The sounds of drilling and the occasional rumble from the construction taking place next door didn’t prevent eager bibliophiles – many visiting from out of town – from enjoying a colloquium at New York’s Grolier Club on January 20. The colloquium, “Journeys Through Bookland: Explorations in Children’s Literature,” was held in conjunction with the Grolier Club’s current exhibition, One Hundred Books Famous in Children’s Literature, which is on display until February 7. The speakers were G. Scott Clemons, president, Grolier Club; Chris Loker, exhibition curator; Andrea Immel, curator, Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University; Jill Shefrin, children’s book historian; Adrian Seville, British collector and expert on printed board games; H. Nichols B. Clark, founding director, chief curator, Eric Carle Museum; Leonard S. Marcus, children’s book historian, author, and critic; and Michael Suarez, director, Rare Book School, University of Virginia.

The presenters delivered an immersive afternoon filled with insights into the history of children’s literature, approaches to early childhood education, and the future of reading. In the Grolier Club’s main exhibition hall, where the event took place, attendees had the benefit of being surrounded by the very children’s books that the speakers addressed in their presentations.

First up was Clemons, who spoke about how the exhibition has been surprisingly controversial, with many viewers having “highly opinionated” views on books that were left out. “It’s a show that gets people talking,” he said, believing that it “evokes one’s first interaction with books” and a “remembrance of childhoods past.” Loker introduced the “dream team of warriors for children’s literature,” beginning with Andrea Immel.

The Audacity of Once Upon a Time

Immel reflected on how characters from children’s books are often sutured into memory in a way that characters from adult books are not, saying: “Avid readers wish to still lose themselves in books the way they once did." An adult reader’s connection to books from his or her childhood is driven by “a lot more than nostalgia,” however. One of the reasons these books resonate with readers into adulthood, she said, may be because of their use of symbolism. Children’s books are filled with recurring motifs – frequently “perfectly ordinary objects” – that have appeared in stories for centuries, taking on powerful significance. While there are many from which to choose, for the purposes of the discussion, Immel focused on shoes, offering multiple examples of how shoes play symbolically in fairy tales and other children’s stories, often as “potent markers of social status. Shoes can be read like books,” Immel said, and speak to the identities of the characters within the children’s literary canon. One need not look very far for examples: Cinderella’s glass slippers, Dorothy’s silver shoes (made ruby red in the film adaptation), the old woman who lived in a shoe, and Puss in Boots, to name a few.

Other characters remain shoeless throughout their journeys, such as Peter Pan and Mowgli from The Jungle Book (in fact, he’s naked for much of his story). Bilbo Baggins, of course, has no need for shoes and his feet remain objects of curiosity, being “off-putting” and raising the question of whether he is “man or beast,” Immel said. And like Dorothy, who leaves behind elegant footwear, Bilbo ultimately shows that he has “no real desire for riches” when he surrenders the ring. In both The Fellowship of the Ring and in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, shoes - or the lack of them - come to be associated with characters who display “latent toughness and deep- seated decency that is stronger than magic,” Immel said.

In a trope that is perhaps unique to children’s literature, many characters begin their story lines dissatisfied with their stations (consider Dorothy and Max in Where the Wild Things Are) but, following their journeys to fantastical realms, return home content with the trappings of the ordinary life – such as Max’s soup and Dorothy’s Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. The journeys are perhaps not so wild after all – especially, considering that Max’s footwear really consists of a pair of “footsie pajamas.”

Tempting Children to Read in Early Modern Britain and America

Next up, Jill Shefrin challenged many misconceptions about early childhood education in centuries past, suggesting that the image of the punitive schoolroom governed by a rule stick is not an entirely accurate representation. In fact, there were a surprising number of philosophers and educators concerned with finding innovative ways to teach children to read. Before the printed book, readers practiced reading through Horn Books (several of which are on display in the exhibition), followed by printed copies of the bible and learning primers (also on display).

