The Power of NO! - Closing Doors

John Tierney has an interesting article in the February 26th, 2008 New York Times, The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors.

He is reporting on the incapacity of even some of our brightest and most intellectually accomplished people to focus on what is most important to them. What the article highlights is an instinctive desire on the part of most people to keep open options, even past the point where the cost of keeping those options open becomes material and reduces the rewards of what we are actually trying to accomplish.

"Most people can't make such a painful choice, not even the students at a bastion of rationality like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Dr. Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics. In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish, even though it was obviously a dumb strategy (and they weren't even asked to burn anything).

The experiments involved a game that eliminated the excuses we usually have for refusing to let go. In the real world, we can always tell ourselves that it's good to keep options open.

You don't even know how a camera's burst-mode flash works, but you persuade yourself to pay for the extra feature just in case. You no longer have anything in common with someone who keeps calling you, but you hate to just zap the relationship.

Your child is exhausted from after-school soccer, ballet and Chinese lessons, but you won't let her drop the piano lessons. They could come in handy! And who knows? Maybe they will."

This last of course hits close to home. Having lived abroad many years, one of the many things we see that distinguishes the US from most other countries is just how over-scheduled people here become and I think it is a function, partly of culture (Americans are notable for always trying to improve things) but also, simply, of raw wealth.

Even the poorest quintile of Americans have more possessions and wealth than the middle classes of most countries in the world. With this wealth comes a surfeit of opportunities and choices and I think to some degree we become seduced by this cornucopia, we reach for just that one extra thing that might be fun, we try to squeeze in just one more event. And suddenly, everyone feels over-scheduled, stressed and wondering how they can be so well off and yet so overwhelmed.

For those of us trying to foster of love reading among children it does mean, almost as a corollary, choosing to accept a slower, less crowded life. And I think that is a good thing, but very counter to everything that is going on in the environment around us. I know our kids love having quiet time where they can just kick-back and enjoy a good read. But that means there is some club, some sport, some other activity which they could do, and which they might even enjoy doing, but which they (or we as parents) have elected not to do in order to have the time to savour reading.

It is one more of those duties/burdens of parenthood, particularly for parents wanting to foster a love of reading - giving our children one of the most precious gifts of all. Not a gift of toys, or TV, or clubs or sports. The gift of time to themselves to discover an even wider world where they are in command, a world where time is their own. And of course the books that open up that magic door.

The constancy of a bibliophile's love

I think one of the special privileges accorded to the condition of being a bibliophile is a certain constancy in one's literary loves and passions. It is not always the case. Sometimes one returns to a well loved book only to discover that the reader has moved on and the excitement or significance no longer resides in the dead pages.

More often though, a bibliophile returns again and again to the magic of a particular tale or author and is rewarded with the same elixir of wonder, enchantment, excitement or fascination that first captured them. In a world of such unremitting progress and change, this constancy is a magical treat. Vincent Starrett (1886-1974), veteran journalist and Sherlock Holmes scholar, captured this special state of captured enchantment:

"Shall they not always live at Baker Street? Are they not there this moment as one writes? Outside, the hansoms rattle through the rain, and Moriarty plans his latest devilry. Within, the sea coal flames upon the hearth and Holmes and Watson take their well-won ease. So they will live for all that love them well: in a romantic chamber of the heart, in a nostalgic country of the mind, where it is always 1895."

Awards as predictors of quality

Here at Through the Magic Door, we are always playing with different ideas about how to identify books that are likely to be of lasting interest to children. Recently one of the questions that arose was: How good are the mainstream awards at predicting lasting interest in a book?

So we decided to look into it.

Definitions/Methodology

We settled on a handful of awards based on their longevity, consistency of application, availability of the information, etc. We included both primary winners (Medal) as well as runners-up (Honor awards). Based on these criteria we used the following awards:

Bank Street (and its later specializations)

Caldecott
Carnegie
Horn Book Fanfare
Kate Greenaway
Newbery

We used "ready availability" as a proxy for "lasting interest", recognizing the drawbacks associated with that definition. "Ready availability" we defined as available through a major distributor in a standard format. In this instance we used Baker & Taylor. We excluded from ready availability those books only available; through used book venues, as on-demand print versions, and those through high-end/very specialized publishers. We recognize that there is a capriciousness in equating lasting interest to only those being available at this particular snapshot in time but think that it is as viable an approximation as the many alternatives and has the benefit of being readily determined in objective fashion.

