books of quality and can define the quality; that it can stimulate creative writing and
creative illustration’ (Meigs 1969:389).
Cooperation between librarians and the American Booksellers Association, whose
secretary was Frederic G.Melcher, resulted in a national Children’s Book Week in 1919.
Booksellers, publishers and public and school librarians were all involved, and
Children’s Book Week became an annual event, its influence gradually increasing, with
the Children’s Book Council (originally organised for the purpose) taking over
responsibility for publicity and publications.
Soon after the first Children’s Book Week, the family of Frederic G.Melcher endowed
the John Newbery Award for the ‘most distinguished contribution to children’s literature’
published during the preceding year, to encourage original and creative work in the field
of children’s books and to emphasise that children’s literature deserved recognition.
Administration of the award was placed in the hands of the Section for Children’s
Librarians of the ALA and the first award made in 1922. The Randolph Caldecott Award
for the most distinguished picture book for children followed in 1938.
In 1924, the first issue of the first magazine to specialise in the reviewing of children’s
books, The Horn Book Magazine, edited by Bertha Mahony and Elinor Whitney of the
Bookshop for Boys and Girls in Boston, was launched, and was used primarily by
librarians, many of whom became reviewers. In the 1920s, after the publication of
Certain Standards, schools in the USA increasingly employed librarians who were
qualified in librarianship as well as having teaching qualifications; this helped to create
an additional market for books for children and young people.
By the 1930s, children’s librarianship in the USA had set the pattern for developments
worldwide. As will be seen, British libraries followed the American pattern closely, and
British influence subsequently shaped developments in the countries of the British
Empire. Canada, Australia and New Zealand, however, were also directly influenced by
America, and Lillian H.Smith of Toronto, Canada, and Dorothy Neal White of Dunedin,
New Zealand, were among the notable early pioneers of children’s librarianship, both
emphasising the importance of quality in children’s reading. Lillian H.Smith had trained
at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh and under Anne Carroll Moore at the New York
Public library, before being invited in 1912 to return to Canada to organise a boys’ and
girls’ division at the Toronto Public Library; she thus became the first trained children’s
librarian in the British Empire. During the 1950s a number of young British librarians
held one-year internships at Boys’ and Girls’ House in Toronto.
The American influence reached further: in the 1930s, some Scandinavian librarians
trained at Pittsburgh, showing particular interest on their return in establishing
imaginative areas for story-telling within the children’s library. These ranged from an
old-fashioned chimney-piece and fireplace to a whole room entered through bookshelves
which swung back when the child knocked three times, as at Malmö, in Sweden. These
developments were in turn influential, the earliest example in Britain being the story-
hour room at Luton Public Library in England, opened in the late 1950s.
In France, the development of public libraries (as known in the English-speaking
world) was comparatively late, but in 1924, an American committee established a
children’s library in Paris, L’heure Joyeuse; this was run by three librarians who
developed it on the American model, attaching great importance to book selection and
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