Hundreds of booksellers are online this week for New Voices New Rooms, the combined fall conference for the Southern and New Atlantic Independent Booksellers associations, and much of the discussion has turned to the ways in which children s books can help young people and their parents navigate challenging times.
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How Much Have The Culture Wars Earned Dr. Seuss This Year? As It Turns Out, A âWhole Awful Lotâ
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Copies of âAnd to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Streetâ, âIf I Ran the Zooâ and âMcElligot s Poolââthree of the books by Dr. Suess that will no longer be published.
Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group via Getty Images
âThey say Iâm old-fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast!â
So wrote Dr. Seuss, the beloved childrenâs author whose decades-old writing crashed into the present-day culture wars last month when the company managing his work announced it would no longer publish six of his lesser-known books because they contain racist imagery.
By Alex Green | Feb 26, 2021
Children’s booksellers often need to satisfy more than one customer when making a book recommendation. There’s the young reader herself, but there’s likely also a parent, grandparent, or other adult with an opinion about what belongs on her shelf. With multiple people to please, children’s booksellers say they tend to reach for beloved older titles, and consequently, children end up reading deeply into an author or genre’s backlist.
In short, backlist is integral to starting kids on the path to becoming lifelong readers, says Cathy Berner, children’s and YA specialist and events coordinator at Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston. “You want to hook them; you want them to love reading. When they do, they gobble up books. When you’ve got a voracious reader, you need to know backlist it’s so important for the bottom line. Every bookseller in the store has favorite backlist titles that we always keep in stock.”