Your dream last night: A children's book publisher looks at the iPad
Forget the Sports Illustrated fantasy. Forget the Wired demo. Penguin:
Via Fast Company. Aiming for kid brains, once again = out of the box.
This video made me think of my time at the Cheshire Cat, which made me think of the great essays people sometimes write about children's books. Googling, I came across this '97 essay from Eden Ross Lipton, the late Times Book Review's children's books editor. A position not unlike being head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, she was only the third person in that job since 1935. She quoted a great line from a 1937 Times story, "To help your children to the right reading, right for them, requires everything … not only tact, self-abnegation, patience, imagination, but also utilization of every resource you can find."
In searching for more about Lipton, a CJR appreciation turned up. It quoted New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger about when she spoke at a city planning seminar at Yale. The imaginative link shows:
She was presenting a study she had done about the gargantuan rocket assembly building at Cape Kennedy, the largest enclosed space in the world. I remember that Eden called the paper 'How High Is the Sky?' and that I was struck by the whimsy of that, whimsy being a trait that visiting scholars did not tend to have. It did not take long to discover that Eden had a deep and passionate connection to the spirit of place, to the notion of a kind of poetics of place. She understood instinctively that places, like people, play a critical role in emotional life, and at that stage of her life she was spending a lot of her time trying to make sense of that idea.
