups.

  Also by E. L. Konigsburg

  Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth

  From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

  About the B’nai Bagels

  (George)

  Altogether, One at a Time

  A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver

  The Dragon in the Ghetto Caper

  The Second Mrs. Giaconda

  Father’s Arcane Daughter

  Throwing Shadows

  Journey to an 800 Number

  Up From Jericho Tel

  Samuel Todd’s Book of Great Colors

  Samuel Todd’s Book of Great Inventions

  Amy Elizabeth Explores Bloomingdale’s

  T-Backs, T-Shirts, COAT, and Suit

  TalkTalk

  ATHENEUM

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Text copyright © 1995 by E. L. Konigsburg

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Designed by Ann Bobco and Anne Scatto The text of this book is set in Perpetua.

  First edition

  Printed in the United States of America 10 987654321

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Konigsburg, E. L.

  TalkTalk / E. L. Konigsburg.

  p. cm.

  “A Jean Karl Book.”

  ISBN 0-689-31993-2

  eISBN 978-1-4424-2924-6

  1. Konigsburg, E. L.—Authorship. 2. Children’s stories, American—History and criticism Theory, etc. 3. Children’s stories—Authorship. 4. Children—Books and reading. I. Title.

  II. Title: TalkTalk.

  PS3561.0459Z475 1995

  810.9’9282—dc20 94-32341 CIP

  IMO Mo

  Contents

  TALK AND TALK

  1. Newbery Award Acceptance

  THOSE 60S

  2. Lethal Weapon

  INTO THE 70S

  3. Painting a Novel for Children

  THE 70S (CONTINUED)

  4. Going Home

  THE 70S (FINITO)

  5. The Middle-Aged Child Is Not an Oxymoron

  6. SPREZZATURA: A Kind of Excellence

  INTO THE 80S

  7. Between a Peach and the Universe

  WINDING UP THE 80S

  8. The Mask Beneath the Face

  HERE IN THE 90S

  9. The Big Bang, the Big Picture, and the Book You Hold in Your Hand

  TALKTALK

  Acknowledgments

  Jean Karl’s advice to make the whole more than the sum of its parts by linking the speeches to one another proved to be the insightful incentive that made me look forward and back to see these speeches in a new light. I thank her first for that. And I thank her, too, for the research she did, the letters—worldwide—she wrote, and the contacts she made to obtain permissions for printing the pictures that illustrate three of these speeches. I thank Jon Lanman for being the consistent voice in the corner office during several changes of the guard. I thank Ann Bobco for her inspired art direction, her optimism, and our lengthy working conversations over long distance with her saying, “We’re almost there.” I thank Patricia Buckley for being a friend in the home office.

  I also want to thank three friends not in the office: Colette Coman for translating French; Jack Dreher for translating Italian; and Judith Viorst for a phone call, made immediately after reading my manuscript, telling me the baby has all its fingers and all its toes and was born speaking.

  I thank Sarah Mitchell at Art Resource for her interest and her help in finding suitable transparencies of artwork from medieval to modern. I thank Evan Levine of the Education Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for putting me in contact with Beatrice Epstein of their Photo Slide Library, who tracked down the elusive picture of the stucco and plaster Bust of a Lady that the museum purchased in 1965. I thank Anne Scatto for fitting the pieces on the pages and Howard Kaplan for keeping track of the pieces.

  My husband, David, who is mentioned several times in the course of these speeches, must be mentioned here, too, for I can never consider complete a list of people to thank without including his name. I thank him for tuning in when he should and tuning out when he should. It is he who hears the hollering and halting, the screeching and screaming before the work has the spirit of sprezzatura.

  Last, I want to thank all the people in the auditoriums, cafetoriums, media centers, and public rooms of Holiday Inns who have listened to what I have had to say about children and books and who have said that they would like to read what they had heard. They are my audience: lovers of print on paper.

  Talk Talk

  A children’s book author speaks to grown-ups.

  Talk and Talk

  When I delivered the first of these speeches at the annual convention of the American Library Association in 1968, I was the mother of three. I have since become the grandmother of five. Having shifted my generation, I have, by definition, shifted my point of view. I could say that like an old lady without bifocals, I must hold the printed page at arm’s length just to make it possible to read. I could say that. But I won’t. Instead I choose to think of myself as the viewer of a large Impressionist painting standing back—and farther back—to see all those dabs of color come into focus. I see myself moving deeper into the work by standing farther back from it.

  First to last, these speeches reflect or reflect upon the changes in children’s literature in the United States over the past quarter century. The change overriding all others is growth. In a letter dated July 7, 1993, Judy V. Wilson, former president and general manager of the Children’s Book Group of Macmillan Publishing Company wrote, “[I]n 1980 2800 children’s books were published and in 1988 5000 a year. I don’t have more recent numbers but it could be a 50% increase in the past five years.”

