The NCTE also put out the CLA Bulletin, now the biannual Journal of Children’s
Literature (1994-), focused on issues relating to children’s literature and pedagogy. In
1972 the NCTE’s Assembly on Literature for Adolescents began a typescript ALAN
Newsletter, since 1979 a standard journal, The ALAN Review, which appears three times
a year. It contains several feature articles, usually on authors, and its useful reviews of
hard cover and paperback books come on file cards which can be cut out of the journal.
Another NCTE publication is College English which, although primarily devoted to issues
centred on teaching at the university level, particularly rhetoric and composition, has
from time to time published critical articles about children’s literature.
The other association in the USA that has a large membership and many publications
is the International Reading Association; its major journal is The Reading Teacher. A
typescript without reviews in 1948, in September 1952 it became a fully-fledged journal,
edited by Nancy Larrick, with themed issues, book reviews, columns, and
advertisements. Today it provides themed essay reviews of recent children’s books as a
regular feature. The IRA also produces The Journal of Reading, Reading Research
Quarterly, and as of the end of 1992, eighty-two other journals and newsletters,
including The Dragon Lode (1983-), a journal put out by its Children’s Literature and
Reading special interest group. The Dragon Lode has two or three short feature articles,
book reviews, and announcements.
A journal of high quality for those concerned with using non-fiction in their teaching is
Appraisal (1967-), issued by the Children’s Science Book Review Committee, which is
jointly sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the New England
Round Table of Children’s Literature. Appraisal has one longer article, sometimes
critical sometimes informational, at the beginning of each issue followed by fifty to seventy
reviews, for young adults as well as children, in two separate paragraphs, one by a
librarian, the other by a scientific specialist. (For educational journals, some no longer
published, see Meacham 1978, Hearne 1991, Reetz 1990, and Children’s Literature
Abstracts). In general, the early numbers of the older journals are of greater interest to
those concerned with children’s books themselves; the focus in their articles on the
problems that still trouble us today is a reminder of how little is new. The greater and
greater emphasis in later journals on how literature should be taught and how
responses should be manipulated not only makes for some dull reading but may be
responsible, at least in part, for the scorn with which some academics view the
educational establishment in the USA. The ‘real books’ movement has improved matters
somewhat, but fine books have already been basalised. Education journals rarely
publish sustained critical analysis.
The early history of reviewing and criticism in journals put out by the book trade,
library associations, and educational associations demonstrates that The Horn Book
Magazine did not appear in 1924 out of the blue as is sometimes claimed, but was part
of an extended evolutionary process. Nevertheless there is a divide between the primarily
adult-centred or child-centred publications already mentioned and journals devoted
solely to a discussion and review of children’s literature, and the founding of The Horn
Book Magazine marks that divide in the USA. This critical review journal, founded by
Bertha Mahony, was the outgrowth of the lists she had been compiling with her colleague
Elinor Whitney during her years of work at the Bookshop for Boys and Girls. Both Aidan
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