Current Reviewing of Children's Books

Abstract

Tii His paper is designed as an analysis of the current reviewing of children's books and is directed to a question pertinent to the needs of the consumer: What is the character and the measure of my access to current publication of children's literature via the sources of critical evaluation? I shall examine two studies of current reviewing and report on one of my own, and shall conclude with some comments on what seem to be the unsolved problems, the current needs, any changes or improvements that have come in response to these needs, and a hopeful look at the future. Two studies of current reviewing have been made, one by Evelyn Anderson in a master's thesis at the University of Chicago and the other by Louise Galloway in a doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. They used somewhat comparable methods, and they concluded with somewhat comparable results. Each analyzed one year of reviewing, giving some attention to policies and practices of their chosen media and scrutinizing in particular those reviews that all of their media had published in common. First, set us examine Mrs. Anderson's thesis,' A Study of Some Reviewing Media of Children's Books. Based on the recommendations of book selection aids in eight standard publications, Mrs. Anderson chose the following: Booklist, Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, Horn Book, and School Library Journal. I shall use that present title of the latter publication; Mrs. Anderson refers to it as Library Journal and Miss Galloway as Junior Libraries. The materials analyzed were those reviewed by all four journals out of the list of juvenile books that had been published in 1955, as announced in Publishers' Weekly-1,450 titles. Of these, 166 were reviewed by all four journals, the span of publication of these reviews being from July, 1954, to December, 1956. There were 428 books, one-fourth of those published, not reviewed by any of the four journals. Mrs. Anderson uses a list of fifteen criteria: