We have awarded this year's Calling Caldecott to Aaron Becker's Journey and Peter Brown's Mr. Tiger Goes Wild, two books we love love love.

Yes, a TIE.

This was a decision we really did not want to have to make. This outcome would be impossible on the actual committee -- the real committee could not get away with such nonsense. But the real committee, which meets face-to-face with a set number of members and follows a strict voting procedure, does not have to deal with ballot stuffing. Well, that does not sound very nice, does it? But there you have it. Unfortunately, on our second ballot, while almost all of the books had votes that generally corresponded to the first ballot, a few did not. The irregularities would be obvious to any of you, believe me. (For example: one book that was not close to the top on the first ballot receiving twice the number of first-place votes than either Mr. Tiger or Journey and getting almost no second- or third-place votes.) We are not the NSA, but we could see some action on the interwebs that made it clear that someone was messing up our fun. I am sure that it wasn't a deliberate attempt to derail our process. And I imagine the pertinent publishers and authors and illustrators would be mortified if they knew it was THEIR BOOK that threw the vote. No matter, it did mess up the fun of voting and make the ballot invalid. 

I know. Boo and hiss. No amount of red wine tonight at the hotel bar in Philadelphia tonight is going to take the sting away.

But we DO have our original ballot, and that ballot was a marvel, was it not? And, since we did have that first ballot, we did what the real committee does when it has to choose honor books: we went back to all previous ballots. And, since the first ballot showed a virtual tie, that's what we are going with. On the real Caldecott committee, more than half the committee has to vote first place for the winner. If on the real committee, the first ballot showed two books in a virtual tie for first place, the members would have to discuss and persuade and discuss some more and then take as many votes as necessary late into the night for one of those tied books to pull ahead far enough to be declared the winner.

Here at Calling Caldecott, no matter how we played with either of our ballots -- taking out the disqualified book(s), leaving them in, looking at the overall percentages, and so on -- it was quite clear: Journey and Mr. Tiger Goes Wild were tied. And we are fine with it. Okay, I am NOT fine with it because I love me the honor books. I would have loved to award half a dozen honor books. But I love honesty and Doing The Right Thing better. And the right thing to do here is to say, "Congratulations, Peter Brown and Aaron Becker, because you both deserve this award and you have created beautiful books that adults and children love." We certainly do.

Stay tuned for my reports from ALA's convention floor and for our reactions to Monday's announcement.

 

 

	1st choice (4 points)	2nd choice (3 points)	3rd choice (2 points)	Total points
Building Our House	18	x	x	x
The Dark	21	x	x	x
Flora and the Flamingo	41	x	x	x
Have You Seen My New Blue Socks?	84	x	x	x
Journey		x	x	x
Locomotive	x	x	x	x
The Mighty Lalouche	x	x	x	x
Mr. Tiger Goes Wild	x	x	x	x
Mr. Wuffles!	x	x	x	x
Niño Wrestles the World	x	x	x	x
On a Beam of Light	x	x	x	x
Parrots over Puerto Rico	x	x	x	x