  Growth certainly means greater numbers, but it also means development from a simpler to a more complex form, and publishing children’s books has certainly grown more complex.

  When my first book was published in the spring of 1967, Atheneum was a small independent publisher with offices in an old brownstone on East Thirty-eighth Street. There was a big red letter A on the door. The Children’s Book Department was on the fifth floor—walk-up. Jean Karl was its founder and editor.

  Books were published twice a year—spring and fall—to little fanfare and quiet profit. The major steps for getting a children’s novel into the hands of a child were: a writer wrote it; an editor accepted it; a publisher published it; a director of library services sent the book to the media and major library systems for review; the book was purchased by schools and libraries; children read it.

  Children’s books stayed on the shelves a long time. Recency and primacy comfortably coexisted. Books went into third, fourth—fortieth—reprintings. The backlist books, those for which all the editorial and start-up costs had already been paid, were the backbone of the children’s book departments. Experimentation, excitement, lay in the front list; pride and profitability, in the back.

  In 1979 Atheneum merged with Scribner’s. Macmillan bought Atheneum-Scribner’s in 1984. Maxwell bought Macmillan in 1988. Until February 1994, when Paramount bought Maxwell Macmillan, Atheneum was one of nine imprints of the Macmillan Children’s Book Group. Paramount, which also owns Simon & Schuster, has designed its children’s book grou
p as follows: three trade hardcover imprints, one paperback imprint, and an imprint that will publish novelty-merchandise items. In July 1994, Viacom bought Paramount, but we don’t have to talk about that. As the corporate structure now stands, Atheneum will be one of the three Simon & Schuster hardcover imprints; it will absorb Scribner’s.

  In the last rounds of corporate buyouts, the children’s book departments were part of the dowry. They weren’t the vast estates of the reference and textbook divisions or the many mansions of adult trade books, they were the small, beautifully wrought silver tea service that had been in the family for years, carried down from the attic, brought to the bargaining table, polished and still holding water—flavored water.

  When I step back to see the patterns of growth in the publishing of children’s books, I find that I can tease out trends—those sustained streaks of color that at various times are applied to subject matter, style, and/or genre of what is published.

  A current trend in children’s book publishing is the increased role of marketing. Tracking the role that marketing has played can show how growth means development from a simpler to a more complex form. Growth has affected the marketing of children’s books, and marketing, in turn, has affected growth.

  Complications in marketing started even before the corporate mergers. When Atheneum Books for Children was a fifth-floor walk-up, over 95 percent of children’s trade books were sold to schools and public libraries. To present its books to the market, children’s book departments had a small department of library services, which sent copies of the books to professional journals and major library systems for review. Spring and fall, they put together catalogs of the lists and set up ads in trade publications. They also arranged attendance and entertainment at library and education conferences so that people in publishing could meet people who bought books. The director of library services reported to the children’s book editor.

  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the population of the United States shifted toward the Sunbelt, new schools were being built with media centers integral to their construction. The new configurations and the increased numbers of school libraries improved the market for children’s trade books as well as textbooks. At the same time that school libraries were developing into healthy markets for trade books, the federal government started funneling money into school libraries as part of its Great Society programs, and the publishing world experienced the first great swelling in the number of children’s books needed to satisfy the market. Large school systems developed their own selection processes, and the continental divide in opinion drifted West and South along with the shift of population. Directors of library services were now covering education and reading conferences as well as library conferences in states from coast to coast.

  When Atheneum was a brownstone, and I was a pup, paperback children’s books were an egg. Five years later, the egg hatched. And five years after that, paperbacks were fully feathered and had taken off. The emergence of paperbacks, coupled with an educational trend toward using trade books instead of basal readers, allowed schools to purchase classroom sets of books.

  Strange as it may seem, bookstores did not become a viable market for children’s books until some time after the federal money for school libraries dried up, and the publishers, newly incorporated by the first of the mergers, wooed the bookstore market to make up the loss of Great Society funds. The children’s section in many had been (many still are) more gift department than book department. In the mid-1970s, after paperbacks had gained a foothold in children’s books, bookstores began to stock books other than Nancy Drew, novelty items, and mass-market books, and stores devoted exclusively to children’s books started up in suburban strip malls and on city sidewalks.

  Directors of library services now had to attend to bookstore needs.

  Corporate mergers increased the number of imprints a single publisher would market; paperbacks increased the kinds of books to be marketed. The improved school library market, the new importance of bookstores, and the good old standby public library market—everything and everyone needing goodwill—complicated the role of the department of library services. The staff grew and developed specialties such as catalog design, conference planning, sales conferences, and author appearances. The department of library services became the marketing department, and its director no longer reported to the editor but took his seat at the conference table beside the children’s book editor and the publisher.

