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100 Best Children’s Books: New Lists by BBC Culture, Chris Loker, and Leonard Marcus

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There is always room for one more list of outstanding children’s books.  A hundred is the usual cut-off for an ambitious survey, large enough to be comprehensive while giving the pundit some wiggle room for individual expression.  Whether prepared by an individual, committee, or poll, accommodation is the name of the game.  The results are bound to make as many people cross as happy.  Scanning one of these lists usually brings the opinionated critic out of the book lover, gorge rising that certain favorites didn’t make the cut and furious that others did.

Given all the questions that have to be addressed, the creation of a list of 100 best/ classic/ essential/ significant books is never a quick and easy exercise.   Who gets to decide which books are classics?   Teachers, librarians and other educational experts?  Readers?  Book buyers or publishers?  Critics and reviewers?   Because their concerns are not identical, all should be allowed to chime in.  Are some, on the other hand, are more equal than others if long discussions ensue to untangle the messy ball of criteria?

To what extent does “best” mean of personal importance to the selector—i.e. childhood favorites?  Is the “best” book one that is read by many over a long period of time and just how long is long enough?  Why weigh readers’ responses if few have survived?  Should the authors be included primarily on  literary merit or should they reflect a cross-section of their society, with outsiders and elites represented?  What about authors like Enid Blyton or Roald Dahl with phenomenal sales records over generations when they expressed values now considered unacceptable?  Should Palmer Cox’s Brownie books, which were popular between 1870 and 1920, be considered or are they more correctly regarded as a far-reaching craze of historical interest?  Beloved series books tend to fall in this gray area and who knows if eventually Harry Potter will too.  How heavily should the number of movies, adaptations, translations, etc. be weighed?  Should non-fiction and information books have a place at the table?

And so on and so forth.  Eventually the arguing has to stop and some kind of consensus reached so the selecting can start.

Chris Z. Loker, an antiquarian bookseller and past board member of the EricCarle Museum of Picture Book Art, brings a thoughtful and disciplined approach to A Shimmer of Joy: One Hundred Children’s Picture Books in America (San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 2019), the companion volume to her One Hundred Books Famous in Children’s Literature (New York: Grolier Club, 2014).  A showcase of a private collector’s treasures, at first the book looks as if its primary audience is children’s book collectors.  Shimmer can be browsed or dived into, thanks to the addition of a section of four short essays contextualizing the genre by Catharine Mercier, Joel Silver, and Michael F. Suarez.  There is also  a compendium consisting of a 2011 manifesto proclaiming the picture book’s relevance signed by 22 artists and an omnibus of definitions which were offered between 1699 and 2019. The entries are written in a clear, relaxed style accessible to anyone beguiled by modern picture books.  Stereotypes and cultural appropriation in books published before 1960 are addressed honestly while keeping in sight of those qualities which have held an audience for decades.  Designed by Jerry Kelly, who has many sumptuous museum exhibition catalogues to his credit, Shimmer is among the most handsome 100 best lists on any subject.

Pictured Worlds: Masterpieces of Children’s Book Art by 101 Essential Illustrators from Around the World (Abrams, 2023) is a thoroughly professional job as one would expect of Leonard S. Marcus.  The format suggests the goal was to reach out to the widest possible audience, because it is both a generously illustrated coffee table book and a reference book, each entry featuring an author portrait, brief biography, appreciation, and publication history of one major work. Marcus insists that this is not an “old-fashioned” list of the canon or an artistic pantheon, but instead a roster of those who have engaged children “in the kind of artful blend of instruction and delight that John Locke recommended long ago, and which continues to prove its worth to an ever larger portion of the world’s population.”  Having invoked Locke, Marcus chose not to address the question if the seventeenth-century philosopher would have agreed that the contemporary picture book still embodied his idea of “some easy pleasant book suited to his capacity” that communicated “clear ideas,” when centuries of improved printing technology have dramatically changed the role of illustrations vis-à-vis the words.

Tana Hoban, Shapes and Things (1970).

Christian Epanya, Le taxi-brousse de Papa Diop (2005).

