With contributions from the Library of Congress’s National Ambassadors for Young People’s Literature and input from children’s book specialists, LoC writer and editor Hannah Freece created Tell Me a Story: Fantastic Children’s Books from the Library of Congress. The fourth book in the library’s Collection Close-Up series, Tell Me a Story presents selections from the vast holdings of the nation’s largest library, spanning 18th- and 19th-century instruction books—The New England Primer, The Slave’s Friend, The Cherokee Primer—to 20th- and 21st-century storytellers such as Kwame Alexander, Grace Lin, Yuyi Morales, Kadir Nelson, and Chris Raschka.
Freece, who co-authored the LoC’s Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote and The Joy of Looking: Great Photographs from the Library of Congress, came to children’s books through her association with Sybille Jagusch, who was chief of the Children’s Literature Center at the Library of Congress from 1983 until her retirement in 2021. “I worked with her on a book that she published on the depiction of Japan in American children’s books, a passion of hers that she had spent all this time researching,” Freece told PW. “She introduced me to the collection, and that’s how I got hooked.”
To start this project, Freece reached out to experts across the Library of Congress’s “international and national divisions, even though I had decided, let’s be realistic, we’ll stick to American books—we’re not going to do the history of children's books all over the world,” Freece said. In his foreword to Tell Me a Story, current National Ambassador Mac Barnett observes that the Library’s collection “includes more than 600,000 children’s books.” Freece faced a monumental task, and she had to leave out several favorites. (One regret, she admitted, was having to omit Russell Hoban’s Frances books: “In that era of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, there were so many classics and genre-defining, boundary-breaking books coming out,” Freece said.)
Instead of a comprehensive overview, Freece aimed to create an inclusive volume that represented “cultural touchstones” and the complexity of America. “There are many books about the history of American children’s books, and I’m not claiming to reinvent the wheel,” she said. “You see the same books over and over again. They’re powerful, but I wanted to see, what are the gaps I could fill in?” Some of her choices are familiar—The Runaway Bunny and Make Way for Ducklings—while others are deeper cuts, such as Pura Belpré’s 1932 Pérez and Martina: A Portorican Folk Tale, illustrated by Carlos Sanchez; and Japanese American author Taro Yashima’s 1953 The Village Tree.
Freece chose to include Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day, which she said is “rightfully lauded for being a positive portrayal of a Black child as the protagonist. That’s a big deal, but there’s all these other stories of African American children in children’s books long before that,” including Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps’s 1932 Popo and Fifina; Effie Lee Newsome’s 1940 Gladiola Garden, illustrated by Lois Mailou Jones; and Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1956 poetry collection Bronzeville Boys and Girls, illustrated by Ronni Solbert, all of which are featured in Tell Me a Story.
“Wherever I could, I tried to take what seemed to me as the conventional wisdom and see what else I could find in our collections that might offer another facet of that story,” Freece said. She looked outside the major New York publishing houses for items in the LoC collection that were regional successes. “We don't have to wait until the 1960s to start getting these stories. They were here all along, in their way, and that’s really important,” she said.
In several photographs throughout the book, hands of varied skin tones hold the archival objects, , showing that diverse young readers have interacted with books. “Some of our books are very fragile, and the safest way to mount them for photography is to have them held in the hand rather than strapped down in any way that would put stress on the book,” Freece said. “We decided, if we’re going to go that route, we need a diverse cast of hands.”
Interspersed with Tell Me a Story’s example texts are short essays from former National Ambassadors for Young People’s Literature. “This is the heart of the book,” Freece said. “We commissioned new essays from all of the former ambassadors,” and added an excerpt from a 2014 New York Times editorial by the late Walter Dean Myers, who served as 2012–2013 ambassador.
Freece asked each ambassador to think of a childhood book that influenced their career in writing for young readers. “I was just waiting to see what they picked,” she said, “because often they would solve a problem for me. Like: ‘Where am I going to fit Harriet the Spy? Oh, thank goodness—Kate DiCamillo wants to write about Harriet the Spy.’ ” Among the other essays, Meg Medina wrote about how girl detective Nancy Drew, who famously drove a convertible, influenced her book Tía Isa Wants a Car, illustrated by Claudia Muñoz; Jacqueline Woodson described her transformative readings of Mildred D. Taylor and Virginia Hamilton; and Gene Luen Yang created a multi-panel comic to reflect on his changing understanding of Superman as a rule-following immigrant from another dimension and Batman as a wealthy outlaw in Gotham City.
Freece’s next projects include a companion volume for The Source, the LoC’s soon-to-open interactive youth space, and a July book tied to an exhibit celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. For the moment, she’s reveling in Tell Me a Story and the process of working with the youth ambassadors. “I’m so honored that they all wanted to be part of it,” she said. “As someone who loves children’s books, I’m hoping it will speak to other readers about how powerful it is to be a kid and to read a book that really connects with you.”
Tell Me a Story: Fantastic Children's Books from the Library of Congress by Hannah Freece. Library of Congress, $26.95 ISBN 978-0-8444-9593-4
