The Good Master! Sweet Ladies!

Back on December 31, in my very first blog entry, I picked GOOD MASTERS! SWEET LADIES! : VOICES FROM A MEDIEVAL VILLAGE by Laura Amy Schlitz as a possible Newbery Honor Book. Less than a month later, this book didn’t just win silver, it won gold.

News that GOOD MASTERS! SWEET LADIES! won the Newbery got a mixed response. Some think this unique volume -- a collection of dramatic monologues related by the denizens of a thirteenth-century hamlet -- is a daring selection and exactly the type of book the award was meant to recognize. Others feel this title lacks kid-appeal and, though it may be useful in classrooms, it’s unlikely to be truly embraced by young readers. I tend to agree that this book has a tough row to hoe -- especially buried back in the Dewey Decimal section, instead of sitting on the fiction shelves with most of its brethren. Time will tell whether GM!SL! will become one of Newbery’s Greatest Hits. My guess is that it’s likely to be one of those books ultimately more admired than loved. It does, however, mark the arrival of major new voice in children's books, especially coming on the heels of the author's acclaimed Grimm retelling, BEARSKINNER, and beguiling novel A DROWNED MAIDEN’S HAIR.

A recent Wall Street Journal profile of Laura Amy Schlitz contained three fascinating facts:

1) Before writing for children, she published an adult romance novel under a pseudonym. I’ll leave the pseudonym and the book title secret in case anyone out there loves researching literary myteries as much as I do. (I found the answers on the internet in less than a minute.)

2) Schlitz submitted GM!SL! simultaneously to eleven publishers. Ten rejected it before Candlewick purchased it. Kinda make you wonder how many other possible Newbery winners have been rejected over the years.... Editors, take heed! (Writers, take heart!)

3) After GM!SL! was accepted by Candlewick, it took seven years for the book to be published. SEVEN YEARS! I wonder if this book would have won the Newbery if it had been published during one of those earlier years. Could it have beaten CRISPIN : THE CROSS OF LEAD or THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX? Probably. What about KIRA-KIRA, CRISS CROSS or THE HIGHER POWER OF LUCKY? There are too many factors involved, including the annual pool of candidates and the unique composition of each year’s award committee, to ever say for sure -- but it’s still fun to ponder.

Seven years seems like an extraordinarily long wait between acceptance and publication -- probably more the exception than the rule. But most writers would tell you that nowadays every book takes a year to be published at the very least...and most take eighteen months, two years, sometimes even longer than that.

The irony is that it wasn’t always this way. Believe it or not, publishing actually moved faster BEFORE computers, e-mails, faxes, and other marvels of modern technology arrived on the scene.

Case in point: THE GOOD MASTER by Kate Seredy, a classic Newbery Honor Book that’s the near-namesake of this year’s winner. Story has it that Seredy went to see Viking Press editor May Massee about getting an illustrating job in early 1935. As they chatted, Seredy told the editor about her Hungarian background, and Massee replied, “Go home and write a book about your childhood in Hungary.” (Gosh, editors usually stop after the first two words when dealing with me.) Massee told Seredy that if she could complete her manuscript that spring, she’d publish it before the holiday season. Seredy went home and wrote an autobiographical story about a headstrong city girl who is sent to live with her uncle’s family on a rural Hungarian horse ranch. Though English was her second language, Seredy completed the novel in two months and returned the HANDWRITTEN manucript to Massee in the spring of 1935. The book was published in October of 1935.

That’s right, a handwritten manuscript submitted in the SPRING was already published and in the bookstores by OCTOBER.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

And one can’t even argue that the book suffered because it was “rushed” into publication. It went on to be named a Newbery Honor Book, is still in print, and continues to be enjoyed by readers today. Meanwhile, Massee was editing a full-slate of books (including another 1936 Newbery Honor, the 1937 Newbery winner ROLLER SKATES, and three of 1937’s Honor Books) and Kate Seredy kept herself busy designing a hand-crafted model of a Hungarian farm that was exhibited around the United States to help publicize THE GOOD MASTER.


