First Page Excerpts [please, note that italics and other formats are not reproduced in this excerpt] ---------------------------------------------------------- INDEX: Signal 93 Sept 2000 Josef Guggenmos: Poet for Children Anthea Bell 147 We All Went on a Prize Hunt: The Carnegie Medal Presentation Alan Tucker 158 The Death of Populism Aidan Chambers 162 Children's Fiction Set on or near Canals: A Collection Joan Tucker 165 Boutique Inclusiveness in Literacy Education Lissa Paul 192 Endpapers: Sheila Ray on resources for studying children's books 205 Annual Index 2000: issues 91, 92, 93 208 Contributors 211 *********** Josef Guggenmos, Poet for Children ANTHEA BELL The children's poet Josef Guggenmos has been a familiar and well-loved name to several generations of young people in the German-speaking countries. In many respects, as I hope to show below, he writes the German equivalent, whether serious or comic, of the children's verse of such twentieth-century English poets as Walter de la Mare and Charles Causley. Unlike them, however, he has concentrated entirely on poetry for the young, and there I cannot think of anyone precisely comparable writing in the English language. 'What makes a good poem for children?' asks Hans-Joachim Gelberg in his essay on Guggenmos at the end of the collected volume of verse entitled Ich will dir was verraten [I'll tell you something]. It is, he concludes, 'a question of perspective. However good the poem, it is a poem for children only if a child reads it or listens to it.' Guggenmos has very clearly kept that in mind in a lifetime of writing children's poetry. Born in 1922, he was fascinated as a child by meeting a real writer who visited his school, but did not begin writing himself until his early thirties, when he was working freelance for various publishing firms after seeing war service as a radio operator on the Black Sea and in Denmark. His main inspiration, we are told, came from a commission to translate R.L. Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses into German; he was struck by Stevenson's ability to write from the child's viewpoint. He has translated Edward Lear as well as Stevenson, and influences from German literature include the nonsense poetry of Christian Morgenstern and the humorous and satirical verse of Joachim Ringelnatz. Once launched on his chosen career, Guggenmos published a good deal, beginning with small volumes of verse. When those went out of print the poems and stories from them appeared in other collected volumes, and he is published now mainly by Beltz & Gelberg, whose fine list for children and young people is one of the success stories of German publishing for that market in recent decades. He does not have a single regular illustrator with whom his work is automatically linked, but has been illustrated by a number of different artists, and some of his verses have appeared in an anthology illustrated by the author/artist Janosch, whose own quirky verses and animal fables seem to me very close in spirit to those of Guggenmos himself. *********** We All Went on a Prize Hunt: The Carnegie Medal Presentation ALAN TUCKER The Carnegie Medal this year was awarded to Aidan Chambers for Postcards from No Man's Land, published by The Bodley Head. The announcement and presentation of the award at Imperial College, London, were covered by the daily and weekend press and by BBC and local radio. Imperial College lies between the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Albert Hall, the short route from Kensington tube station being by subway-the pedestrian tunnel Seamus Heaney describes in his poem 'The Underground'. On their honeymoon hurrying to the Proms, some buttons pop off his wife's going-away coat. Later, like Hansel, Heaney follows the trail of lost buttons until arriving at the dark station, the last train gone, he listens for her, 'and damned if I look back'. I remembered the poem as Joan and I walked this same echoey tunnel on Friday afternoon, 7 July. The day had been one of the happiest and best presented of events*, with a jamboree atmosphere starting at the publishers' display area with the admirable bookshop run by the Norfolk Children's Book Centre. At midday 'something to do with television' required everyone to wait in a crush outside the auditorium, where we found ourselves surrounded by children from Bristol, in dark blue uniform, cardigans, etc. All over the country schools have run shadow selection groups, reading and discussing the leading contenders and holding their own vote. Bristol, it emerged, favoured Tightrope by Gillian Cross. The senior girl who offered this information seemed to have reservations, confirmed when I asked if it was her own choice. 