Picture Book Bohemia

Hopefully, I will be able to post some pictures to complement this entry.
Last Saturday, I took a tour of Greenwich Village called Picture Book Bohemia. Our tour guide was none other than the amazingly knowledgeable Leonard Marcus, who has done so much research on picture book history. Had him sign his bio on Margaret Wise Brown, Awakened by the Moon.
I mentioned to Leonard that I was the girl who had spotted him in the subway and had yelled at him, “Are you Leonard Marcus?” He said he remembered that incident, and that it would make a neat story. The kind of thing you can tell friends: “So I was in the subway…”
Anyway, during the tour I discovered some delicious things: Charlotte Zolotow used to be Ursula Nordstrom’s secretary; the picture book world has not been intrigue-free; Robert McCloskey bought 16 ducklings and brought them to his apartment, in order to finish his book Make Way for Ducklings; Margaret Wise Brown was a kook (she had two houses in New York, and of course The Only House in Maine, and she would move from house to house to suit her mood, “of which she had many,” Leonard said wryly”).
What I found most exciting about the tour was the revelation of how certain people rallied to make radical picture books in the late 30s to the early 50s. Today, M.W. Brown’s The Noisy Book might strike us as cliché, but because it was a book with no story, because it was more of a catalog of city noises (a very poetic catalog, though), it gave children an alternative to the “Once upon a time” stories that dominated the market. And of course I found myself wanting to be affected by some revolutionary idea on education and children’s literature, (or more ambitiously, create such ideas), in order to create some small tremor in the world of publishing.
It’s not necessarily about being published, either. It’s about understanding what children want, or what children respond too. It’s about changing the way adults view books for children, so we may produce more radical literature for everyone. Of course, here I am again, rattling on with idealistic zeal. Making this ardor come to life that will probably consume me. Or the more nightmarish scenario: I would never get around making my abstract rants concrete.