A History of Margaret. Okay. McElderry Books

This yr marks the fiftieth anniversary of Margaret Okay. McElderry Books, the primary eponymous kids’s imprint. This can be a milestone by any conceivable measure, however it’s all the extra spectacular after we contemplate that the imprint would possibly by no means have been began had its founder not modified the panorama of kids’s literature — or, certainly, if she had not been pivotal to it being thought of literature within the first place.

Who Was Margaret Okay. McElderry?

Margaret Knox McElderry led a life as eventful and colourful as that of a literary heroine. Born in Pittsburgh on June 10, 1912, she went to Mount Holyoke College and adopted it up by attending the Carnegie Library School in Pittsburgh. This wasn’t as a result of of a deep curiosity in librarianship, however due to a school counselor telling her that she had nothing to supply the publishing business. She received a job within the kids’s division of the New York Public Library, a interval of time that Publishers Weekly known as “foundational” for her future as a writer.

McElderry’s love of tales developed early, whereas listening to the folks tales her mom favored to inform whereas gardening. It by no means went away: quite the opposite, she resorted to it through the hardest, scariest instances of her life. Among these, boarding a freighter from New York to London in 1944 stands out. McElderry, on her solution to taking a job on the Office of War Intelligence, entertained her fellow passengers by telling kids’s tales aloud. Her buddy Susan Cooper, writer of the Dark Rising sequence, stated that she believed that kids’s tales have been the perfect tales.

After World War II ended, she returned to New York and joined the primary kids’s division at Harcourt Brace & World. She was instrumental in turning kids’s literature “from a prewar cottage industry to today’s billion-dollar business.” She edited a number of books that may go on to grow to be Newbery and Caldecott winners.

McElderry married Storer D. Lunt, a former president of writer W.W. Norton. The marriage lasted till his dying a decade later. She died in 2011, abandoning a plethora of grieving associates and colleagues.

Margaret Okay. McElderry Books: The Beginning

In a stunningly shortsighted (and admittedly ageist) transfer, William Jovanovich fired McElderry in 1972 with this parting shot: “the wave of the future has passed you by.” She moved on to Atheneum, the place she began Margaret Okay. McElderry Books, the very first eponymous kids’s imprint. She proved Jovanovich spectacularly flawed: up to now 50 years, her imprint has bought over 80 million books.

McElderry firmly and famously believed that kids have been the bedrock of publishing: “If you don’t catch them young,” she stated, “you won’t have any adult readers.” As a outcome, her imprint initially targeted on center grade and movie books. She wasn’t afraid of taking dangers, as she had already confirmed in 1950 when she revealed The Two Reds by Mr. Lipkind and Mr. Mordvinoff. Although the story is a couple of redheaded boy and a pink cat, the title alone scared booksellers sufficient that many refused to promote it, afraid that it will be about Communism.

Margaret Okay. McElderry Books started the careers of a number of award-winning authors and illustrators. Her style and imaginative and prescient have been legendary, little question aided by her expertise as a kids’s librarian. As Cooper put it, “her insight as a publisher came from intelligence, experience, and instinct.” Indeed, her imaginative and prescient is partly liable for launching the careers of authors and illustrators like Margaret Mahy, Cassandra Clare, Irene Haas, and extra.

Throughout the years, Margaret Okay. McElderry Books’ mum or dad writer modified arms a quantity of instances. Atheneum was acquired by Scribner, which was acquired MacMillan, which was then acquired by Simon & Schuster in 1994. Margaret Okay. McElderry Books is at the moment a boutique imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Division.

The Imprint Now

Although its founder has now handed, Margaret Okay. McElderry Books reveals no indicators of slowing down. It publishes about 30 to 35 books a yr, with its catalog having expanded to incorporate YA, poetry, and nonfiction. More importantly, it continues to observe its founder daring spirit: Vice President and Editorial Director Karen Wojtyla informed Publishers Weekly that “we’re in a regressive time. With books increasingly being challenged, it’s incumbent upon us to fight for kids and their right to read anything and everything.”