If Marcus really wasn’t interested in the canon making, then perhaps he should have experimented with the format and ditched with the the magic number of 100, provided the publisher would have gone along with it.  He has written extensively elsewhere about the twentieth-century American children books and many of the British ones that constitute nearly two-thirds of the list  The representation of Continental illustrators feels a little thin even when those American artists who were emigrés from Europe between World Wars are counted as out/insiders to both traditions.  Even though the Russians had an outsized impact on modern children’s book illustration, only two make the cut and neither are the 1920s.  The six illustrators from the Far East, two South American, and one African seem to have won places at the table primarily on the basis of the awards won.  Had Marcus branched out and covered another 25-50 artists after 1950 beyond the Anglo-American illustration tradition, Pictured Worlds would have been a less predictable and more adventurous selection.  Taking a look at picture books from the last fifty years would have opened up the field for lively discussion—something as more valuable and eye-opening than predicting which illustrators will make it into the winner’s circle of the future.

Late winter 2023, the staffers of BBC Culture announced that having compiled lists of the 100 greatest films and of television shows, the time had come for the children’s book.

We needed to finally turn our attention to another art form so deeply embedded in all our lives – books. And there is no variety of books more embedded in them than children’s literature…It also felt like just the moment to survey children’s books because of the recent conversation around how they are sorely undervalued compared to adult literature…All in all, then, it felt like the right time to do our bit to both give children’s literature its due and consider what has made and continues to make great children’s writing. And so, in order to do that, we have decided to ask many experts a very simple question: what is the greatest children’s book of all time?

The actual instructions to contributors were somewhat different: submit a list of ten children’s books, ranked from 1 to 10.   Only one volume could be  chosen from a series The Chronicles of Narnia or Harry Potter. ISBN numbers were also required, for some obscure reason.  Participants were encouraged to think internationally and to write comments clarifying their selections, if they wished.   The methodology of list creation is rarely watertight, so the exercise may turn out to be more entertaining for the compiler than instructive to the reader.  As no criteria were given for weighing one book against another, it was up to the list maker to decide how to play the game.  The cynic might decide to pick the ten most likely to be chosen by fellow contributors in order to score high, which could mean putting oneself inside the skin of the sentimentalist who favors childhood favorites.  The contrarian will try to separate the sentimental canon from works transcending nostalgia on the wings of author’s imagination, style, and impact.

How many respondents dashed off a list?  How many agonized over it?  How many people approached by BBC Culture didn’t bother to respond?  And most importantly of all, how did BBC compile the list of experts?

The results were posted on the BBC Culture website in books section at the end of May.  It revealed that a total of 177 “critics, authors, and publishing figures” from 56 countries made submissions: 133 were women, 44 men, and three unidentified by choice.  The 1050 books nominated were scored and ranked to create the final list.  All the respondents, with their positions, countries of residence, and list of ten books can be studied—which is in many ways, as BBC Culture admitted, more intriguing than the final list of 100, with Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are in first place and Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories in one hundredth.  There are few surprises, the majority being modern classics from the popular canon published in England or America.  Children’s literature still doesn’t have a history, even in the minds of most experts.  Some authors like Roald Dahl might have had a higher profile if they weren’t prolific, giving respondents the opportunity to name different titles.  No one admitted to liking series fiction like Nancy Drew, the Babysitters Club, Goosebumps, etc.   For those who tried to champion their country’s best children’s books in languages other than English, this was not the venue to bring them to a wider audience–only the international best-selling Western authors like Astrid Lindggren or Tove Jansson made it to the final one hundred.  Even the great traditions in Russian, Chinese, and Japanese barely surfaced.  Works written in the last twenty-five years, however, got special treatment in a separate list.

Making lists of 100 best children’s books has always struck me as a fruitless exercise,  because it is impossible to get it “right,” whatever that means.  We know it doesn’t mean 100 books absolutely everyone will agree on forever and ever.   Lists assembled by tabulating the results of a survey will produce a different cross-section of books than ones compiled by an individual: trying to figure out what those lists tell us about taste and values takes a lot of time to unpack.   Perhaps “getting it right” means the selection represents a balance between old and new, popular and high-brow, familiar and surprising.  Maybe the combination of knowledge, passion, and quirks are what really count because it shows the compiler wasn’t afraid to take risks and make some outrageous or debatable calls.  A bland selection is nowhere as much fun as an opinionated one: the best 100 bests push buttons, challenge convictions, and ask to be revisited for ideas and inspiration.

