The Grinch & Co.

It was much easier in 1646. That year saw the printing of the first children's book in America, and a shopping parent could bring home to his child a copy of John Cotton's Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes in either England, drawn out of the Breasts of Both Testaments for their Souls' Nourishment. A question-and-answer catechism, written by the grandfather of Boston's famed hell-fire-and-brimstone Preacher Cotton Mather, Spiritual Milk was designed to edify and scare the daylights out of colonial moppets, e.g.: "Q. What is your corrupt nature? Answ. My corrupt nature is empty of Grace, bent unto sin, and onely unto sin, and that continually." It ended with the threat and promise that "the Righteous shall go into life eternall, and the wicked shall be cast into everlasting fire with the Devil and his Angels."

This Christmas week, as parents throng U.S. stores looking for a volume or two that might lure Junior briefly away from the TV set, their choice will be vastly broader, but they will find no mention of hellfire or corruption. About the only danger to a child's complacency is the threatened loss of Christmas--an anxiety that, surprisingly, provides the plot for three of the season's best children's writers: Dr. Seuss in How the Grinch Stole Christmas ("The Grinch hated Christmas!. . . No one quite knows the reason"), Ogden Nash in The Christmas That Almost Wasn't ("This was the gruesome, grimsome guard/That ruled the land under Evilard/And decided to outlaw Christmas"), and Phyllis McGinley in The Year without a Santa Claus ("Headlines screamed/Wires went humming./Santa says 'Too tired'/Not coming.").

Fortunately, all three writers reach the same happy conclusion: Christmas is here to stay. This comes as no surprise to children's-book publishers. Whatever happens, it is always Christmas for them: the moppet market has become a mainstay of U.S. publishing.

Titans Leaning on Tots. This year the presses are turning out more than 350 million copies of juvenile books--nearly one in three of all books published in the U.S. Some 2,000 new titles are on the shelves, and sales are expected to top last year's record-breaking $80 million. Many a children's book, even in the higher price range, dwarfs the sales of adult bestsellers. Where an adult novel usually achieves its peak sales within six months of publication and then drops off to virtually nothing, the successful children's book--e.g., Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1909), Marjorie Flack's China-flavored The Story About Ping (1933), E. B. White's gentle Charlotte's Web (1952)--goes right on selling a steady 10,000 to 20.000 copies a year. One of Simon & Schuster's Little Golden Books, The Poky Little Puppy (illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren), has sold 5.000,000 copies in 15 years. Since 1942, S. & S. has sold a total of half a billion children's books.

Even the proudest firms are titans leaning on the tots. At Grosset & Dunlap, children's books comprise two-thirds of the firm's publishing operation; 35% of Random House's sales volume is estimated to be in juveniles; fully $13 million of Simon & Schuster's $18 million gross last year came from books for kids.

"There are too many of them." says James (The Wonderful 0) Thurber. "The trouble is, everyone thinks he can write a children's book." Picture books range from the sophisticated cutouts of Italy's Bruno Munari in Tic, Tac and Toe to the bold line drawings of Kurt Wiese for Claire Huchet Bishop's classic The Five Chinese Brothers; nature shines in Roger Duvoisin's The House of Four Seasons and James Fisher's The Wonderful World of the Sea; the infancy of the human race lies in Ella Young's evocation of Gaelic Ireland, The Wonder Smith and His Son, and in a reissue of Howard Pyle's saga of the German robber barons. Otto of the Silver Hand. A tall tale is found in Daniel Boone's Echo, by William 0. Steele; poetry in Katherine Love's anthology, A Little Laughter; magic in Mary Norton's Bed-Knob and Broomstick; hobbies in Royal Wills's Tree Houses. The range is being pushed farther and farther from pram to prom, from pre-reading do-it-yourselfers (with buttons and Zippers fixed to the pages) to a growing number of teen-age novels (Girl Trouble, etc.) that compete with adult books.

Other-Directed Moppets. In a field that is paced by Daniel Defoe and the brothers Grimm. Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, J. M. Barrie and Louisa May Alcott, Kenneth Grahame and Beatrix Cotter, how good is the current output? In a sense, each generation reveals itself by what it finds in its children's books. Said

A. A. (Pooh) Milne, speaking of people's reactions to another children's classic, The Wind in the Willows: "You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself. You may be worthy: I don't know. But it is you who are on trial."

In John Cotton's Spiritual Milk, the message was to be good or face damnation. One hundred years later, it was still menacing enough (in one story, when a little girl went out on a forbidden walk, she was promptly kicked by a horse and crippled for life). Today the moralizing is less obvious, but it is still there.

Critics charge that the message in contemporary juveniles is one of tame social "adjustment" and of a vast, undifferentiat-ing tolerance. "Love thy neighbor." they say, has been replaced by "Love that minority." Books by the hundred set out to show that "the little Zulu or heathen Chinee is absolutely like you and me." Sociologist David Riesman analyzes Tootle as appropriate for bringing up children "in an other-directed mode of conformity": a story about a locomotive that learns to stay on the track like other docile little engines, instead of wandering happily in the fields. In Play With Me, a lonely little girl starts out by chasing animals to make them her friends; she is rejected, and then learns that if she sits absolutely still, the animals--and, presumably, mama and papa and teacher--will accept her. To some critics, the most shocking thing in stories of this sort is the notion of a conditional love that is granted only when the child behaves.