With these definitions, we then went back and looked at the award winners from 75 years ago (1932, 7 titles receiving awards), 50 years ago (1957, 15 titles receiving awards), 25 years ago (1982, 31 titles receiving awards), 10 years ago (1997, 40 titles receivng awards), and 5 years ago (2002, 29 titles receiving awards).

We then looked at which of those were still readily available at all (in any format such as paperback, hardback, library binding, etc.), those that were only available in a single format (such as only in paperback or only available in hardback), and finally those that were out-of-print.

Results

The results of this analysis were as follows:

	Out-of-Print	Single Format	Multiple Formats
5 Years	8%	32%	60%
10 Years	20%	25%	55%
25 Years	55%	19%	26%
50 Years	53%	7%	40%
75 Years	86%	0%	14%

Two or three things leap out at me.

Attrition Rate is Pretty Steep

75 years after their recognition, 85% of the winners are out of print. In this instance, among the seven Newbery Award winners of 1932, only Rachel Fields' Calico Bush is still in print. Of the other winners that year (Marjorie Hill Allee's Jane's Island, Mary Gould Davis's Truce of the Wolf and Other Tales of Old Italy, Dorothy P. Lathrop's Fairy Circus, Eloise Lownsbery's Out of the Flame, Eunice Tietjen's Boy of the South Seas, and Laura Adams Armer's Waterless Mountain), several sound interesting but I don't recognize many/any of them and don't see them among the many lists of favorites that I routinely review. Calico Bush I do recognize, know it is still read in schools as assigned reading but is also read by children under their own volition and is generally well liked by those that have read it. So, it sounds like the Newbery folk got it about right seventy-five years ago.

None-the-less, there is, to me, a surprisingly high attrition rate such that more than half the award winners just a generation ago (1982, 25 years) are out of print.

Data Anomaly Regarding Awards from 25 and 50 Years Ago

Bucking the general trend of steady declines in availability at different points over the seventy-five year period, there is a plateau at the twenty-five and the fifty year mark where approximately 45% of the original winners remain in print. I think the anomaly here is the fifty year mark and my specualtion would be that there is a false high level of in-prints owing to publishers marking "50th Anniversary" type milestones with re-releases. This is perhaps coroborated by the fact that there is a steady decline in the number of books in single formats but there is a reversal of the trend in the number available in multiple formats at the fifty year mark, which is what you would expect if publishers were re-releasing special edition hardbacks in addition to the available paperbacks.

Increasing Message Density

There seems to have been a break point between twenty-five and fifty years ago where the "message density/sophistication" of children's books suddenly took a leap forward. Among the eleven winners (even restricting it to Caldecott, Newbery, Greenaway, and Carnegie) in 1982, you do not find any real counterparts in 1957 to Chris van Allsburg's Jumanji, Nancy Willard's A Visit to William Blake's Inn, Aranka Siegal's Upon the Head of the Goat or Maurice Sendak's Outside Over There. You might argue that some of those are darker books but there were some dark winners in 1957. It strikes me that the distinctive difference is that some are darker in a different, more primal way but more than that, they are visually more sophisticated, they imply an expectation of a greater level of world knowledge than earlier winners, and that there is a much more subtle/nuanced perspective in the stories than is prevelant earlier.

Author/Illustrator Gender

Not really sure what to make of it but it is notable that 100% of the author/illustrators that were winners seventy-five years ago were female. From the fifty year mark onwards, the proportion of author/illustrator award winners that were male has varied up and down at each milestone between the ranges of 35 and 45%. Was there a sudden flood of men into the field of children's literature? Were the awards captive to a gender bias for a while early on? Was 1932 just an anomaly? Interesting questions.

The dog that didn't bark

When analyzing data, you always look for what's not there. In this instance, we know the numbers and titles for the books that were given awards and which of them have lasted. But what about other books published in each of those years that might not have received awards but that are recognized as enduringly popular?

That's quite an exercise in data analysis which I will put off for another day. Just as a quick reality check though, there are some interesting highlights. I have aggregated the bibliographies of a dozen or so 20th century children's authors/illustrators and done just a quick spot check.

For 1932, even with this tiny sampling, there are a couple of books that probably ought to be noted as more persistent in popularity including Kurt Wiese's illustrated version of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, and certainly Walter R. Brooks' Freddy the Detective.

Looking at fifty years ago we see John Langstaff's Over in the Meadow as still being available, along with Walter R. Brooks' Freddy and the Flying Saucer Plans, and Rosemary Sutcliff's The Silver Branch.

