Children's classics
Until very recently parents who wanted to introduce their children to the kind of classics described in Francis Spufford's memoir, The Child that Books Built either had to haunt second-hand book-shops or the Internet. The most famous, such as CS Lewis's Narnia series were in print - though without their exquisite covers by Pauline Baynes - as were Tolkien - but the majority, which had been published by Puffin, were not. You could find Alice in Wonderland in Everyman Children's Classics, but great modern children's authors such as Diana Wynne Jones, Joan Aiken and Eva Ibbotson were extremely hard to get hold of, and marvellous ones such as Edward Eager and Elizabeth Goudge wholly unobtainable.
In
the past couple of years, however, there has been a
magical transformation. Jane Nissen, a former children's
editor at Penguin, launched her own house in 1998, reprinting
such classics as TH White's Mistress Masham's repose,
Eric Linklater's The Wind on the Moon and Alison Utterly's
A Country Child. A clutch of major publishing houses
began to re-examine its back-list (books that it still
had the rights to, but which are no longer new, or front-list.)
Rejacketed and properly promoted, these have been fallen
on with joy by parents and children alike - but how
has it come about?
The Harry Potter phenomenon has transformed children's publishing from the Cinderella of the trade, where the most junior editors begin their careers, into the hottest area of publishing. Yet according to Jane Nissen, the rebirth of children's classics is due not to JK Rowling but to the other colossus of children's literature, Philip Pullman, who this year became the first children's author ever to win the Whitbread.
"He made the most wonderful acceptance speech when he won the Carnegie Prize for Northern Lights about the importance of story, and I think that was the turning-point. Pullman reminded librarians and booksellers what fantasies are all about. Really, I think Harry Potter would never have had the success it had without that speech," she says. A call to arms, it came just as children's fiction, the last refuge of narrative rather than self-conscious style, was sinking beneath dismal brands such as the Goosebumps and Animal Ark series of the 1980s.
Nissen, who republishes children's classics at a rate of about two a year, has an infectious love of them. "I choose books that there's a strong welcome back for - I'm too small to create interest if a book has been totally forgotten," she says. "Something like 'Marigold at Godmother's House' I got onto through a funny magazine for elderly people; I think an awful lot are bought by adults for themselves. It's really a labour of love."
She missed out on getting the rights to the Edward Eager books (Half Magic, Magic By the Lake, The Time Garden) and to all the Rumer Godden books, which the Oxford University Press got hold of, but her success helped to wake up other slumbering giants. A classic, by Nissen's definition, "has got to have a universal appeal that transcends the time of publication. Essentially, it's got to have a jolly good plot." Not every modern child is going to have the patience to attempt Frances Hodgson Burnett's (check) The Little Duke, however.
Annie Eaton publisher of children's fiction at Random Century, credits Charley Shepherd, in charge of the four-year-old Red Fox Classics series with the major rediscoveries at Random Century. This has been busily reprinting E. Nesbit's less-known House of Arden adventures, and those of Rosemary Sutcliffe and Arthur Ransome. Eaton thinks it's been a more gradual process than a revolution, however.
"It's been going on longer than the Harry Potter phenomenon. Puffin started it with their Classics series in the 1980s, reprinting Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. I think the rediscovery is partly because a generation of us who grew up with certain classic authors want to share them with our own children," she says. "I missed Joan Aiken as a child and have just discovered what riveting, page-turning stuff she writes. However, there are some authors such as E. Nesbit whom some children will find quite a hard read. I adored 'Five Children and It' as a child, but my son couldn't get into it. Statistically kids persevere less than they would have done in my generation - though you do still get girls who are passionate and who will devour everything. Some books do just date because they were particularly topical in their time. Biggles, for instance, though still in print, is I think one example. On the other hand, Rosemary Sutcliffe is timeless, exciting, dramatic - and because the historical detail is correct she's useful for the National Curriculum."
