In honor of our centennial, we asked interns from over the years to share their reminiscences.

When I was a Horn Book intern, I opened physical boxes of physical books, shelved those books around the physical Sullivan Square office, and mailed them physically to reviewers or, in the case of extra books, to the Strand Book Store.

I did some proofreading and fact-checking, attended some star meetings, read the first chapter of a forthcoming book called The Hunger Games, and got to know some people who spent their workdays talking seriously (and not-so-seriously) about children’s books. Kindred spirits, if you will.

The Out of the Box blog didn’t exist then as an outlet for interns to express themselves, and what’s now the traditional Meet the Interns blog post wasn’t a blog post, it was a bulletin board. My “fun fact” on that bulletin board was about writing poetry, and my favorite book was listed as Anne of Green Gables.

It was 2008. Anne of Green Gables’s centennial year. And the Horn Book wanted to commemorate that in some way.

One thing led to another, and I had what Anne would call the “thrill” — heck, what I would call the “thrill” — of being asked to write a poem for the occasion, to be published as the November/December 2008 issue’s Cadenza.

I reread the book (again) and then wrote the poem under a tree on the Simmons campus. It was called “To Anne Shirley on Her Hundredth Birthday,” and it asked an imagined much-older Anne some questions about how she had or hadn’t changed since we last saw her.

Now it’s another centennial, and I’m writing this in my living room, which, like various parts of all our homes, is part of the Horn Book’s virtual office. Scattered across my inbox, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, and our nascent Virtual Book Room are serious (and not-so-serious) conversations about children’s books. My copy of the November/December 2008 issue is next to me, with its last page asking my own how much have you changed in the intervening years questions from sixteen years ago.

To the Horn Book on Its Hundredth Birthday,

You’ve changed a lot.

And you haven’t changed a bit.

For more Horn Book centennial coverage, click here.