For this centennial-year entry, with its mini-theme of middle grade, the Horn Book editors put our heads together to brainstorm cover art. We came up with a few ideas, in conjunction with our designers, and even mocked them up. And then came Shoshana Flax’s suggestion of Charlotte and friends — which spoiled us for all other options. If “terrific” and “radiant” come to mind, you’re not alone! With “humble” thanks to HarperCollins and the Estate of Garth Williams for granting us permission for its use. Additional thanks, as always, to our design team, listed on page 2; this one was by Mark Tuchman, but the cover assignment rotates. There’s a reason we’re so braggy about our covers — especially this year.

Longtime readers may have heard this before, and it’s laid out in the Virtual History Exhibit’s “Controversies & Kerfuffles” section of hbook.com, but the Horn Book has a fascinating history with Charlotte’s Web. (Pull up a chair! But not Bertha’s; it’s rickety.) First published in 1952, Charlotte’s Web was E. B. White’s children’s-book follow-up to Stuart Little. In the December 1952 issue of the Magazine, Horn Book editor Jennie D. Lindquist gave it a glowing review, praising White’s beautiful writing along with the story’s wisdom, its humor, the verisimilitude of farm life, and its indelible characters, both in the narrative and in Williams’s art. “The plot, the conversation, the characters, all defy description; no one can get any idea of the book without reading it.” What she said! I’m with her!

Anne Carroll Moore — famously influential, highly opinionated New York Public librarian; practically one of the inventors of children’s librarianship and with a rubber stamp reading: “Not Recommended for Purchase by Expert” — was a Horn Book contributor from the very beginning. A dozen years in, in 1936, she began her long-running “The Three Owls’ Notebook” column for us, including book recommendations and musings. Cut to December 1952 and the very same issue as Lindquist: “I step into real trouble and I may as well confess that I find E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web…hard to take from so masterly a hand…no such country child would have spent day after day beside the manure pile to which the pig was consigned and repeated afterward to as dumb a mother as a parent’s page ever invoked what the animals told her in their language.” Ouch. And Charlotte? I’m paraphrasing, but basically, per Moore, she didn’t do enough for spider-kind to make kids not want to squish them.

Which book was she reading? is my reaction (and others’), but what an intriguing snapshot of a moment in time and a literary and cultural phenomenon; a ­pre-pre-internet “viral moment” of very public, intra-publication disagreement that has survived as lore for seventy-plus years. Longtime Horn Book Guide reviewer Nell Beram recently spotted us in the upcoming adult biography The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker. We’ve often been called “the New Yorker of the children’s book set,” and it sounds like White used us as a personal and professional reference. She was, of course, married to E. B. — and, per Barbara Bader’s 1997 article “ONLY the Best: The Hits and Misses of Anne Carroll Moore,” the two women had a very cordial correspondence — so no lasting hard feelings on the Charlotte thing, I guess (phew!).

The Horn Bookers are opinionated — and, heck, sometimes we’re even wrong — but we’re also just about as thoughtful and collaborative as one could hope for. These traits have helped keep us on our toes and, I believe, have been vital to our ­longevity and trustworthiness in the field. As our ad sales rep Al Berman likes to say, “Reading the Horn Book is like having a conversation,” and, really, what could be better for us book lovers than a hundred-year-and-counting discussion of children’s literature?

From the September/October 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. For more Horn Book centennial coverage, click here.

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