100 Best Children’s Books: Roundups by Martin Salusbury, Roderick Cave, and Brian Alderson

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Everyone must have prizes!

Spinning out a history through one hundred objects is probably here to stay for a while longer.  One hundred things sounds like a cornucopia of examples, but the largely arbitrary number sprawls and contracts during the maddening process of finalizing list.  What looks good at the end of one session, stirs up arguments at the next one. Passions run so high that an impartial and judicious selection seems an impossible dream. In the end the principles for selection have to be spelled out succinctly even though they will please almost no one, because everyone will protest gleefully at the omission of a favorite and inclusion of the unthinkable.

Children’s books have been the subject of three such surveys in the last four years.  In 2015 there was 100 Great Children’s Picture Books by Martin Salusbury, graphic designer and professor of illustration at Anglia-Ruskin University.  Roderick Cave, a publishing historian and teacher of rare book librarianship, collaborated with his daughter Sarah Ayad on A History of Children’s Books in 100 Books (2017).  Entering the lists last month was The 100 Best Children’s Books by Brian Alderson, the ultimate jack of all trades who for decades has been engaged with the creation, publication, and interpretation of children’s books. 

Martin Salusbury starts with Peter Newell’s The Slant Book (1910) and finishes with Katherina Manolessou’s Zoom Zoom Zoom (2014), which both happen to be about wayward babies–one in a runaway buggy, the other a little monkey who can’t get to sleep.  As a coda to the chronological list of his one hundred books, he offers a glimpse of what the future may bring. There’s a “Further Reading” section comprising books about reading, visual communication and storytelling, the major journals in the field, and a heap of websites, so it’s not a bad place to start learning more about modern children’s book illustration.

Salusbury’s goal is to provide the picture book’s admirers with “a visual feast” of titles distinguished by good art and design.  The “wow factor” is the major criteria for selection, by which he means a colorful, bold modernist aesthetic that’s more abstract that representational.  He’s eminently qualified for the job, having for years haunted the major global book fairs, served on juries for international awards, and taught aspiring illustrators, at least one of made the cut here.  Many of the people whose work is praised here also had careers in advertising, set design, and fashion, a welcome reminder that illustrators’ artistic practices aren’t necessarily confined to one medium or form.  Of British illustrators, Salusbury is partial to Edward Ardizzone and the best pupils of Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Enid Marx, and Betty Swanick, famous for her London Transport Posters.  While the focus is the Anglo-American tradition, he also acknowledge the excellence of French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and Swiss illustrators (the Germans are largely passed by without comment).  Whether or not you share Salusbury’s taste, looking at the well-chosen pictures and reading the genial commentary is entertaining and informative (even if the facts aren’t always right), The conception of Cave and Ayad’s  History of Children’s Books  is also was conceived to accommodate the reader who’s inclined to skip around instead of reading straight through. The curious and confusing omission of a master list of the one hundred titles is quite noticeable because the book includes non-book objects, like a Sumerian silver lyre in the shape of a ship, ephemera like a agent-recruiting advertisement for Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and a papier-mâché and wood logo model for Dean’s Rag Books, but there is no way to know if they are part of the count.

Instead the material is organized topically in chapters with alluring titles such as “Innocence, Experience, and Old-Fashioned Nonsense,” “Fairies and Frighteners: Tempters, Tearaways and Cautionary Tales,” “Advanced Women, Looking Backwards, or “Growing Up Fast: Comics, TV and New Media.”  While the literary works like fairy tales, adventure stories, and animal tales are treated in logical chapters, the rationale for distributing the educational works across the volume. seems more arbitrary. The English-language teaching materials produced in the Empire’s far-flung colonies would have made more of an impact if shown together instead of dispersed, such as Chinua Achebe’s “How the Leopard Got His Claws” (1972), part of an ambitious plan to produce books for Nigerian school children aborted by the Biafran war, or Rabindrinath Tagore’s Bengali primer Sahaj Path (1930).  Works where illustration was critical to the educational scheme, like Jane Johnson’s manuscript nursery library or Karion Istomin’s 1694 illustrated Russian-language primer or Bukvar  seem orphaned in their own sections unrelated to similar materials elsewhere in the volume.