Shefrin shared examples of surprisingly playful supplements to teaching children to read in the 17th through 19th centuries, including a Scrabble-like game involving dice pasted with vowels and consonants, alphabetical marbles, and biscuits baked into letter shapes. In 1671, A Token for Children, which fell somewhere between a primer and a bible – serving as a leveled reader of sorts as well as a guide to piety – was published. And taking a cue from John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education, which posits that children learn best through entertaining sources, “J.G.” published A Playbook for Children: To Allure Them to Read as Soon as They Can Speak Plain (1694). The book contained a sentence for each letter of the alphabet and used familiar objects and animals to entertain and reward children as they learned.

Zooming ahead to the 20th century, numerous educators made strides in finding new approaches to teaching children to read. Among them, Shefrin singled out New Zealand teacher Sylvia Ashton Warner, who, in working with Maori children, “ditched government readers” and made her own books that more openly reflected the children’s cultural experiences. Shefrin ended her talk by emphasizing that “history is full of progressive and child-centered educators,” and stating that philosophical approaches to teaching are certainly not entirely modern constructs.

Books as Board Games: Another Way of ‘Reading’ the Story

Adrian Seville spoke to the audience about the intersection of reading and play in the past, notably hybrid forms of storytelling such as board games. Seville owns a very large collection of antique board games that will be on display at the Grolier Club in 2016. During the presentation, Seville spoke about how many early board games involved a great deal of reading. One of the first models of a 16th-century board game, the “Goose Game” or “Game of the Goose,” featured a board with numbered spaces in the formation of a spiral. Often, ornately illustrated and anthropomorphic geese would serve as “spiritual guides” in what amounts to a symbolic representation of the life cycle, in which death is just a misstep away. The first “Game of the Goose” was created in 1598 and is housed at the British Museum.

In addition to the “Goose Game,” other games directly incorporated numerous characters and story arcs, including Aesop’s Fables. Later games began “sticking to the story,” or focusing on a single narrative, like Little Red Riding Hood. Later, board games showed examples of what Seville called “characters escaping story.” For instance, the iconic children’s book figure Struwwlepeter made a cameo in a 19th-century German board game advertising Hobby Horse brand soap. The 63-space track with two accompanying dice game became the typical design for original board games, though later games also used tops and more recently, spinners.

Some authors themselves designed games based on their books, including Beatrix Potter; Seville shared images of Potter’s notes and early designs for her “Peter Rabbit Game.” Other games Seville displayed were what he called “a story with obnoxious graphics,” or Little Black Sambo. Incidentally, Sambo’s path on the board is marked by footprints – and at one point he loses his shoes.

If there was any question remaining about the connection between children’s books and board games, Seville quizzed the audience, asking attendees to guess how many of the books featured in the exhibition had been adapted into board games. The answer: out of the 100 books published from 1790 to 1990, 54 have inspired board games, the most recent adaptation being the first Harry Potter volume.

The Art of Children’s Books in the 20th Century

Nick Clark, who recently retired as chief curator of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, delivered an overview of the ways in which children’s book illustrators have been directly influenced by classic and modern artists throughout time. Albrecht Dürer’s highly detailed and frequently naturalistic depictions of animals informed the work of early children’s book illustrators Howard Pyle and Beatrix Potter, who “wanted to train as a naturalist.” Clark also noted that the “meticulous attention to the details of the barn” in Garth Williams’s illustrations for Charlotte’s Web also speak to Dürer’s influence, and the brooding monsters (reminiscent of Dürer’s angel in Melancholia) in Where the Wild Things Are. The American folk-art tradition was a chief inspiration for Wanda Gág, whose work was “framed in a more conservative art historical movement.” Echoes of Henri Rousseau and the Fauvist Andre Derain are evident in Laurent de Brunhoff’s illustrations in the Babar books, Clark noted. And, bringing the discussion very close to home, given his affiliation, Clark noted how Eric Carle, whose images have a “sense of color, a joyousness, simplicity, and directness” that children connect with, credits Matisse as being one of the primary seeds of inspiration for his work (Clark shared a juxtaposed image of the two artists in their studios, in which they are working in analogous states of joyful disarray).

