It’s a feel-good story that just might break through the clouds of this bleak election cycle: a story about a personal passion-turned-profession, a selfless act, and a few fortuitous connections. And it has a very happy ending (at the Children's Book Council) that turns out to be just the beginning – for a cherished collection of Newbery and Caldecott books.
The tale starts with a girl growing up in North Dakota, who “liked books from the start,” even though, says author Claudette Hegel, “my parents were not readers.” Hegel recalls first becoming aware of the Newbery Awards when she was in sixth grade, and the interest never left her: eventually it evolved into a career. Hegel has written three books on the Newbery and Caldecott Awards as well as biographies of Randolph Caldecott and John Newbery. Now a resident of Minnesota, she has also spent 20 years volunteering with the Minneapolis and Hennepin County Public Libraries. Additionally, she served as a Minnesota regional advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.
While she didn’t necessarily set out to build a complete collection of Newbery and Caldecott Award and Honor recipients, with her frequent book purchases, Hegel’s library kept on growing. She realized one day that she was missing only a few Newbery and Caldecott titles and that she might as well track down those last titles so that she’d have them all. The collection now holds every Caldecott and Newbery Medal and Honor book from 1922 to 2016 – a total of 736 titles.
When PW asked Hegel to comment on what it is about the awards that so captures her interest, her answer was a little surprising. Though her love for the books themselves is paramount, she said she is fascinated by how the Caldecott and Newbery Award committees go about choosing the winners and Honor books each year: “I like to imagine being on the committee,” she said. After reading and rereading the books in her library and adding new titles each year, she has also developed a theory. She often feels that a year’s Honor books are better than the winner, and wonders if perhaps the committee ends up being so deadlocked between books that they choose a less contentious winner.
Before Hegel donated the collection, rarely would a day go by that a book’s cover didn’t catch her eye, inviting her to leaf through the pages. Or a line would spring to mind that she would need to revisit. Yet life circumstances have led Hegel to the need to downsize. ”I was feeling like a real hoarder,” she said. She also had the realization that, should something happen to her, she wanted the collection to be in the hands of someone who recognized the intrinsic value of the books, which range from “pristine, autographed first edition hardcovers to ex-library paperbacks.” So she made the difficult decision to find a new home for the books.
Hegel is no stranger to making such donations; in the past, she has also donated her collection of Caldecott and Newbery ephemera to the Children’s Literature Research Center/Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota. This time, she reached out to a friend in the children’s lit circuit, explaining that she was seeking a library or other organization that would be interested in taking her book collection to provide them a safe, permanent home where they would be appreciated for years to come.
In New York City, Tracy van Straaten, v-p of publicity and education/library marketing at Scholastic, saw the posting about the donation on the child_lit listserv at the end of June. “It obviously caught my attention because it was such an amazing collection,” she said. “The Children’s Book Council immediately came to mind as a possible home for it.” She got in touch with CBC interim director Josalyn Moran, who agreed that this was a priceless opportunity. Moran contacted Hegel, who was familiar with the CBC and agreed to donate them there. Then Moran arranged to fly out to help Hegel box up the books and ensure their safe journey to New York. Moran described the experience to PW: “It was magical to walk into Claudette's home to find this incredible treasure trove. For the first time I was able to hold some of the titles about which I had only read,” she said.
How did Hegel feel once the books were all boxed up and were sent on their way? Surprisingly, “I didn’t shed a tear,” she said. In the following weeks, though, she did have moments when she missed the books. “I’d go to check on an illustration and it wasn’t there,” she said. She admits that she does have favorites in the collection – among them: Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day, Kevin Henkes’s Kitten’s First Full Moon, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light, Louis Sachar’s Holes, and Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet. But she could not be more pleased that they are safe at the CBC: “People will get use out of them,” she said. Also, Hegel admitted, she’s already purchased replacement copies of those personal favorites.
'A Big Project and an Important One'
Over at the CBC’s offices, a mastermind was at work. New York City spaces can be notoriously modest in size; attempting to arrange all 736 books in a way that allowed them to be visible, was a challenge for recent college graduate Miranda Janzen. She came to learn about the CBC’s acquisition of the book collection through the Denver Publishing Institute’s listserv, where Carl Lennertz, who came on board as CBC’s executive director in August, had posted a request for volunteers to help unpack and organize the books. He had been one of Janzen’s instructors for the Publishing Institute’s Marketing Week course. The Nebraska native had just relocated to NYC, having realized that, if she wanted to work in publishing, “I probably needed to move to the big city,” she said. She hadn’t found a job yet and figured, in the meantime, “I’ll go help Carl.”
As Janzen began shelving books in the newly arrived collection last month, it dawned on her that “we wouldn’t have enough shelves.” Thinking creatively, she decided to stack some of the Newbery and Caldecott Honor titles in a way that conserved space, while still allowing them to be visible. Then she displayed the Newbery and Caldecott winners so that their covers face outward. The process of unboxing and arranging the books also allowed Janzen the chance to admire and leaf through the titles, and view their original cover art: “There were so many books and some are just beautiful,” she said.
She plans to visit the books again sometime soon: “It was a big project and an important one,” she said. Janzen also has some good news on the job hunt: she’s now officially a part of the New York City children’s publishing community, having been hired at Holiday House as assistant to the president and v-p for rights, permissions, and digital publishing.
Moran hopes to visit the collection now that it’s been installed in its new home. Lennertz has also issued an open invitation for authors to visit the collection and sign their books. They can even sign a baseball, if they like, he said. Lennertz started the baseball-signing tradition for his personal collection back when he met Shoeless Joe author W.P. Kinsella, and figured he’d carry on the tradition with the new library.
The first author planned to visit is Richard Peck. And though it’s not on the calendar yet, Lennertz also anticipates that the CBC will hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony of sorts, to welcome the entire collection to its new forever home. Then it will be time to break out the champagne – “Prosecco,” said Lennertz. “We’re nonprofit.”