'Oh no! Postcards!' she said, about to make a friend for life, but as a younger boy insisted, 'Tightrope is very very good', the doors were thrown open and we all surged forward. The awards ceremony was conducted by Annie Everall, chair of the *********** The Death of Populism AIDAN CHAMBERS This news feature is reprinted from The Bookseller, 14 July 2000, where it was headed: 'Save us from populist tyrants: The promotion of market ethics in the public library sector threatens the educational function of these institutions, argues [this year's] Carnegie Gold Medallist.' When people talk about education they tend to forget one fact of history: without a free public library service, the schooling of the so-called 'common people' results in nothing more than the provision of factory fodder. In our society, unless you have unfettered access to information and the written mind of our culture, unless you know how to manipulate the means of delivery-books, computers, the Net-you will be left in an oppressed underclass. It is only because of a brilliant teacher, Jim Osborn at Darlington Grammar School in the 1940s and 1950s, that I could write the book that won the Carnegie Medal, and it was mainly because of public libraries that I was able to make full use of what he taught me. Jim Osborn believed that his job was to enable me to go where I could not go on my own as a reader and a writer, and to get there as quickly as possible. He expected my reach to exceed my grasp. He did not teach me what I already knew and give me more of what I already knew I liked. He helped me select what I read, trained my understanding of it, and revealed to me why he read what he read and how he read it. Learning to browse He also expected me to select for myself and find my own way. Given my family background, I could not have become an independent reader without the aid of a free public library. There I navigated my way through the stacks and sniffed out the books I didn't know I wanted until I found them. But browsing the stacks was only worthwhile because the librarians who stocked them believed their job was to make available a collection which was as representative as possible of all that was written in our language. They did not think they should provide only what their borrowers said they wanted. Jim Osborn and those librarians were not populists. They were democrats. They knew populism is perfidious. It pretends to be democratic when it is brutally undemocratic. Many of these populists have *********** Children's Fiction Set on or near Canals: A Collection JOAN TUCKER Maybe I am a bibliopole but not a bibliomaniac, a book collector but not a junk collector-or am I just a picker-up of unconsidered trifles? In assessing my collection of children's canal books, I have to confess to being each of these. It all began over forty years ago when Alan and I were first married. We both had an interest in canals. Alan grew up in Hereford and knew the remains of the Hereford & Gloucester Canal. I was brought up in Nottinghamshire, which has the navigable River Trent and several canals running through it, and was always aware of the importance and fascination of waterways, both economically and physically. One day in a W.H. Smith's sale we bought Narrow Boat by L.T.C. Rolt for 4/6d. reduced from 18/-. We still have the copy, a second revised edition, reprinted 1957. It is a classic in the genre of country writing and journeying. This book changed our lives, for we determined to live on a canal boat and travel around selling books. We bought a narrow boat, Sarah, and lived on her for four years at Saul on the Stroudwater Canal, Gloucestershire, while we started our bookshop in Stroud. It was a converted butty boat with no engine, and as there was no easy access to the main canal system, we stayed put until we could buy a house. *********** Boutique Inclusiveness in Literacy Education LISSA PAUL In 1999 Lissa Paul was invited to contribute to a special 'En-genderings' issue of Language Arts, the journal of the National Council of Teachers of English, USA. Although the points explored in the article concern North American texts and practices, the thinking that has given rise to them will be familiar in other settings. This article is an edited version of 'The Naked Truth about Being Literate', Language Arts, volume 77, number 4, March 2000. This passage may be offensive. Read it anyway. As I walk, I feel the sweetgrass sweeping against my legs. My nostrils fill with its odor. It is the same as the smell of the sweetgrass basket Grandfather made for me. I shall make one too, someday. But not tonight. Grandfather's voice breaks the silence. 'Have you found it yet?' 'Yes, I see it there.' My arm shoots up, finger pointing high. Grandfather chuckles. 'Noshen, your finger could be pointing to a thousand stars but there is only one North Star. When you spot the Big Dipper you'll always find the North Star. Remember this when you are in the woods.' That's the kind of text that might be coming to a school near you. It isn't sexist, violent or racist, and seems to be a shining example of an inclusive text, a heartwarming tale of male-bonding between a boy and his grandfather. What could be wrong? Nothing, except that it is blandly written, contains a tautology, and is culturally compromised. This sample text, from the 'Night' chapter of Morning on the Lake (a picture book by Jan Bourdeau Waboose, illustrated by Karen Reczuch), is reproduced in a booklet published by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) in Ontario, Canada (education is under provincial jurisdiction in Canada). The rest of the forty-page document (which includes a five-page appendix