E.L. Konigsburg - Talk, Talk. A Childrens Book Author Speaks to Grown-Ups

Talk Talk

A childrens book author speaks to grown-ups.

Also by E. L. Konigsburg

Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
About the Bnai Bagels
(George)
Altogether, One at a Time
A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver
The Dragon in the Ghetto Caper
The Second Mrs. Giaconda
Fathers Arcane Daughter
Throwing Shadows
Journey to an 800 Number
Up From Jericho Tel
Samuel Todds Book of Great Colors
Samuel Todds Book of Great Inventions
Amy Elizabeth Explores Bloomingdales
T-Backs, T-Shirts, COAT, and Suit
TalkTalk

ATHENEUM
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Childrens Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Text copyright 1995 by E. L. Konigsburg

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Designed by Ann Bobco and Anne Scatto The text of this book is set in Perpetua.

First edition
Printed in the United States of America 10 987654321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Konigsburg, E. L.

TalkTalk / E. L. Konigsburg.

p. cm.

A Jean Karl Book.
ISBN 0-689-31993-2
eISBN 978-1-4424-2924-6

1. Konigsburg, E. L.Authorship. 2. Childrens stories, AmericanHistory and criticismTheory, etc. 3. Childrens storiesAuthorship. 4. ChildrenBooks and reading. I. Title.
II. Title: TalkTalk.
PS3561.0459Z475 1995
810.99282dc20 94-32341 CIP

IMO Mo

Jean Karls advice to make the whole more than the sum of its parts by linking the speeches to one another proved to be the insightful incentive that made me look forward and back to see these speeches in a new light. I thank her first for that. And I thank her, too, for the research she did, the lettersworldwideshe wrote, and the contacts she made to obtain permissions for printing the pictures that illustrate three of these speeches. I thank Jon Lanman for being the consistent voice in the corner office during several changes of the guard. I thank Ann Bobco for her inspired art direction, her optimism, and our lengthy working conversations over long distance with her saying, Were almost there. I thank Patricia Buckley for being a friend in the home office.

I also want to thank three friends not in the office: Colette Coman for translating French; Jack Dreher for translating Italian; and Judith Viorst for a phone call, made immediately after reading my manuscript, telling me the baby has all its fingers and all its toes and was born speaking.

I thank Sarah Mitchell at Art Resource for her interest and her help in finding suitable transparencies of artwork from medieval to modern. I thank Evan Levine of the Education Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for putting me in contact with Beatrice Epstein of their Photo Slide Library, who tracked down the elusive picture of the stucco and plaster Bust of a Lady that the museum purchased in 1965. I thank Anne Scatto for fitting the pieces on the pages and Howard Kaplan for keeping track of the pieces.

My husband, David, who is mentioned several times in the course of these speeches, must be mentioned here, too, for I can never consider complete a list of people to thank without including his name. I thank him for tuning in when he should and tuning out when he should. It is he who hears the hollering and halting, the screeching and screaming before the work has the spirit of sprezzatura.

Last, I want to thank all the people in the auditoriums, cafetoriums, media centers, and public rooms of Holiday Inns who have listened to what I have had to say about children and books and who have said that they would like to read what they had heard. They are my audience: lovers of print on paper.

Talk Talk

A childrens book author speaks to grown-ups.

W hen I delivered the first of these speeches at the annual convention of the American Library Association in 1968, I was the mother of three. I have since become the grandmother of five. Having shifted my generation, I have, by definition, shifted my point of view. I could say that like an old lady without bifocals, I must hold the printed page at arms length just to make it possible to read. I could say that. But I wont. Instead I choose to think of myself as the viewer of a large Impressionist painting standing backand farther backto see all those dabs of color come into focus. I see myself moving deeper into the work by standing farther back from it.

First to last, these speeches reflect or reflect upon the changes in childrens literature in the United States over the past quarter century. The change overriding all others is growth. In a letter dated July 7, 1993, Judy V. Wilson, former president and general manager of the Childrens Book Group of Macmillan Publishing Company wrote, [I]n 1980 2800 childrens books were published and in 1988 5000 a year. I dont have more recent numbers but it could be a 50% increase in the past five years.

Growth certainly means greater numbers, but it also means development from a simpler to a more complex form, and publishing childrens books has certainly grown more complex.

When my first book was published in the spring of 1967, Atheneum was a small independent publisher with offices in an old brownstone on East Thirty-eighth Street. There was a big red letter A on the door. The Childrens Book Department was on the fifth floorwalk-up. Jean Karl was its founder and editor.

Books were published twice a yearspring and fallto little fanfare and quiet profit. The major steps for getting a childrens novel into the hands of a child were: a writer wrote it; an editor accepted it; a publisher published it; a director of library services sent the book to the media and major library systems for review; the book was purchased by schools and libraries; children read it.

Childrens books stayed on the shelves a long time. Recency and primacy comfortably coexisted. Books went into third, fourthfortiethreprintings. The backlist books, those for which all the editorial and start-up costs had already been paid, were the backbone of the childrens book departments. Experimentation, excitement, lay in the front list; pride and profitability, in the back.

In 1979 Atheneum merged with Scribners. Macmillan bought Atheneum-Scribners in 1984. Maxwell bought Macmillan in 1988. Until February 1994, when Paramount bought Maxwell Macmillan, Atheneum was one of nine imprints of the Macmillan Childrens Book Group. Paramount, which also owns Simon & Schuster, has designed its childrens book group as follows: three trade hardcover imprints, one paperback imprint, and an imprint that will publish novelty-merchandise items. In July 1994, Viacom bought Paramount, but we dont have to talk about that. As the corporate structure now stands, Atheneum will be one of the three Simon & Schuster hardcover imprints; it will absorb Scribners.

In the last rounds of corporate buyouts, the childrens book departments were part of the dowry. They werent the vast estates of the reference and textbook divisions or the many mansions of adult trade books, they were the small, beautifully wrought silver tea service that had been in the family for years, carried down from the attic, brought to the bargaining table, polished and still holding waterflavored water.