Category Archives: Cotsen Curatorial

Banned Books Week 2019: And Tango Makes Three

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And Tango Makes Three. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, ©2005. (Cotsen)

Today we are going to highlight the most frequently challenged book of the late 2000’s: And Tango Makes Three (New York : Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2005).

Written by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson and illustrated by Henry Cole, this picture book tells the story of two male chinstrap penguins who adopt an egg together. Roy and Silo are a long time couple living and playing together with the other penguins in the Central Park Zoo. During mating season, they build a nest together, but they can’t lay an egg.

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The zookeeper Mr Gramsay notices them and decides to take action! He knows another penguin couple has recently laid an extra egg they can’t take care of (chinstrap penguins tend to lay and care for one egg at a time). So he puts the egg in Roy and Silo’s nest. After they take turns sitting on the egg:

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Tango is born!

Roy and Silo raise their adopted daughter Tango (it takes two!) as a happy penguin family.

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The book was very popular and won multiple awards including: the ALA’s Notable Children’s Book Nominee in 2006, the ASPCA Henry Bergh Book Award in 2005, and was named one of the Bank Street Best Books of the Year in 2006. It was lauded as a great book for parents and educators to use for introducing children to diversity of families and to the idea of homosexual couples. Part of appeal of And Tango Makes Three is that it is based on a true story. Parnell and Richardson (a gay couple themselves no less!) were inspired to write the tale after reading about Silo and Roy in a New York Times article.

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Two real chinstrap penguins with a chick. Roy and Silo? A heterosexual couple? If you can’t tell the difference, does it really matter?

But at the same time it was objected to by numerous detractors for, well, many of the same reasons. In fact, objections were so sustained and diverse that in 2011 Dr. Martha L. Magnuson published a study analyzing the motives behind the numerous objections to And Tango Makes Three.

But the impact of the book goes far beyond children’s reading and the “culture war” debates about what to expose our children to. At the time of release, the book became part of an ongoing zeitgeist of interest and controversy regarding homosexuality in animals. The book helped spark debates about “natural” behavior, inspiring research in the scientific community and interest in the general public. Not bad for a picture book…

Registration open for the 2019 Cotsen Symposium on Children’s Books and Transnationalism

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Traditionally research into pre-20th century children’s literature has focused on titles written and consumed in a particular country. However, most 18th- and 19th-century children, parents, and teachers would not have necessarily used a book’s national origin as the chief criterion for selection. In the majority of European countries, children read books in more than one language, so in reality there was a transnational corpus of children’s books crossing language groups, political borders, and the seas, their texts and illustrations translated and transformed. In order to better understand the world of children’s print culture from both the perspectives of the young reader and of the “children’s book business,” its transnational character should be taken into account.

“Books for Children: Transnational Encounters 1750-1850” (Part II) is a continuation of the May 2018 symposium of the same title held at the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in Copenhagen, where the presentations and discussions made clear that the collaboration ought to continue in order to reach a wider audience.

Online registration for the symposium is open till Saturday October 26, 11:59pm (US Eastern Time).

Please find details of the symposium schedule at https://bookstransnational.princeton.edu/

Organizers

Charlotte Appel
Associate Professor
Head of the PhD-programme for History, Archaeology and Classical Studies
School of Culture and Society
Aarhus University (Denmark)

Nina Christensen
Professor, Head of Centre for Children’s Literature and Media
School of Communication and Culture
Aarhus University (Denmark)

Matthew Grenby
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies
Dean of Research and Innovation
School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics
Newcastle University (United Kingdom)

Andrea Immel
Curator, Cotsen Children’s Library
Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
Princeton University Library