This exhibition, originally mounted in conjunction with the publication of Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature by Leonard Marcus, will remain on display here in the M.E. Grenander Special Collections Department through Friday January 16th, 2009.
Where: Standish Room, Third floor Science Library, University at Albany, SUNY
When: October 23, 2008, 4:00 PM
Leonard Marcus, one of the foremost authorities on the history of children’s literature, will discuss and sign his new book, Minders of Make-Believe (2008, Houghton Mifflin), an animated first-time history of the visionary editors, authors, librarians, booksellers, and others whose passion for books has transformed American childhood and American culture.
What should children read? Marcus tackles this three-hundred-year-old question that sparked the creation of a rambunctious children’s book publishing scene in Colonial times. And it’s the urgent issue that went on to fuel the transformation of twentieth-century children’s book publishing from a genteel backwater to big business. Marcus delivers a provocative look at the fierce turf wars fought among pioneering editors, progressive educators, and librarians - most of them women - throughout the twentieth century. His story of the emergence and growth of the major publishing houses - and of the distinctive literature for the young they shaped - gains extraordinary depth through the author’s path-finding research and in-depth interviews with dozens of editors, artists, and other key publishing figures whose careers go back to the 1930s.
Free and open to the public. Seating is limited. RSVP to: Brian Keough, at bkeough@albany.edu or 518-437-3931
The M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives is fortunate to have undergraduate and graduate students working on a variety of projects including arranging and describing collections, conducting research related to our collections, and many other initiatives. Here is another posting from one of these students, University at Albany graduate student Kali Roy.
My name is Kali Roy and I am a graduate student in the Information Science Program at the University at Albany, SUNY. I also work as a student assistant in the University at Albany’s M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives. In general, I aid David Mitchell (Curator pro bono of the Miriam Snow Mathes Historical Children’s Collection) with collection maintenance. This collection maintenance can involve seemingly mundane tasks such as shelving, searching Minerva and OCLC for copies of books for the collection, and providing preservation housing for the collection artifacts, such as phase boxes, portfolios and enclosures. The reason I use the word seemingly is that while I am in the process of performing these necessary tasks to keep the collection neat, orderly, and significant, I am also gaining knowledge about how a special collections department works, and about how the history of children’s literature has evolved over time. This results in giving the tasks a positive complexity with learning that is two fold. Past and present children’s literature is one of my all time favorite interests; this job has provided me with great resources for learning about past and present authors, artists, publishers, and stories that continue to inspire those working in the field of children’s literature. As a student assistant, I have also learned to be flexible and open to all avenues of learning and experience.
The exhibit The Secret Lives of Toys and Their Friends is on display in the lobby of the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives on the third floor of the Science Library at the University at Albany.
A small number of items and information from the exhibit are made available online at http://library.albany.edu/speccoll/secretlives/ as an introduction to the physical exhibit.
This exhibit contains items drawn from The Miriam Snow Mathes Historical Children’s Literature Collection and is on exhibit through early October 2006. This exhibit features a small sampling of the many stories written for children from either a toy’s point of view or about adventures based on the lives of living toys or objects. The over fifty items in the physical exhibit, including the small number displayed in the online exhibit, are a fraction of what the Mathes Collection contains on the subject of animated objects and/or toys.
Update: The Secret Lives of Toys and Their Friends is back by popular demand on display in the lobby of the Department of Special Collections and Archives beginning January 24, 2007.