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Publishing Books for the Very Young
My love of books for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers was inspired, I am sure, by my own early introduction to words and music. In our atypical, interracial
working-class family, storytelling and books and reading and language and music were a very large part of our typical days. While neither of my parents graduated from college, my mother read to us aloud, even as
babies—nursery rhymes and nursery tales and fairy tales and finger rhymes. And she sang to us—lullabies and spirituals and folk songs and "Mares Eat Oats and Does Eat Oats and Little Lambs Eat Ivy. . . ." She bought us
Little Golden Books at the supermarket, and classic picture books at library clearance sales, and all kinds of storybooks at yard sales and rummage sales so we would have books of our own. And she took us regularly to the
public library. I was an avid, independent reader by the age of four. Later, my father read aloud to us, theatrically, from Winnie-the-Pooh and The Wonderful World of Oz, and Uncle Wiggly and Uncle Remus, and
Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Camus, and much poetry—e.e. cummings and Robert Frost and T.S. Elliot, and his own unpublished poems. Reading opened up worlds to me that I might never have known, and allowed me to go places
that I might never have gone. And not reading shut out so many of the children I grew up with, who did not come from families where reading was highly valued.
I believe that all children, from birth, are beginning readers. And I believe that all children—if only they are read to early and regularly, for the pure
pleasure of it—can learn to read, and read well, and love to read, and grow up readers. Reading to babies and toddlers is the first step to universal literacy. I so passionately believe this that I have devoted
most of my thirty-year career to publishing books for the very young—mass-market books that every family can afford.
Here are some of the qualities I look for in good books for the very young:
- Simple, energetic language, employing rhythm, rhyme, and repetition. Whether soothing and somnolent or silly, sassy, and rollicking, the words should be
memorable and "memorize-able."
- Illustrations that reinforce, expand upon, extend, and enhance the text. Whether realistic or photographic, soft pastels or bright, bold graphics, the
pictures should give readers strong visual images that will engage their interest.
- Content that reflects familiar elements from a young child's world: home, family, food, toys, daily routines, favorite pastimes, weather, holidays …
- Themes that foster a sense of security, safety, comfort, stability…
- Introductions to the wider world: animals, vehicles, community and community helpers, country, farm, town, city…
- Introductions to basic early-learning concepts and cognitive skills: alphabet/letters, counting/numbers, colors, shapes, opposites, animal sounds, sorting,
spatial relationships, telling time …
- A finished product that is beautiful to look at and beautifully printed and bound—sturdy enough to stand up to repeated readings.
- Representations of the diversity in our multicultural society.
My own daughter, at the age of seven months, could crawl to her bookcase and pick out any title from her well-stocked shelves I asked her to bring for story
time—and she would choose to bring me her favorites as well. As a toddler she much preferred to sleep with her well-worn copy of Goodnight Moon than any of her many plush teddies or bunnies or dolls. By the age of four, she too was a lover of words. If children learn early on that they can have a relationship with books, that books can be objects of comfort and companionship, then they will become lifelong readers.
Bernette Ford has been an Editor at Random House and Golden Press, and was VP/Associate Publisher at Grosset & Dunlap/Putnam Publishing until 1989, when she left to found Cartwheel Books for the Very Young at Scholastic Inc. She left Scholastic in May 2002 to start her own independent packaging and consulting business, focusing on African-American, Latino, Asian-American, and Native-American books for the very young. Ford is co-author, with Cheryl Willis Hudson, of Bright Eyes, Brown Skin (Just Us Books, 1991), which was illustrated by her husband, George Ford.
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