Alexandra Dunietz— Would Sydney Taylor, author of the All-of-a-Kind books, have had a Facebook page? I usually avoid counterfactual history, but while helping June Cummins with research on Taylor, I occasionally wondered what she would have made of the internet. What makes me think she would have engaged in some
John Batchelor— Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865, the son of a highly skilled artist and sculptor, John Lockwood Kipling, and his wife Alice (nee Macdonald), who was the daughter of a celebrated Methodist. The Methodist background does not play a large part in Kipling’s life, but his
Timothy Young— The history of children’s books is still being written. While there are important writers working in the field, much needs to be done to bring the rigor of mature literary, sociological, and historical investigation to this relatively young field of study. One of the challenges to research is
My gracious said Orlando isn’t it lovely the wind in the trees. You mean the green trees said Olga, oh yes said Only the wind in the green trees. You mean said Owen the blue sky and the wind in the green trees. Oh yes said Orlando my gracious isn’t
Gertrude Stein was an American, but her presence in Europe, notably her adopted home of Paris, was incredibly influential. Not everyone was a close friend of Picasso and Hemingway, a literary avant-garde comparable to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, collected paintings by Matisse, or the subject of Carl Van Vechten’s
At the Seventh Annual Connecticut Book Awards held in the atrium of Hartford Public Library on September 21, 2008, Drawn to Enchant was awarded the 2008 Connecticut Book Award for Design in praise of its imaginative and colorful arrangement. The Connecticut Center for the Book, which presents the awards every