Down the road then, we will construct a database that lets us look at books published in the respective years and will then capture those that are still in print and are readily acknowledged in hindsight as being superior books whether or not they ever received an award.

Next Steps

We will at some point, as described above, look at what books printed in the past, escaped the attention of award programs but which have endured and won popular attention over time. With this information we will then be able to see the balance effectiveness in the past of identifying great books that would last over time.

The other project we will pursue is to collate the winners of the various awards for 2007 and invite TTMD community members to identify which of the award winners will last how long into the future (using the degradation map we have already developed) as well as which non-award winning books might most likely remain popular into the future.

Almost too good to believe

From Robert Hendrickson's The Literary Life and Other Curiosities.

In promoting Simon & Schuster's children's book Doctor Dan and the Bandage Man, publisher Richard Leo Simon decided to give away six Band-Aids with each copy. "Please ship half-million Band-Aids immediately," he wired a friend at Johnson & Johnson. He soon received the reply: "Band-Aids on the way. What the hell happened to you?"

Genius at a discount

The Spectator (of the UK) has a review by Sam Leith of Peter Ackroyd's new book, Poe: A Life Cut Short (not yet available in the US). Referencing Poe's always present financial problems, in the review he mentions that:

It was calculated, says Ackroyd, that the total income from all Poe's books, over 20 years, was $300.

About $8,500 in today's money. One more case of worth not being recognized when it would have been useful to the author.

Gotta love those kids

From Tom Stanton's forward to his Hank Aaron and the Home Run that Changed America.

In the early months of the 1973 baseball season, when reports surfaced about the odious mail souring Hank Aaron's home-run pursuit, something stupendous happened. Tens of thousands of children - from San Antonio, Texas, to Salem, Oregon, from Marshfield, Wisconsin, to Mt. Vernon, New York, and myriad places in between - set out individually to lift Hank Arron's spirits. This earnest, youthful army, raised on Brady Bunch do-good and swayed by the words of Top 40 philosophers like Bill Withers ("Lean on me . . . I'll help you carry on"), rallied to Aaron's side.

Through the eyes of these children, it seemed a simple morality play, the line dividing right from wrong as sharp and crisp as the one separating fair territory from foul on the ball diamonds of our youths. The solution seemed just as simple: Write a letter. That it occurred to so many of us at once testifies to something universal in the unjaded heart. That we thought our letters alone could eradicate the evil heaped upon our hero affirms our age and naiveté.

I sent my letter that spring, in the twelfth year of my life, decorating the white envelope with red and blue markers, the patriotic colors of the Braves. In summer, a note of thanks came from Atlanta, Georgia, accompanied by a postcard signed, "To Tom. Best wishes. Hank Aaron." Of course, given the quantity of mail, there was no human way for Aaron to have personally answered my letter. But I was convinced he had, and his words endeared him to me. It's not a unique story. That year, Hank Aaron received more mail than anyone but the president.

There is a common adage, ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.' - Wonderful seeing children instinctively standing up to evil in its various forms.

Peacocks and Pagodas

Barry Rubin in an article dated February 13, 2008, in PajamasMedia, captures several strands of thinking with which I agree; the importance of historical perspective, dealing with the facts as they are rather than the theories as you wish them to be, the serendipity surrounding the life of a used book, and a skepticism of faddish intellectual indulgences.

Sometimes to understand one's own era you have to immerse yourself in another. I pick up my copy of Paul Edmonds' Peacocks and Pagodas as an example. This — though you've probably never heard of it — seems the best-regarded book ever written on the people and society of Burma. You may know it as Myanmar. What could be more esoteric, and yet profoundly revealing, about much broader issues?

My copy is a first edition from 1924 and in its long life and travels it once belonged to T.N. Jayavelu, Antiquarian Bookseller of Choolai, Madras, India. But now it resides on a low rickety table in Tel Aviv, at the top of the pile of books I am reading. My text for today's sermon comes from the first three pages only. We are nowadays used to the notion — or at least used to having it pounded into us — that Westerners were historically racist and imperialist, only recently having become enlightened in the age of "political correctness."

And, to paraphrase the Rudyard Kipling poem (and well-known song) about the road to Mandalay, it suddenly dawns on you like thunder that the contemporary conventional wisdom about how people in the West thought about the rest of the world just isn't true.

Churchill and Free Will

Here is an interesting aside from Churchill. Ever the English pragmatist, he has an interesting analogy for the conundrum of Free Will and Predestination. This arises in part from his reflecting on his third attempt at the entrance exam for Sandhurst when he was tested upon some obscure (at least obscure for Churchill) equation to which he had just coincidentally been exposed to the prior week.

