The news that the children’s group of the U.K. Publishers Association has decided to put age guidelines on kids’ books bothered us as much as it did Philip Pullman. We went to the group’s Web site and read the seventy-five-page rigmarole explaining the program. It includes a section entitled “The Misery of Gift Buying for Children,” boasting quotes from disgruntled adults who don’t like having to make a choice all by themselves. The conclusion: “Bottom line—people believe they would buy more books for children” with guidelines printed on the back. Nowhere does the report consider the vantage point of children. Pullman and his fellow anti-age-labellers rightly argue that a child could be steered away from books he or she might naturally gravitate toward, or be made to feel insufficient by failure to fit in a narrowly defined category.

What, we wondered, would the impact have been on our own childhood reading material? How would a favorite—Volumes I and II (comprising poetry and stories) of the 1949 edition of WorldBook Encyclopedia’s ChildCraft series, say, passed down from our parents, whose own parents bought them from a travelling salesman—have been labelled? At age six, we loved Eugene Field’s “The Sugar-Plum Tree” and were bored by Mother Goose. And we were (and remain) amazed at Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman,” a ghostly ballad in which a voluptuous lovelorn heroine commits suicide by shooting herself in the breast. (The poem is available online, complete with illustrations.) Unutterably moving, haunting, and slightly over our little heads, it gave us exactly what every child demands in a book—a sense of wonder. What sort of label applies to that?—Macy Halford

Macy Halford 

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