{"id":18186,"date":"2016-03-21T08:30:56","date_gmt":"2016-03-21T12:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=18186"},"modified":"2016-03-21T08:30:56","modified_gmt":"2016-03-21T12:30:56","slug":"fantastic-books-that-might-not-get-published-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=18186","title":{"rendered":"Fantastic Books That Might Not Get Published Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once in a while, I come across books that are beloved by kids and families\u2014some universally loved, others with a narrower but just as passionate audience\u2014that I’m pretty sure wouldn’t make it through\u00a0today’s acquisitions meetings. I’m not talking about books with dated, sexist, racist, or otherwise unacceptable social content; it’s pretty clear why those would hit the recycling bin now. The books I mean are simply off-beat, quirky,\u00a0or darker than we adult bookmakers are currently comfortable producing \/ than readers are currently comfortable buying.
\n
\n(Tangent about darkness in children’s books: there’s a strange dichotomy at work in today’s book market. On the one hand,\u00a0we seem to want to sanitize nursery stories and popular\u00a0tales: the wolf doesn’t get burned up in the three little pigs’ fireplace anymore, nor does Little Red’s hunter chop up the beast, and Santa no longer smokes a pipe in some versions of The Night Before Christmas. <\/em>On the other,\u00a0we allow darker and bleaker content into MG and YA than ever before. Murder has entered the younger middle grade market\u2014action-adventure murder unaccompanied by\u00a0normal human grief or consequence\u2014and yet we are squeamish about Hans Christian Andersen’s red shoes, something\u00a0Bruno Bettelheim<\/a> would have a little to say about.)
\n\"\"<\/a>The books I’m talking about not making today’s publishing grade are books with odd sensibilities, but they contain something that resonates in a fundamental way with children. Take\u00a0The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>a Caldecott Honor-earning wordless picture\u00a0book by\u00a0the brilliant Molly Bang, published by Simon & Schuster in 1980. It’s an odd book, no question. As the Grey Lady wanders through town with her basket of luscious strawberries, she is followed by an eerie figure intent on taking her berries. She eludes him in a variety of ways, finally escaping him in the woods where he is distracted by the discovery of delicious blackberries. The book is suspenseful, creepy, lovely, and speaks to wordless fears and delights deep in human souls. It’s the kind of book that fascinates children, but\u00a0the kind of book that many adults in the bookstore glance at and dismiss\u2014unless they have already uncovered its magic themselves. Reading Molly Bang’s account of the making of the book reveals that it wasn’t an easy sell back in 1980, but it did find important champions. I didn’t know the history of the book before starting to write this post, but I love discovering that the book was published despite its oddness, that someone saw\u00a0it through children’s eyes.
\n\"\"<\/a>Mr. Bear Squash-You-All-Flat<\/em>\u00a0by Morrell Gipson, illustrated by Angela, is another wild picture book. It was recently reprinted by the wonderful Purple House Press with a note\u00a0from cartoonist Gary Larson, who wrote that he had been obsessed with the book when he was a little tyke and that\u00a0“[a]s an adult, I’m thrilled to see that\u2014after a long hibernation\u2014he is once again roaming the forest of every child’s imagination.” The story follows a destructive bear who goes around smashing the houses of all of the forest creatures until they find a way to teach him a lesson. It’s a weird book and absolutely adored by kids. Perhaps\u00a0it would find a publisher today, but\u00a0I wonder if marketing and sales would balk at the alarming “squashing” and the strangely impersonal bullying of the bear.
\n\"\"Remy Charlip’s marvelous Arm in Arm<\/em>\u00a0has a hard time getting through adult gatekeepers to find its kid audience, which makes me wonder if it would have a chance in Acquisitions today. My sister and I spent hours poring over the clever illustrations, mini-stories, jokes, micro-plays and more in this creative bonanza of a book. Subtitled\u00a0A Collection of Connections, Endless Tales, Reiterations, and Other Echolalia,<\/em> this was definitely not a book that wrote down to its child audience. It sparked our imaginations, we acted out the plays, we drew and drew, inspired by the complex doodles and artwork in the book. When I leave\u00a0the book with\u00a0kids at the store, they get pulled into it the way we did, but when I show it to adults, they are a little confused by the title and bewildered by what it’s “supposed to be,” since it isn’t a traditional narrative story. I was delighted when Tricycle Press reissued\u00a0this book in 2010, but I wondered\u00a0what kind of reception the manuscript of Arm in Arm<\/em>\u00a0would\u00a0receive today.\u00a0There’s a difference between reprinting a proven title and taking on an untested one.
\nToday’s picture book field\u00a0is a rich one. I actually think the past few years have\u00a0seen a growth in its tolerance for creative experimentation\u2014but some of these experiments have more adult than child appeal. I can’t help wondering if child-appealing but (some) adult-off-putting books are getting shorter shrift than they did in the 1970s and 1980s. What do you think?
\nAnd what beloved books from your past do you think might not make it to press in today’s world because of their quirkiness?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are there quirky books you loved as a child that today’s publishers would reject?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}