Blessed Mother Goose. Other critics scoff at the nearly total domination of kiddies' books by such animals as Saggy Baggy Elephant, Curious Little Owl, Peter the Sea Trout, Cottontail Rabbit, Brush Goat, Milk Goat, Cuter Tooter (a donkey), Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Little Brown Bear, The Happy Lion, Big Brown Bear, Mister Dog, Shy Little Kitten, Snuggly Bunny, Thidwick, the Big-Hearted Moose. Not that animals are new in fables, but now nearly all writers of children's stories seem to suggest that 1) the animal kingdom has become an animal democracy where no one would ever tell a skunk that he smells bad, for fear the poor fellow might feel like a second-class citizen; 2) animals all live together in cuddly fellowship; 3) it is more fun to be animal than human, contrary to centuries of civilized thought; 4) animals are people, only with more hair.

Religion has nearly vanished from children's books. In a catalogue of some 400 Little Golden Book titles, only ten have a religious flavor. To an extent, this lack is made up by publishing houses run by the various denominations. There is a Roman Catholic Blessed Mother Goose, with dogma-slanted lyrics ("There was an old woman who lived in a shoe/She had so many children because she wanted to"), and Mother Goose Rhymes for Jewish Children (by Sara G. Levy). Sample:

Jack Spoons could eat no prunes; His wife could eat no quinces.

But when "Shavuos" came around, They both enjoyed their blintzes.

The Trimmers. Whatever is wrong--or right--with children's books is mainly the responsibility of go-odd editors, only a dozen of whom are men. A literary agent who has worked long in this field says that "with a few possible exceptions, all of them are slightly nuts." Many of the editors are former schoolteachers or former librarians, and there appears to be a bond of rare sympathy between them and such organized groups as the American Library Association. A.L.A. issues a bimonthly list of "approved" children's books for the "guidance" of its 21,000 members. Since the librarians control the bulk of institutional book buying in the U.S., and some publishers count on school and public libraries to buy as much as 80% of their children's books, the danger is that juvenile stories may be written for the approval of librarians, not children.

Hovering behind the publishers, the librarians are the grey eminences that keep things so grey.

What are the librarians' standards? They are a long way from the 18th century reformer, Sarah Trimmer, who argued that Cinderella was pernicious because "it paints some of the worst passions that can enter into the human breast . . . envy, jealousy, a dislike of stepmothers." But there are still plenty of Trimmers trimming away, seeing to it that the books are inoffensive to one and all.

By way of example, an A.L.A. spokeswoman explains: "The Wizard of Oz is not on any of our lists. It's not well written. Black Beauty is not listed for two reasons: i) the problem of blinders on horses is not a problem for children today, and 2) it's very sentimental." Chil-dren's-book editors also defer to child psychologists, many of whom operate in the spirit of Educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell in her onetime denunciation of fairy tales: "Does not Jack and the Beanstalk delay a child's rationalizing of the world and leave him longer than is desirable without the beginnings of scientific standards?" Says one longtime publishing executive: "I think what children's books need is more people who are writers and fewer who are experts on children."

Words & Pictures. Socio-illogical jargon lies so heavily over the children's-book field that it is a wonder any amusing books get printed. Yet they do, though often by seeming accident. When Dr. Seuss wrote And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, his first and perhaps his best children's book, 20 editors turned it down. After his last rejection, in 1936, Seuss was headed up Madison Avenue, dejectedly thinking of burning his manuscript, when he met an old Dartmouth friend and told him that he was vainly trying to sell "a damned kid's book." Said the friend: "I've just been named juvenile editor of Vanguard Press, and we're standing in front of my office. Come upstairs." Thus began a series of 14 highly successful children's books that have won a warm response from children, parents and librarians alike.

Dr. Seuss (rhymes with deuce) is the pseudonym of Theodor Seuss Geisel, 53, a cartoonist ("Quick, Henry, the Flit") and movie idea man (Gerald McBoing-Boing) who works and lives in a house with a square, pink tower that overlooks La Jolla, Calif, and the Pacific. His books (H or ton Hatches the Egg, McElligot's Pool) are characterized by zany verse and an abundance of out-of-focus animals with horseshoe eyes.

Seuss is one of the pioneers in a new children's field: books for beginning readers. In writing The Cat in the Hat, published early this year, Seuss limited himself to a list of 300 simple words that psychologists have decided represent the reading vocabulary of first-graders, and, using only 233 of them, fashioned an attractive and moderately engrossing story (it was tough going, because Seuss kept discovering that such words as foot and legs, sky and eggs were not on his list.