From Winston S. Churchill's My Early Life, page 28 in the Folio Society edition.

Which brings me to my conclusion upon free will and predestination; namely - let the reader mark it - that they are identical.

I have always loved butterflies. In Uganda I saw glorious butteflies the colour of whose wings changed from the deepest russet brown to the most brilliant blue, according to the angle from which you saw them. In Brazil as everyone knows there are butterflies of this kind even larger and more vivid. The contrast is extreme. You could not conceive colour effects more violently opposed; but it is the same butterfly. The butterfly is the fact - gleaming, fluttering, settling for an instant with wings fully spread to the sun, then vanishing in the shades of the forest. Whether you believe in free will or predestination, all depends on the slanting glimpse you had of the colour of his wings - which are in fact at least two colours at the same time. But I have not quitted and renounced the mathematick to fall into the metaphysick. Let us return to the pathway of the narrative.

Churchill and Courteously Rigid Discipline

From Harrow, Churchill managed to gain entrance (after repeated effort) to Sandhurst, the British equivalent of West Point.

From Winston S. Churchill's My Early Life, page 50 in the Folio Society edition.

I learned several things at Sandhurst which showed me how to behave and how officers of different ranks were expected to treat one another in the life and discipline of a regiment. My company commander, Major Ball, of the Welsh Regiment, was a very strict and peppery martinet. Formal, reserved, frigidly courteous, punctilious, impeccable, severe, he was held in the greatest awe. It had never been his fortune to go on active service, but we were none the less sure that he would have had to be killed to be beaten.

The rule was, that if you went outside the college bounds, you first of all wrote your name in the company leave-book, and might then assume that your request was sanctioned. One day I drove a tandem (hired) over to Aldershot to see a friend in the militia battalion then training there. As I drove down the Marlborough lines, whom should I meet but Major Ball himself driving a spanking dog-cart home to Sandhurst. As I took off my hat to him, I remembered with a flash of anxiety that I had been too lazy or careless to write my name in the leave-book. However, I thought, 'there is still a chance. He may not look at it until mess; and I will write my name down as soon as I get back.' I curtailed my visit to the militia battalion and hastened back to the college as fast as the ponies could trot. It was six o'clock when I got in. I ran along the passage to the desk where the leave-book lay, and the first thing that caught my eyes were the Major's initials, 'O.B.', at the foot of the leaves granted for the day. I was too late. He had seen me in Aldershot and had seen that my name was not in the book. Then I looked again, and there to my astonishment was my own name written in the Major's handwriting and duly approved by his initials.

This opened my eyes to the kind of life that existed in the old British Army and how the very strictest discipline could be maintained among officers without the slightest departure from the standards of a courteous and easy society. Naturally after such a rebuke I never was so neglectful again.

Churchill and Harrow

Harrow is one of the ancient (1572) public (i.e. not run by the state) boarding schools of England. Along with Eton, it is immensely rich in history and tradition. Harrow has produced nine of the UK's prime ministers, including Winston Churchill.

From Winston S. Churchill's My Early Life, page 15 in the Folio Society edition.

I had scarcely passed my twelfth birthday when I entered the inhospitable regions of examinations, through which for the next seven years I was destined to journey. These examinations were a great trial to me. The subjects which were dearest to the examiners were almost invariably those I fancied least. I would have liked to have been examined in history, poetry and writing essays. The examiners, on the other hand, were partial to Latin and mathematics. And their will prevailed. Moreover, the questions which they asked on both these subjects were almost invariably those to which I was unable to suggest a satifactory answer. I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had only one result: I did not do well in examinations.

This was especially true of my entrance examination to Harrow. The Headmaster, Mr Welldon, however, took a broad-minded view of my Latin prose: he showed discernment in judging my general ability. This was the more remarkable, because I was found unable to answer a single question in the Latin paper. I wrote my name at the top of the page. I wrote down the number of the question '1'. After much reflection I put a bracket around it thus '(1)'. But thereafter I could not think of anything connected with it that was either relevant or true. Incidentally there arrived from nowhere in paticular a blot and several smudges. I gazed for two whole hours at this sad spectacle: and then merciful ushers collected my piece of foolscap with all the others and carried it up to the Headmaster's table. It was from these slender indications of scholarship that Mr Welldon drew the conclusion that I was worthy to pass into Harrow. It is very much to his credit. It showed that he was a man capable of looking beneath the surface of things: a man not dependent upon paper manifestations. I have always had the greatest regard for him.