  The increased role of marketing in the publishing of children’s books has resulted in marketing’s sharing or shading a publishing decision. Not always, but sometimes. A single two-part scenario, in which I played a role, will demonstrate how this sometimes happens and how it sometimes doesn’t.

  It is summer. It is late ante meridiem. We are doing brunch. My host is a children’s book editor. She is a recent hire of a large publishing house with a West Coast presence. This is the West Coast. This is where right-on-red came from. This is L.A., the city where the phone is a prosthesis. She asks if we can do a deal. I know she means a book. I tell her I’ve been thinking about a book. This book will be a picture book. My second grandchild will be a character. I have a title: Amy Elizabeth Explores Bloomingdale’s. She expresses enthusiasm. We part, mellowed out on champagne and promise.

  I submit the manuscript. I do not receive a reply—not even an acknowledgment of receipt—for more than a month. Uh-oh.

  Experience has taught me that when a response to a requested manuscript is long in coming, the manuscript is in trouble. I was right. What experience had not prepared me for, however, was the source of the problem. In her letter, the editor wrote:

  What confuses me however, is that the title is misleading, and I think the reaction of sales reps and booksellers [italics mine] will be negative rather than positive. The book is about something completely different than the title suggests and I think the reader will ultimately be disappointed. It seems to me that it could be called AMY ELIZABETH TRIES TO EXPLORE BLOOMINGDALE’S or AMY ELIZABETH DOESN’T EXPLORE BLOOMINGDALE’S or perhaps more clever than the above that conveys to the reader that the book will be satisfying even if you don’t get to go to Bloomingdale’s. I also think that reviewers [italics mine] would object to the book disappointing the child.

  We could not agree on a treatment for the book, and I requested that she return the manuscript to me. I then submitted it to Jean Karl, who has been my forever editor. Her letter, talking about the same book, said:

  … The idea of setting out for someplace and never getting there—but seeing a good many other places along the way—is always amusing. However, somehow … the text … sits on the surface of events in a way that does not bring the reader fully into the experience.

  The difference in these two criticisms points out the difference between market-driven and book-driven publishing. Jean Karl trusts her own taste and judgment to find books that will satisfy the marketplace. She trusts something else, too: she trusts her writers. Her criticism of my manuscript shows that she trusted me to rework the text in a way that would bring the reader in, for that was the real problem with the book. Subsequent to its publication (October 1992) not one reviewer, bookseller, or librarian [italics mine] has objected to the title.

  Sometimes trends affect genre. Genres, though seeming replete and powerful for a time, fade away and sometimes disappear, affecting the pattern but not changing the direction of growth in children’s books.

  In the years since I walked up four flights of stairs to reach the Atheneum Children’s Book Department, I have seen young adult novels grow breasts and hair and then stop short of further growth. I have seen series books spawn healthy litters, one after another. Even as I write, I see picture books fighting for room at the trough while chapter books are being nursed to great good health.

  Trends start, swell, and disappear but leave their mark, a protrusion on the forward thrust. Fads, on the other hand, arrive quickly, take over, and disappear as sudd
enly as they appeared. Being short-lived, they are swept along within a trend and alter, only briefly, its texture.

  Fads infect subject matter and genre, and while they are in full blossom, they are so ubiquitous that it is hard to believe that they will pass, but they do. In this past quarter century, I have seen Batman come and go and come and go again. Ninja Turtles: here, there, everywhere—yesterday. Trolls have come and gone and come and—as of this morning-are on the deeply discounted table at Kmart.

  When a fad influences a genre, we get choose-your-own-adventure books, the hula hoops of the eighties.

  The current fad in marketing is the celebrity-authored children’s book. Whoopi Goldberg, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dom Demise, actors; Olivia Newton-John, singer; the Simons, Carly and Paul, songwriters and singers; and Fergie, an English duchess, have all contributed to recent children’s books lists. Dolly Parton has one “in development.” My friend, the poet, essayist, and children’s book author Judith Viorst, explained, “Children’s books have become the designer perfume of the nineties.”

  It was inevitable, I suppose, that when the entertainment industry married into the publishing family, they would want children of their very own. They did not produce books, however. They produced book-products. Novelizations. Of movies, of TV shows. Even song lyrics. Biographies that are rushed to print before their subjects’ fifteen minutes of fame have run out are also book-products. So, too, are headline stories that are rushed from talk-show circuit to printing press. Authors of book-products are now thought of as “content providers.” Time will tell if the metamorphosis from producing a book into manufacturing book-products will or will not be a trend. I fear one and hope the other.

  While each of my books has been written because I had a story I wanted to tell, these speeches were written because I had something I wanted to say. The audience for the former is children; for the latter, adults. Much more than my books, these speeches reflect or reflect upon what has been going on in the world of children’s literature at the time they were written. I recognize—with a measure of amused detachment—that some were written as a reaction to trends; others, to fads.