Susan Cooper. Photo: Benjamin Flythe.

I’ve been here before. Long ago, in October 1974, when I was thirty-eight years old, the handsome fiftieth-anniversary issue of The Horn Book Magazine ended with a little two-page tribute from me. It was titled “A Love Letter to the Horn Book.”

And it did tell a story of falling in love. I was an isolated, rootless person, not only because I’d left my native Britain, but also because I had turned to writing fiction published for children after doing well with journalism and adult books. None of my former colleagues could understand the change, and in my immediate surroundings my work was regarded as an amusing hobby. I had married an MIT professor, and his engineer friends would give me an indulgent smile. “You write children’s books? That’s cute! Do you draw your own pictures?”

“I was beginning to turn into a kind of inarticulate disembodied scream,” I wrote in that 1974 Horn Book tribute. “And then I read my first copy of the Horn Book.

“I shall never forget that joyful shock. Suddenly, here was an island; green trees on the horizon; refuge…it was astounding to find that a thick, healthy magazine not only devoted itself exclusively to ‘children’s books and reading’ but had considered this a proper study for the last forty-odd years. Even more astonishing were the scholarly, unpretentious, sensitive reviews and articles inside. And on top of everything else, this was a beautiful magazine, printed and published with affectionate care, in an elegant font, on excellent paper…”

I was writing as an author, of course, overwhelmed by finding such dedication to the profession of making children’s books, which I had seriously begun to think nobody outside the world of publishing considered a profession at all. And The Horn Book Magazine is not written primarily for authors, but rather for librarians, teachers, parents, and all others responsible for judging and buying children’s books. All the same, the service it provides for authors is incalculable. “Like a good editor,” I wrote in my love letter, “it is a sort of parent; it praises our successes, scolds our failures, and, above all, cares about what we are doing. Its very character, indeed, makes us feel that what we are doing is the most important thing in the world. It isn’t, of course, but we need to think so. Part of the time, anyway.”

In later years, this devotion didn’t stop me from being an irritant to successive Horn Book editors whenever I was asked to write an article. Thinking your work is the most important thing in the world doesn’t always have admirable results. I once wrote tetchily to Ethel Heins, who published my ­Newbery Award acceptance speech, “When you go through the text you will find that I have in a very large number of places removed copy-editing changes in punctuation and phrasing…As anyone who is unfortunate enough to publish me discovers, I write more like a musician than a literary academic…” But Ethel was patient, as her lovely successors have been; the parental concern for authors has never been eclipsed by the more complex service that the magazine performs for all those librarians, teachers, scholars, and parents.

Half a century later, and every word in that 1974 love letter is still true; this remarkable magazine’s values have never faltered, and for its diverse readers it’s a pillar of the world of children’s literature. The fact that there is such a world, these days, owes a lot to the Horn Book’s influence. So, to update a greeting from this grateful author: many happy returns, my dear friends. May your next hundred years be even more successful than the first. Whatever your opinion of our next books, your magazine is precious to those of us who make “children’s books and reading.”

From the May/June 2024 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Our Centennial. For more Horn Book centennial coverage, click here. Find more in the "Blowing the Horn" series here.

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