Some chapters are grab bags of ideas whose connection with the designated books may not be especially clear or logical. A reader may be confused by Chapter I, “First Steps: Oral Traditions and Pre-literacy,” which jumps from child-rearing gurus Sir Truby King, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and Lady Margaret Mount Cashell, then to authors determined to raise good readers like Mrs. Trimmer, Charlotte Yonge, and Dorothy Butler, next skips to 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey, and concludes with a discussion of battledores, hornbooks, Steichen’s photographically illustrated First Picture Book.  Surprisingly little is said about the children’s illustrated–Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book, also illustrated and mentioned in Chapter 3, Mrs Henry Cole’s The Mother’s Primer (1844), and an advertising poster for Dean’s Rag Books. Overall the volume feels less like a history than an exhibition that does not seek to make an argument about the subject and therefore oblige a conscientious viewer to start at the beginning and work systematically through the sequence of cases.  If most of the cases are given a good look, the viewer may take away a sense of the subject’s  many facets, without understanding much about how they are related.Of the three best books, Alderson’s roams the widest over narrative fiction– fantasy, historical fiction, adventure yarns, family and school novels. The introduction lays out in typically uncompromising terms the project’s aesthetic.  His “team” of 100 is composed of  books that “will sound as well read aloud as they may be read on the printed page (or perhaps even better).” Twain’s Tom Sawyer, yes, but Jeffries’  Bevis: The Story of a Boy (1882) is surely something of a stretch… He has not hesitated to include a book not considered an author’s “best” if another “which allows a discussable element of their style” or chosen a “first or early work from which the oeuvre as a whole has blossomed,” William Mayne’s A Swarm in May (1955) being a good example.  The short essays, a good number of which have an illustration from the book, are arranged in strict chronological order.  The essays are in two parts: a plot summary which also puts the book in literary and historical context to begin and a commentary to conclude, both well-larded with Aldersonian barbed quips.  Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone with: “Lewis [i.e. C. S.] got the job done quicker with the White Witch and not so much argy bargy with death-defying wands.”

This volume, which demands and repays attentive reading, may turn out to have the longest shelf life.  I was disappointed that the first nine essays about historically important children’s books published before Anderson’s Snow Queen (1846), do not quite measure up to the rest.  It may be true that few adults (much less children) since World War II  have  read  Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (1749), The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765) or Maria Edgeworth’s Parent’s Assistant (1796).  There are certainly excellent reasons why these classics have been abandoned as no longer relevant to modern children’s lives.  Nevertheless they were the best of the best in their own times and Alderson doesn’t try that hard to explain why they might have been read with pleasure for decades.  The essay on Mme d’Aulnoy is a disquisition on the Kunstmaerchen that never gets down to describing any of her enchanting tales like “The White Cat,” “Graciosa and Percinet,” “The Good Little Mouse.”   They have not entirely lost their magic because in the early 1960s I read and reread in The Looking Glass Library edition of Lang’s Red Fairy Book.  I still have the grubby thing,

So how much common ground can there be between three such different lists?  The authors did not arrive independently at anything like a consensus about the canon of children’s books.  Any number of authors, illustrators, and series appeared in two of the three, including John Masefield, James Barrie, Kathleen Hale, Edward Ardizzone, Judith Kerr, Ladybird Books, and Puffin Picture Books but only Beatrix Potter made the cut in all three  It’s probably more interesting in the long run that Salusbury, Cave and Ayad, and Alderson each present a different view of what constitutes excellence in children’s books.  But in the final analysis, these lists of 100 best all dodge the difficult task of writing an interpretive history, something critics seem less and less willing to undertake in times where the interpretive politics of gender, race, and class can seem less like a lens and more like a muzzle.  .So vive la difference and revel in the arbitrary opinions of the passionate experts.