Seeing how quickly -- and how well -- our literary forebears worked (in a world without computers or modern technology, no less!) makes today's publishers seem like a bunch of "poky little puppies" in comparison.

Quarter Dolls and Yeller Dogs

Spoiler alert: This blog entry contains "spoilers" for the novel OLD YELLER. If you have not yet read the book or seen the movie, you might want to skip the following.



A few years ago I was visiting a friend and, as we sat talking, I could hear the sounds of a barking dog coming from the family room, where his five-year-old son was watching videos. A couple minutes later, the little boy yelled, "Daddy, how does OLD YELLER end?"

My friend, always blunt to a fault, shouted back: "The dog dies."

A moment later, I heard the TV switch off and then saw my friend's son go outside to play in the yard.

Smart kid, I thought. He knew enough to ask.

Even though he was only five, he'd seen enough movies and TV shows to know that a loving canine companion rarely makes it to the final credits. I certainly didn't know that at his age. In fact, no matter how many dog stories I read as I was growing up, I never did learn that lesson -- and always began each new animal book with the naive belief that a happy ending lay in store. Which was why I stupidly took OLD YELLER to school with me in eighth grade (yes, I still hadn't learned that lesson by eighth grade!) and read the heartbreaking scene where the young protagonist must shoot his dog just before the bell rang at the end of class...then had to pretend I was catching a cold as I blew my nose all the way to my locker.

Many years passed before I acquired a copy of this book for my collection. Once, after ordering some books from a catalog, I sent the book dealer a list of titles I was still seeking; one of them was OLD YELLER. The next time this dealer came to Michigan for an Antiquarian Book Fair, she had two copies of the book to offer me. Both were the same price -- $125.

One was in a dull dustjacket with small tears at the top and bottom of the front panel. Someone had tried to repair these tears with tape, and though the tape had now been removed, its shadows remained. The top of the spine was chipped, the bottom of the spine had an open triangular tear and the second "E' in YELLER had a white scratch across it. The back panel had some light surface oil and a black skid mark coming right down the middle. However, the book was signed by the author!

The second copy was presented in a bright yellow dustjacket pristine in every way (no chips, tears, tape shadowing, or skid marks.) However it was unsigned.

What a dilemma! A dingy copy that had once been signed by the author or a perfect unsigned copy. I debated and debated, remembering how the appraisers on the Antiques Roadshow always say to get an item in the best possible condition, since condition is all-important. Still, how many copies of OLD YELLER did Fred Gipson sign? Wouldn't it be smarter to get a copy he'd actually held in his own hands and written in, despite its physical imperfections?

The previous blog entry describes how I emulated the behavior of my Aunt Tony when visiting a bookstore. Now I was following in the footsteps of another relative, Aunt Gerry, who was once given twenty-five cents to buy a quarter doll. They were called "quarter dolls" because that's what they cost. (This was in the 1920s, before the Depression; during the Depression the family didn't have twenty-five cents for food, much less dolls.) Aunt Gerry took her twenty-five cents to the store and looked carefully at the display of quarter dolls, each dressed in a different outfit. The doll that had the nicest dress also had a cracked head, so Aunt Gerry had to choose between nice dress/cracked face or tacky dress/intact face. Her family was surprised when she returned home with a beautifully dressed doll whose head was cracked in two. Now I was faced with a similar dilemma: an unsigned book in perfect condition or a signed book with a damaged dustjacket.

What would you do? To find out which book I chose, scroll down to the end of this blog entry.

I must say that finding a first edition of this book in any kind of condition was lucky. It's a true classic. The fact that it's a Newbery Honor Book almost doesn't matter: when I see the silver Newbery Honor sticker on later editions of titles like OLD YELLER, CHARLOTTE'S WEB, and some of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, they almost seem out of place, as if those books are so well known on their own merits that Newbery recognition seems unimportant and unnecessary.

