The Crack in the Old Canon: Culture and Commerce in Children's Books

Abstract

The Crack in the Old Canon:Culture and Commerce in Children's Books Ann Haugland (bio) Introduction Culture critics have long worried about the bad taste of the reading public. A recent study of reading habits in the United States deplored the fact that although 30 percent of all adults reported reading novels in the past year, only about 11 percent had read a novel with "literary merit" and only 7 percent had read a "meritorious contemporary work." The rest of the novel readers—almost two thirds—read books the researchers called "blockbusters," "light popular fiction," or "commercial literature" (Zill and Winglee 32). In his study of pleasure reading, Lost in a Book (1988), Victor Nell argues that the condemnation of "mass reading" is both deeply rooted and remarkably constant. In 1817, Coleridge wrote that most readers were engaged in a mindless activity little different from swinging on a gate or spitting over a bridge (cited in Nell 28). Books enjoyed by large numbers of people are called trash, junk, or escapism; reading for pleasure or entertainment rather than enlightenment or education is considered by critics to be a form of laziness or gluttony akin to an addiction to drugs or sex. Or, as literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick puts it, many novels are "for certain women" a "daytime gift to themselves, as the washing machine growls through its cycles." These "mass produced entertainments" are "rather like a glass of beer—Miller Time"; they cannot be considered anything other than "items of capitalist market seduction" (Hardwick 16). Many people would consider the books in the Nancy Drew series an [End Page 48] example of those mass-produced items of market seduction. Authors for hire working a formula set by a businessman with a good eye for the market—that is a perfect example of the worst of the commercial book industry. The encroachment of commercial concerns in the "gentleman's business" of book publishing is at the heart of Lewis Coser's 1982 study of the book industry, Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing. Coser and his colleagues argue that the book industry is increasingly becoming two worlds, a world concerned with serious literature and a world dominated by the bottom line of the market. Culture and commerce are the opposing poles around which the book industry is organized. The usual analysis assumes that culture and commerce are distinct and divergent goals. Publishers who take seriously their commitment to provide serious culture must eschew commercial gain; publishers who focus on marketplace concerns ignore their cultural responsibility. Similarly, books that are considered commercial properties, almost by definition, cannot be important contributions to culture. In this paper I will discuss the culture and commerce of books—specifically children's books—but I will do so to explore how that dichotomy works to shape (and limit) our understanding of the appropriate uses of books and reading. Within the supposed opposition between culture and commerce lies a basic and usually unchallenged assumption of cultural values. I argue that the concepts of culture and commerce are used to distinguish between elite and mass or popular books, to portray only certain kinds of books and ways of reading as legitimate, and to define and limit the meaning of books and reading in a way that would seem to exclude the kind of pleasure that books such as those of the Nancy Drew series provide. But the popularity of Nancy Drew suggests that there might be a crack in the old canon that could lead to a more open and democratic understanding of books and reading for both adults and children.1 Culture and Commerce in Children's Books According to publishing analyst John Dessauer, children's books were the big success story of the 1980s. Although the juvenile consumer market was important before and immediately after World War II, the explosion of funding for schools and libraries in the 1950s and 1960s caused many publishers to reorient their marketing strategies to focus on books that would appeal to librarians and educators. In doing so, publishers increasingly ignored the bookstore market. But as school and library budgets [End Page 49] dried up in the 1970s, some juvenile...