[In a burst of apparently unwarranted Dewey-beats-Truman optimism, my original draft for this afternoon's Notes from the Horn Book editorial suggested that Hillary Clinton could do worse than read some E.B. White (Melissa Sweet's Some Writer! is reviewed in the issue) to guide her presidency. Probably still not a bad idea even as things turned out, but I obviously had to change gears. The new editorial is below.]

As our Out of the Box blog pointed out back in March, Hillary Clinton is far more popular as a subject for children’s books than has been our President-elect, Donald Trump. (The Horn Book Guide Online currently counts seventeen books about Clinton and one about Donald Trump.) This will change: while I’m hard-pressed to think that Trump could inspire as cozy a picture book as, say, Kathleen Krull and Amy June Bates's Hillary Rodham Clinton: Dreams Taking Flight, at the very least he’ll find himself now included amongst the many school series devoted to the American presidents. But My Dad, John McCain notwithstanding, trade children’s book publishing in this country is otherwise as Blue as New England, and this election may serve — please, God, may it serve to do something — to remind us, the Blues, that an awful lot of children live in families and communities that see things very differently from us.

While I am tempted by my friend Elizabeth Law’s facetious suggestion over on Facebook to spend the next four years doing nothing but keeping my head in one middle-grade novel or another, that is obviously not a solution. Look for the helpers, Fred Rogers famously said. Be the helpers, I say to you. Keep bringing children and books together.