OLD YELLER
Written by Fred Gipson
Illustrated by Carl Burger
Harper and Brothers, 1956


Why the book is collectable:

The novel is recognized as a classic book.

It was a Newbery Honor Book.

Made into a good Disney film.

Desired by collectors of dog stories, Americana stories, Texas books, and historical fiction.


First edition points:

This is another Harper book that contains only vague edition information. The book is bound in green and black (spine edge) cloth. The copyright page states "1956" and contains a Library of Congress catalog number. The dustjacket has a price of $2.75 at the top of the front flap and "No. 7042-A" on the bottom of that panel. (No. 704
3-A is on the bottom of the flap.) The back panel has "No. 4769" printed at the bottom.


Difficulty in finding first edition:

Rather difficult to find, though a few copies are listed online running from about $70 (which seems rather low...if they match all first edition points) up to $750, which seems a bit high. I'd say $125 to $200 would be a fair price for a true first edition.

Oh, and this the copy I ended up buying:
...Maybe it's genetic?

Read First, Buy Later

Ann Arbor, Michigan has always been a great city for bookstores. When I was a kid, I was lucky enough to have an aunt who lived there, so once in a great while I'd set aside some of my paper route earnings and go visit Aunt Tony in Ann Arbor, where we'd spend a couple days going from bookstore to bookstore to bookstore. Even though she was a retired widow, Aunt Tony -- who tooled around town in a red Karmann Ghia -- fit right in with Ann Arbor's youthful culture. She was bright and energetic (if she came out of a store or museum or bank and discovered it was raining, she'd simply take off her shoes and run to the car barefoot) and had lots of interests. She also had some very firm opinions. I learned about one of them when I went to visit her in 1972:

"I would never pay $4.95 for a hundred page book!"

We were discussing JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL by Richard Bach. This story of a philosophizing seabird was a bookselling phenomenon and everywhere you went that summer (especially in a college town like Ann Arbor) you'd see people carrying around that slim blue hardcover book. Aunt Tony was curious to know what all the fuss was about, but:

"I would never pay $4.95 for a hundred page book!"

The next morning, as we got in the Karmann Ghia and headed for the first of many bookstore stops, Aunt Tony said, "I decided I am going to read that Seagull book."

"I thought you said you'd never pay $4.95 for a hundred page book."

"Oh, I wouldn't!" she said. "But I figure if I just read a few pages of the book at each store we visit today, I'll have it finished in no time."

"You can't do that!" I said. "It's...it's not allowed!"

She waved off my objections and, a few minutes later, when we arrived at Border's, I headed for the children's book section and she asked the clerk for JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL. This was the very first Border's in the country and had just opened a year earlier. It was also decades before Borders began serving lattes and biscotti and encouraging you to sit around reading their books. Reading wasn't DIScouraged in bookstores back then, but it certainly wasn't encouraged either. Just weeks before I had gotten yelled at in a local bookstore for standing around reading ("This isn't a library!" an employee snapped) and I'd only read a page or two -- not an entire book. So I was quite sure Aunt Tony was going to get yelled at, maybe even arrested.

When I finished browsing at Border's that morning, I found Aunt Tony perched on the side of a display table, nose buried deep in JLS. "I'm up to page 26," she announced and I said, "Shhhhh!" glancing guiltily at the clerks behind the nearby counter.

And so it went for the rest of that day, as we visited Logo's Bookstore ("I"m up to page 43!" "Shhhhh!"), Spangler's ("Page 67!" "Shhhhh!"), and Ulrich's, where they had many many aisles of textbooks where she could have hidden out, but instead chose to brazenly read the book right in front of the information desk ("Page 82!" "Shhhhh!") After dinner that night, we stopped at a Little Professor bookstore where Aunt Tony finally turned the last page, then held the book over her head in triumph and said, "I finished it!" ("SHHHHH!!!") On the way home, she talked about JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL and said she'd enjoyed it, but:

"I would never pay $4.95 for a hundred page book!"

