Story Time: Essays on the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection of American Children's Literature ed. by Timothy Young

Abstract

Reviewed by: Story Time: Essays on the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection of American Children's Literature ed. by Timothy Young Courtney Weikle-Mills Story Time: Essays on the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection of American Children's Literature. Edited by Timothy Young. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 280 pp. Paper $30. The subject of this volume, published by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, is the wealth of American storybooks and manuscript materials for children housed in the library's Betsy Beinecke Shirley [End Page 126] collection. Fitting to its title, the sumptuous book, which features fifteen essays and seventy-one images from published and unpublished children's works, is a truly delightful "story time" in itself. Its pages contain tales of dueling librarians and authors; collaborations between writers not best known for children's literature (namely Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps); immigrants becoming illustrators; and even "wayward animals," llamas who intrude into Karl Marx's famous analysis of Robinson Crusoe via an illustrated adaptation (79). Underneath these stories are implicit ones—about the importance of one dedicated collector, Shirley, and about the thrill of discovery in the archives (this reader would have loved to have been with Jill Campbell when she discovered the source of those llamas!). Unsurprisingly, the pieces, all written by contributors who spent time at the Beinecke, are impeccably researched. Several bring to light unstudied items, demonstrating their connection to key developments in American children's literature. For instance, Elizabeth Frengel suggests that the artist's dummies for Ludwig Bemelmans' Castle No. 9 (1936) display an early use of the concept Maurice Sendak would later call "counterpoint," the technique recognized by scholars as the hallmark of the modern picture book (49). Laura Wasowicz, curator of children's literature at the American Antiquarian Society, mines Shirley's "significant cache of picture book artwork" from the behemoth nineteenth-century publisher, the McLoughlin Brothers, to uncover some of the earliest American illustrators to be credited for their work (173). A running theme in essays by JoAnn Conrad, Pádraic Whyte, and Brian Alderson is the seminal work done by immigrants in the development of American publishing and especially illustration, which, as these scholars point out, built upon the taste of powerful Brooklyn librarian Anne Carroll Moore and Horn Book creator Bertha E. Mahony for fantastical stories. The essays attend to milestones so thoroughly that the collection could be used to support a survey for undergraduates. Essays cover a historical range from Puritan "joyful death stories" (Timothy Young) to classic picture books like Blueberries for Sal (Katie Trumpener) and Mo Willems's satires of modern parenting (Heather Klemann). Martin's essay on Hughes and Bontemps outlines the emergence of modern African American children's literature through the making of one book, Popo and Fifina (1932), with robust attention to context. I can also see the volume being well suited for graduate students, in that it models strong research and writing. Though Young's introduction does not assert a unifying intellectual contribution for the volume, choosing rather to emphasize the productivity of the essays' multiple approaches, the pieces taken together make a compelling statement about how children's literature involves a host of collaborators, including authors, illustrators, publishers, educators, librarians, and, of course, collectors. [End Page 127] The volume also makes an implicit case that children's literature scholarship is, at its best, an interdisciplinary endeavor, including archivists and authors, as well as scholars. Four of the essays are by curators at the Beinecke and elsewhere, and the contributors also include author Gregory Maguire and writer/publisher Patrick Kiley. This implicit endorsement of interdisciplinarity is significant because, as Beverly Lyon Clark (whose essay in this volume traces the illustrations of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women) has argued in Kiddie Lit, children's literature scholarship has sometimes divorced itself from the work of librarians and authors in order to make the case for its objectivity as a field. Yet the interrelationships that shape the world of children's literature are now emerging as an exciting focus of scholarship. Leonard S. Marcus's piece stands out in this regard, outlining how Bank Street educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell, publisher...