Eaton thinks that trends from the adults world, such as the current fascination with history, spill over into that of children's fiction, but predicts that there will be a SF revival in a couple of years time. This is good news for writers such as John Christopher and Andre Norton whose superb SF series have been languishing for decades, but why does it all take so long? If children's books have sold strongly in the recent past, why do they go out of print when a new generation is continually coming into existence to discover it?
Some
of the problems besetting reprints are that until a
decade ago, authors used to be published in hardback
by one company, but in paperback by another. Puffin,
for example, failed to look after the back-list created
under the legendary Kaye Webb and now other companies
are circling it with beady eyes. Intelligent children's
editors such as Suzy Jenvey at Faber realised that "3/4
of the best-selling titles on Puffin's list were ours"
and retrieve at least a couple of them every year. Jenze
is strict about which ones she chooses:
"They've not only got to have a good sales history
but have people remember them. But I took back Catherine
Storr's 'Marianne Dreams' which had been out of print
for six years despite its sales history, which took
some doing, and now it's selling 11,000 copies a year.
Other classics, such as Noel Langley's The Land of Green
Ginger, I couldn't believe were out of print. People
smacked their foreheads when they realised. The down-side
is that children's buyers in book-shops tend to be the
most junior people there, they don't remember the classics
that people in their 30s and 40s do. So Sales didn't
believe me until they got out and sold."
Untangling a writer's publishing history and getting them all under one imprint, as with the marvellous Diana Wynne Jones fantasies, can be a huge headache. Eaton herself believed Random Century to own the rights to one of the Lucy M. Boston Green Knowe series, but Suzy Jenvey at Faber assured me with some asperity that they all belonged to Faber.
Sarah Davis, children's publisher at Macmillan, has been responsible for the relaunch of the utterly delightful Eva Ibbotson. She points out that while Ibbotson was never out of print she was failing to be noticed because until recently children's books were not properly marketed. Given new jackets and new life by the hiatus in publishing the fifth Harry Potter book, her sales soared from a few thousands to 100,000 copies per book.
"The emphasis now is on publishing fewer but bigger books," she says. "The mass-market Goosebumps era has been let go. JK Rowling and Philip Pullman have raised children's fiction into asking about aspects of time, the nature of humanity. Both in new books and reprints there's fierce competition for books that have a life of their own."
Macmillan have kept the Just William series in print, but dropped the Jennings series, "after a huge effort to keep it going". Both are comedies concerning the adventures of a small boy, but Davis thinks certain factors, such as the period in which each is set have helped one to survive and the other not.
"William became iconic as a war-time child. You know exactly what he looks like, so that the media were able to portray William Hague as Just William. With Jennings it's more difficult. They're superb, and have fans such as Stephen Fry but we couldn't keep that series going."
Sometimes an author survives because of the passion of a particular editor, however. Stella Paskins, Senior Editor at the Children's Division at Collins nurtured a passion for Diana Wynne Jones's novels, "notoriously hard to find," for years. Wynne Jones's agent learnt of this and when the rights to her novels reverted (as they do when a novel has been out of print for over two years) she approached Paskins first. "I gulped them up and they're flying off the shelves," she says. Collins, which as publisher of Tolkien has a long association with fantasy writing, are looking through their back-lists, "searching for past prize-winners and trawling our collective memories" for their Collins Modern Classic list and relaunching authors such as Alan Garner in their Voyager series of SF and fantasy last September. Next year they are bringing back Peter Dickinson's The Changes series, about a Britain in which an awakened Merlin has caused machines to fail, because "I've noticed people waiting to get them back."
Paskins thinks that the 80s trend for realism has reversed into a hunger for fantasy. "People want to escape grit and cover the same issues and problems in a different way. Some of the authors on our back-list have become amazingly prescient. Robert Westall's Futuretrack 5, first published in the 1980s, which we republished in January, is a Big Brother type of thing in which people are living in enclaves and being used as voyeuristic entertainment for an elite."
A generation or more have missed out on becoming children that books built, and that is a tragedy for which publishers of adult fiction now pay. Those who are children now, however, will revel in the old and the new.