The Caldecott Medal Needs an International Makeover

Credit...Klaas Verplancke

Good parents in search of the “right” books to read to their little ones have long turned with confidence to Caldecott Medal winners. “The Little House,” by Virginia Lee Burton; Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”; “The Glorious Flight,” by Alice and Martin Provensen; “Jumanji,” by Chris Van Allsburg: Look over the list of past winners, and you’ll find a motherlode of picture book excellence. Back when my son was a preschooler and I too felt the quasi-biological imperative to feed his curiosity about words and pictures with the most nourishing examples, picture books with that shiny gold foil seal on their cover often headed my playlist.

As a critic and historian, I knew that some revered classics — “Goodnight Moon,” “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” — gained their toehold with readers despite having been frozen out of the Caldecott winner’s circle; that not every prizewinning title ages well; and that children latch on to all sorts of books for all sorts of reasons. For months, my freethinking 4-year-old’s favorite read-aloud was not the divine “Make Way for Ducklings” or the timeless “Ox-Cart Man” but an unremarkable (or so I thought!) touchy-feely novelty book titled “Where’s My Squishy Ball?” Clearly, I realized, the Caldecott seal of approval, while immensely valuable, is best taken with a grain of salt.

But lately the Caldecott Medal has begun to show its age for reasons that cannot be written off to the vagaries of time or taste. Today, in fact, the world’s very first prize for children’s book illustration is in urgent need of a makeover: The outdated rule that candidates must be American needs to go.

When the American Library Association introduced the Caldecott in 1938, the United States was an industrial giant but still a cultural stepchild of Europe. Memorable homegrown picture books like “Millions of Cats” (1928) and “The Story of Ferdinand” (1936) were few, and the über-British Peter Rabbit reigned supreme. So librarians wanted to jump-start American creativity by limiting Caldecott eligibility to American citizens and permanent residents just as they had done for their literature award, the Newbery, over a decade before.

The plan worked well — so well that Newbery- and Caldecott Medal-winning titles have largely remained in print ever since and enjoyed pride of place on library, school and bookstore shelves across America. While not all the books have proved to be long-term sellers, their collective impact contributed mightily to the transformation of a once sleepy publishing backwater into a cultural force with influence stretching from Wall Street to Hollywood and beyond.

Their success raised the status of illustration as well, from deadline grunt work to bona fide art. When an earnest young Ohio-born painter named Robert McCloskey won the 1942 Caldecott Medal for “Make Way for Ducklings,” he reportedly had to ask his editor what it was that had just happened to him. Compare that to now, when illustrating books for 4- to 8-year-olds is widely regarded as one of the art world’s cooler callings: a creative specialty supported by art colleges and celebrated by a growing number of museums as exhibition worthy.

Today, the children’s publishing industry is a global enterprise. Picture books are as ubiquitous an American export as iPhones and soybeans. At the same time, spurred by the rise of the internet, the ease of long-distance travel and a belated recognition of the value for American children of a cross-cultural perspective, American publishers have become increasingly open to working with authors and illustrators from abroad and to introducing books that originated elsewhere. With artists from France, Italy, Spain, England, Poland, South Korea, Japan, China, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Canada well represented on publishers’ lists, the time has surely come for the Caldecott Medal to drop the ban on illustrators who aren’t citizens or residents of the United States.

During the baby boom years, America launched a second wave of major children’s book prizes. The annual New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books awards (introduced in 1952) and the Boston Globe-Horn Book awards (begun a decade later) were open to winners of all nationalities whose books were published in the U.S. Two devastating world wars had prompted some idealists to wonder if a cross-cultural exchange of children’s books might have some small role to play in setting the stage for a more peaceful future. Why not encourage a similar mind-set in these fractious times?

Notwithstanding the fairy-dust aura of timelessness that has settled around the venerable list of the A.L.A.’s medal-winning titles, the selection rules themselves have periodically changed. In the early years, the pool of those eligible was assumed to be so small that past recipients were held to the higher standard of a unanimous committee vote before they could win again, in order to allow new illustrators to break through. The A.L.A. experimented with arrangements for choosing the winners before opting, in the late 1930s, for a committee of 23 librarians who selected both the Newbery and Caldecott recipients. By 1980, the committee had morphed into two groups of 15, one responsible for the Newbery, the other the Caldecott.

In revamping its marquee awards for the 21st century, the American Library Association should start with the Caldecott. A Newbery rethink, though also needed, will entail the additional step of deciding how to handle works in translation. (Given that the A.L.A. already has a translation prize, the Batchelder Award, a reasonable course might be to open the Newbery to books written anywhere in the world in English.)

But illustration — for all its beguiling cultural inflections — is perhaps the closest thing children have to a universal language. It is a language that even prereaders can “read,” an art form with the power to inspire young people to “talk back” to it by making art of their own. With the Caldecott recast as a prize with worldwide eligibility, American publishers will have another good reason to seek out and champion the most exciting picture books being created today.

Portugal, Latvia and Brazil are among the countries currently experiencing a picture book moment. After a feverish decade of acquiring rights to the best books the West has to offer, China is poised to become its own picture book provider and, in all likelihood, an exporter as well. In some key respects, China’s current situation mirrors that of the United States in that now distant time when our librarians so wisely grasped the need for an awards program aimed at incentivizing native-born talent.

Now that our own pathfinding Caldecott and Newbery Medals have long since fulfilled their original promise, why not reimagine them for the world we find ourselves in?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/12/books/review/make-caldecott-medal-international.html
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