The Picture Book Made New: Margaret Wise Brown to Maurice Sendak and Beyond

Leonard Marcus next spoke about figures who helped to transform the modern concept of the picture book. There’s been a lasting “misconception” about Margaret Wise Brown, according to Marcus, that the author somehow bears some similarity to the grandmotherly rabbit that rocks in the chair in the green room. In fact, there’s very little resemblance at all. Brown was a vibrant, young pioneer at the front lines of education reform, closely associated with the Bank Street school of thought, which lay in direct contrast to the librarians and “late romantics” of the New York Public Library who subscribed to the idea that children’s books should “lift children out of the mundane.” Those educators associated with Bank Street felt that readers learn best with books that represent “the here and now.... Children want to read about the world they know,” Marcus said. The school also held the opinion that “play things could be just as instrumental and nurturing to intellectual and emotional development as books.” Incorporating such ideas, Edward Steichen and Mary Steichen Caldron published The First Picture Book (1930), which includes photographs of objects that would be familiar to a child and enabled the “child to become a collaborator.”

In 1939, Brown published The Noisy Book with illustrator Leonard Weisgard. The story offered a highly visual and “simplified vocabulary that could speak to young children.” Brown had also begun collaborating with Clement Hurd, on books like Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, which Marcus called one of “the most intensely beautiful pieces of writing for children.”

Goodnight Moon (Harper & Brothers, 1947), with its emphasis on simple language and the use of familiar objects (comb, brush, clock), speaks to the influence of Bank Street and is a predecessor of sorts to The First Picture Book. Marcus believes that Goodnight Moon also represents the moment when the “library world and Bank Street come together,” with both elements of a child’s inner and outer reality becoming “equally real.” With the absence of a main character in the story, in a sense, “the child is the hero of the story.”

Another book that invites children to become a part of the creative storytelling process was Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955), which literally asks readers to draw on the pages, an idea that likely would not have been embraced by the New York Public Library at that time.

By the 1950s, the children’s book landscape was sprouting into a garden of earthly delights. When Maurice Sendak, who was scheduled to work on a project with Margaret Wise Brown before her untimely death, arrived on the scene, “something very unruly was about to happen.” Sendak took many of the ideas at the heart of Bank Street and the work of his predecessors (it was Crockett Johnson who suggested he called the procession of the Wild Things a “rumpus”). but he was also interested in a child’s complex “emotional reality.”

Marcus suggested that Max’s room, which takes on the otherworldly dimensions of the Wild Things, was the “next logical stop from the Great Green Room,” a place where a child can test emotional and psychological boundaries, as well as those of home itself. It was characters like Peter Rabbit, who makes direct eye contact with the reader, and Puss in Boots (who in some classic images is pictured with fangs), who “gave Sendak courage,” said Marcus. In turn, Sendak’s work, with its “edge of menace” and occasional “abrasive darkness,” would go on to influence such writers as Chris Van Allsburg, Brian Selznick, Shaun Tan, Art Spiegelman, and even Mo Willems.

Books, Vooks, Streaming, and the Changing Worlds of Children’s Reading

A colloquium and exhibition to display and celebrate children’s books as treasured physical objects might seem an unusual forum to discuss digital media, yet Suarez delivered a forward-thinking presentation about reading trends among children in the 21st century. While many readers do still read in print, young children are also reading and learning using digital tools, many of which offer a highly emotional and “cinematic” experience, Suarez said. He shared an example in the form of an e-book adaptation of the character-focused story Ladybug Girl by Jacky Davis and David Soman, featuring animated effects. Another example: The 39 Clues multi-platform series, in which readers interact with the book via an online component.

By telling stories both digitally and in print and also inviting active reader participation, Suarez believes that this type of “constructivist reading” may increasingly be the way many readers consume books. While he lamented the “objectlessness” of reading digitally and the fact that a digital library does not equate to the same experience of holding physical books, he discouraged the audience from seeing e-books in terms of “good or evil.... That’s not really the point,” he said.

Suarez also showed other examples of e-books that would seem to be an affront to the treasures housed at the Grolier: “This doesn’t really look very much like a Grolier Children’s 100,” he joked. Yet, as the presenters showed, children have learned to read through the use of a variety of tools and supplements for centuries. He noted that he believes the “enemy is the loss of narrative,” and the risk that might lie behind new forms of reading, but said that “digital can foster engagement and we might even have some fun.” Getting readers to read regardless of means is what matters. “I’m interested in literacy,” Suarez said.