"And I would never stand around reading an entire book in a bookstore!" I thought sanctimoniously.

Then I ended up doing it.

The scene of the crime: B. Dalton's at a local mall.

The book: A BILLION FOR BORIS by Mary Rodgers (a $4.95 book...but over 200 pages long.)

I had read, and loved, the author's FREAKY FRIDAY when it was published a couple years earlier -- laughing so hard at the scenario (thirteen-year-old Annabel Andrews changing places with her mother) and the witty dialogue that my stomach literally hurt after I finished the book. I don't think I even knew about the sequel before I saw it on the shelf at B. Dalton's...but as soon as I picked up the book (which concerns Annabel's neighbor Boris and a television set that broadcast tomorrow's news) I knew that I had to read it. Immediately. Now. Even though I didn't have a cent in my pocket.

So, following in Aunt Tony's footsteps, I planted my own feet in front of the shelf and began reading. I didn't even spread my larceny around, going from store to store and reading a chapter here, a chapter there. No, I read the entire book from cover to cover right then and there, even though it took two and a half hours and the store was almost closing before I finished.

And it was worth it! I found A BILLION FOR BORIS to be as fresh and funny as its predecessor and I loved every page of it.

The main problem with reading a book in a store is, of course, that you have to put it back on the shelf and leave it behind when you finish it. Since 1974, whenever I felt like reading BORIS again, I'd have to check it out of the library (that place where the free reading of books is not only allowed, it's encouraged!) and always wished I had copy of my own.

Finally, a few years ago, I ordered a copy of A BILLION FOR BORIS from a used bookstore. What an upside-down, backwards way of doing business this is, I thought (I actually thought those words!), reading a $4.95 book for free as a teenager and then buying it, twenty-five years later for $30.00.

Annabel Andrews begins her story with these words: "You are not going to believe me, nobody in their right minds could possibly believe me, but it's true, really it is!"

Well, you're not going to believe me about this either, but "it's true, really it is!" When my copy of A BILLION FOR BORIS arrived in the mail, the book was actually bound upside-down and backwards. You had to flip it over, so that the blank back yellow panel of the book is facing the front, in order to read it. If someone saw me reading this book, it would appear that I was holding the volume upside-down.

These kinds of manufacturing problems aren't unheard of in publishing. People who hear that a double-headed nickel or misprinted postage stamp can be worth millions often wonder if the same is true for books. I'm sure there are some cases where problems in historic or rare volumes increase their value, but when these things (different colored endpapers, blank pages, etc.) occur in most twentieth-century children's books, they might add some interest to the book as a conversation piece, but probably add no real value.

But I like the fact that my copy of A BILLION FOR BORIS is backward and upside-down because it pretty much decribes my experience with the book from start to finish: Most people buy a book at the bookstore and then go home and read it. I'd read a book at the bookstore and then went home and bought it.

FREAKY FRIDAY
by Mary Rodgers
Harper and Row, 1972

A BILLION FOR BORIS
by Mary Rodgers
Harper and Row, 1974

Why these books might be collectable:

Well-loved and well-remembered stories of the seventies.

Both have been made into movies; in fact FREAKY FRIDAY has been filmed twice.

FREAKY FRIDAY won the New York Herald Tribune Book Festival Award.

Edward Gorey fans will want these dustjackets for their collection.


First edition points:

Both books have the words "FIRST EDITION" on the copyright page.

FF has a $3.95 price at the top of the front flap and a publication date code of 0472 at the bottom.

BB has a $4.95 price at the top of the flap and code 1074 at the bottom.


Difficulty in finding first editions:

I can only assume that both books had large first printings, as they are surprisingly easy to find for moderate prices -- about $30 each.