showing items such as a calculator and a finger with a string tied around it) is 'intended to provide practical tools and information' for teachers. Besides the sample text, the package contains 'Introductory Information and the Assessment Scales', an 'Overview of the Sample Assessment Unit', a 'Teacher's Plan', and 'Student Materials for Reading, Writing and Mathematics'. The whole document is available in printable form at . *********** Endpapers Every year, after the May Signal is out, Sheila Ray and I meet to talk about the following year's 'Books about Children's Books' feature. Inevitably, as two people who began their connection with children's books in the+ 1960s, we don't always concentrate on future business but lapse into musings about what hasn't been but still should be. This summer the musings began when I asked to hear more about Sheila's files of newspaper clippings. She has very kindly agreed to record a few of the points that came up in the subsequent conversation. N.C. Sheila Ray writes: I discovered the value of newspaper cuttings when I was doing research for a postgraduate thesis on Enid Blyton. By the time I embarked on serious work for this in the mid 1970s, I had been collecting cuttings about Blyton for a decade or so, and although my enthusiasm for doing this has waned somewhat, I suspect I must have one of the largest collections in captivity. My cuttings file, which is housed in numerous ring-binders (the advent of plastic envelopes that fit into them must be one of the best inventions ever), and manila folders, began as a spin-off of Children's Literature Abstracts, launched in 1973. Sometimes there were useful articles and news items in nonspecialist magazines which seemed worth abstracting and of which I kept the originals in the belief that they might be difficult to find when required. At the time the collection began, libraries were becoming resource centres, and the more enthusiastic school and college librarians were building up similar collections on the topical issues of the day that were inadequately covered by books. My collection is made up mainly of items about individual authors and illustrators, from the Ahlbergs to Jacqueline Wilson. A sub-spin-off is that I am also involved in developing and maintaining a special database for the Arthur Ransome Society, in which references to Ransome are recorded on computer (not by me, I hasten to say). I also have folders on such topics as children's-literature organizations, prizes for children's books, sexism, racism and situation books. For example, I have an article Nicholas Tucker wrote for the Guardian, 'Who really cares if Jenny lives with Eric and Martin?' (15 May 1984), soon after the book about the little girl, her father and his male partner was published and in the news, as well as one by Susanne Bosche on the same book from a Guardian of nearly sixteen years later (31 January 2000). Early in 2000, while preparing my annual review of books about children's books for Signal, Tomi Ungerer emerged as a person of significance since several items related to him and he had won the Hans Christian Andersen Award for illustration in 1998. One Ungerer item was a paper presented at a Roehampton conference, which stated that his books had never been popular in Britain. At first I thought this was wrong as I recalled buying large quantities of his books for libraries in the 1960s, but then I remembered coming across a similar comment elsewhere. Sure enough, in my files was a cutting headed 'Second Time Around for Ungerer' (Guardian 26 May 1998), which welcomed the reissue of Moon-Man and No Kiss for Mother and said that Ungerer had had great success everywhere but in Britain and talked about 'cracking the world English language market again'. The announcement that Aidan Chambers had won the Carnegie Medal in 2000 coincided with the hype over the publication of J.K. Rowling's fourth book about Harry Potter. I was not surprise to find that I had no cuttings about Aidan *********** Anthea Bell's translation of E.T.A. Hoffmann's last novel was published by Penguin Classics in 1999 as The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr; she has served three terms on the committee of the Translators' Association of the UK and is on the editorial committee of the journal New Books in German. Before the first Signal appeared in January 1970, the only people who knew it was coming were: Lance Salway, Jay Williams, Downfield Press (the printer), and Joan and Alan Tucker; Alan wrote about poetry for that issue, and compiled the first Signal Booklist, on poetry, in 1975. Postcards from No Man's Land by Aidan Chambers (Bodley Head) has received the Stockport Schools' Book Award 2000 in the Key Stage 4 category. Joan Tucker is a director of the Company of Proprietors of the Stroudwater Navigation, reputedly the oldest canal company in continuous existence in the world. Lissa Paul is the Children's Literature Professor at the University of New Brunswick; her book Reading Otherways is published by Thimble Press. Sheila Ray is working on her fourteenth 'Books about Children's Books' feature, the first three of which appeared in the Signal Selections of 1987 to 1989. ***********