Another notable writer-illustrator aiming at the beginners' market: Sculptor Louis Slobodkin, who has temporarily abandoned his chisel and granite blocks for the more regular financial returns of juvenile writing, has produced such simply written and gracefully illustrated books as Millions and Millions and Millions! and Thank You--You're Welcome. He also illustrated Thurber's Many Moons, a delightful story of ten-year-old Princess Lenore who moons for the moon and almost gets it.

As the word shrinks and the drawings loom larger, more and more writer-artists are becoming the big moneymakers of children's books. Holling C. Holling (Seabird, Pagoo) deals with America, past and present, in large, posterlike illustrations and detailed marginal sketches that make a handsome blend of the factual and fanciful. Robert McCloskey (Blueberries for Sal, Time of Wonder) catches the stillness of a Maine morning before a storm, with both his brush and typewriter. Ludwig Bemelmans has won as many adults as children with his Madeline stories and his Paris scenes, which look as if they had been drawn by a somewhat sozzled Raoul Dufy. Children's books may not read any better than (or as well as) they did in the past, but they look better; the skilled artwork is generally better tied into the text and better printed than it was in the days of great illustrators such as Tenniel, Kate Greenaway, Walter Crane and N. C. Wyeth.

Fiction Factories. This is true even of the products of the "mass" publishers (Whitman, Simon & Schuster, Grosset & Dunlap), whose millions of books are pushed through supermarkets, chain stores, drugstores, Howard Johnson restaurants, newsstands, toy stores and mail-order houses. Their authors are either long dead (and their work, therefore, in the public domain) or journeyman writers, many of them organized in large talent pools. Ideas are assigned, stories written and rewritten by teams of writers and editors, often recalling the Hollywood assembly lines.

One pillar of the mass publishers is the Stratemeyer Syndicate in East Orange. N.J., a fiction factory employing from 10 to 20 free-lance writers around the nation. Founded in 1907 by the late Edward Stratemeyer. who himself wrote under half a dozen pseudonyms, the syndicate's stable of interchangeable writers endlessly creates new volumes in such series as Tom Swift Jr., The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, The Happy Hollisters, The Dana Girls, The Bobbsey Twins, Honeybunch and Norman. These cannot be found on most library shelves; yet children always manage to have them in hand, and they sell at a rate of 2,000,000 a year.

Explains Andrew E. Svenson. a writer and editor for the syndicate: "We have what we call the Stratemeyer formula. In our stories there's no murder, no undue violence--a girl can be tied up. but that's all. There's no gunplay by our heroes. No matter how hard they're pressed, they win by their wits." Neither is there any swearing. The Bobbsey twins used to say an occasional "Gosh" or "Golly." but when a reader protested that these were distant euphemisms for God ("And. by gosh." says Svenson in surprise, "she was right!"), "Gosh" and "Golly" disappeared.

Facts Take Over. In the last decade one long-standing trend has grown bigger than Nancy Drew, bigger than the Grinch, bigger even than puppies--information. Increasingly, fantasy and fairyland have been elbowed aside by an onrush of facts in skillfully done information books. "The American child doesn't want a story now," says Western Printing's Albert Leventhal, one of the originators of Golden Books. "He wants information. There is very little room for fairy tales." These days, the eternal WHY? of children can be partially silenced with books on volcanoes, rocks, oceans, weather, biology, electronics, time, photography and everything else that is new or old under the sun. Most of these books run in series: the First Books of Music. Archaeology, Prehistoric Animals; the excellent Landmark list of more than 100 titles, ranging from biography to battles, and written by such authors as C. S. Forester, Van Wyck Mason and Samuel Hopkins Adams; the We Were There books, which re-create historical events. At a book fair held recently in Westchester, 13 copies of We Were There at Pearl Harbor were sold, while no one bought Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Chicago Bookseller Jack Potter thinks there is a growing schism between parents and children: "Parents tend to buy Grimm's Fairy Tales or Treasure Island. The kids rarely do that. Parents are pretty unsuccessful, I think, in interesting their kids in the same books they enjoyed as children."

The Space Pull. This year the totniks are going mad for Sputniks. Author Robert Heinlein, in his Farmer in the Sky and Citizen of the Galaxy, dominates the fiction end of this field, with a talented combination of space savvy and believable characterizations (even his Boy Scouts sound like human beings), but the trend is toward nonfiction. e.g., Margaret Hyde's Atoms Today & Tomorrow, Franklyn Branley's Exploring by Satellite, Roy Gallant's lively Exploring the Universe.

Parents, leafing through these books--and boggling at up-to-date explanations of the earth's magnetic field and its relation to currents flowing in the ionosphere, or statistical data concerning the light-year measurement of the earth's galaxy-are apt to lament that fantasy and romance have fled from childhood. The fact is that science provides more fantasy than the most fantastic fairy tales. In the introduction to The Complete Book of Space Travel, illustrated by Virgil Finlay. Author Albro Gaul says casually: "The first space pilot has already been born. He is probably between ten and 16 years of age at this moment . . ."

What child could resist the imaginative pull of such words? Or, for that matter, what parent--if only he were a child again?

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