Leonard Marcus Talks about Golden Books' Golden Effect on Kids

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Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 1/16/2008 2:10:00 PM

Remember those Golden Books we read as kids? Leonard Marcus, a historian of children's literature, traces the rise of this low-cost, 25-cents-a-book publishing phenomenon in Golden Legacy: How Golden Books Won Children's Hearts, Changed Publishing Forever, and Became an American Icon Along the Way (Golden Books, 2007).

Golden Legacy is an art book for adults, loaded with research over its 246-page breadth. What’s Golden Books' significance?
Golden Books was an effort to democratize reading and book ownership for young children and their families across America. It came at a time when most people considered picture books too expensive, and when books were not widely available to be purchased, except for people living in larger cities. By finding new ways of printing and distributing the books on a mass scale, the people who created Golden Books were able to [make available] books of pretty high quality, in a way and on a scale that had never been accomplished before.

You include an anecdote about an early influence on Golden's signature board covers and low price: Albert Levanthal, who was part of the original creative team, saw his three-year-old ruin a picture book in the bathtub!
That anecdote makes the point that parents who are often unsure of what is best for their children and are often on a budget were stymied, I think, about choosing books for children. When an affordable alternative came along, it gave them much more scope for trial and error.

Librarians take it on the nose in Golden Legacy for their early rejection of Golden Books. 
There was an element of excess, I think, to the zeal with which the librarians carried out what they saw as their mission. So I guess I was making a little fun of that. I think that it's literally true that they were "factored out" by the way Golden Books were sold. They were put on racks in places like supermarkets, drugstores, and five- and ten-cents stores; and the parents buying these books were not reading the Horn Book magazine, probably. They were just going to where they would have gone anyway for their groceries…they weren't influenced by the [librarians], who saw themselves as the shapers of values about children's books. 

When did librarians come to value the books?
Probably in the '70s and '80s. It didn't all happen at once. People made choices individually, and a trend began to emerge. My guess is it would have been in the late '60s on into the '70s that paperbacks were accepted into libraries for the first time. So there was a rethinking of what was appropriate material to put on to shelves. The other thing is, if you think about the generation of librarians today, many of them were growing up in the '40s and '50s; and I would guess an awful lot of them read Golden Books as children.

The New York Times, in an otherwise positive review, wrote that, "The book may at times be just a bit too celebratory," referring to how your book was published by Golden Books itself. Were there strictures about what you wrote?
No! Absolutely not. In fact I was pretty hard on the company in a lot of ways.

You did get into the dark underside of early children's publishing. 
One way the cost of the books was kept down was by having most of the work done as "work for hire," which means a one-time payment, usually on a fairly modest scale…. [This] led to a fair amount of bitterness on the part of many of the artists and writers. 

Yet some of these books were successful beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Couldn't Golden's executives just say, "Okay, we'll give you a little more money"?
Well, sometimes they did that, with emphasis on the word "little." Janette Sebring Lowrey got $75 for The Poky Little Puppy, which sold at least 20 million copies. You have to feel bad for the artists who didn't really get what they deserved.

What would you choose as the top, top books from the thousands of Golden Books published?
You'd have to include The Poky Little Puppy by Janette Sebring Lowrey (1942) because it has reached so many people over time. And one of the reasons Best Word Book Ever by Richard Scarry (1963) was influential was because it presented families of words to children. It related them conceptually, rather than alphabetically, which was a new approach. 

What is Golden doing today?
There is an effort to bring back into print some of the classic books from the 1940s and '50s, in different formats that are more suitable for libraries. There was the ideological dislike of Golden Books some librarians felt; they saw them as "mass-produced." But there was also the practical objection that the bindings weren't strong enough to stand up to repeated use. So the new editions are being bound with library requirements in mind. 

And they'll still be kid-friendly…
[Golden Books] weren't presented as high-art objects. The art in many cases is very, very good, but the paper wasn't that heavy creamy paper associated with the kinds of books that won the big prizes. Kids were able to handle them more casually and integrate them into their lives in a more natural way, the way they would treat their toys. And there was a place to write your name in the front; and you could draw a little picture there if you wanted to. And nobody would care, because it just cost 25 cents.