Q&A with Barry Moser

Barry Moser on Children's Book Publishing Today
Interviewed by Anna Olswanger

Barry Moser has illustrated or designed over 200 books, won the National Book Award, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and numerous citations and awards from the New York Times, Parents Magazine, Redbook, the International Board of Books for Young People, the American Association of University Presses, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. As the publisher of his own Pennyroyal Press, he has designed and illustrated eighty-five books, including his monumental Pennyroyal Caxton Bible, the culmination of four years' work. With his years of experience as a bookmaker, Moser is not hesitant to criticize the current children's book publishing industry. He has called it an "avaricious, heartless, cowardly" business.

Q: Let's take it one adjective at a time. How is the current children's book publishing business avaricious?
A: I know of creative, responsible, and even visionary editors who have lost their jobs because their books didn't meet specific fiduciary standards set by the "suits" in the industry. These "suits" likely as not read little other than spread sheets and care about art and literature as much as a fish cares about a bicycle. This makes children's book publishing an avaricious and heartless business rather than a collegial business as I feel it should rightly be.

Q: And cowardly?
A: If a book cannot be expected to make money because of its subject matter, let's say death or racism, then it will, given my own experience, not be published. Nor will books that fly in the ideological face of the ever-increasing religious right. And I suspect--given the current madness regarding myopic, flag-wrapping patriotism and the perceived sin of dissent--neither will books dealing with revolution or standing up to authority. Avoiding the difficult makes book publishing a cowardly business. It does not lead. It does not set the standard. It merely follows the path of least resistance and the one that accrues the most dividends. And unless something counters the avarice and the cowardice that I see as a present force in publishing, the mainstream industry will evolve into an empty shell of what it was when men and women of vision set their eyes on quality and art, and felt the call to lead the public's taste rather than anticipate what will sell.

Q: When do you think the avarice and cowardice crept into children's book publishing?
A: It's been a slow attrition. In the past ten years or so publishers have become increasingly preoccupied by the bottom line and that has resulted in what I see as a dimwitted period in publishing. It has to do with the economy. And I am indicting the whole of the industry here, not just children's publishing. If the book won't make a buck, the publishers--with mighty few exceptions--are not going to publish it. It used to be that publishers published some things to make money so that they could afford to publish things that simply should be published. Now it seems that publishing worthy material has largely become the responsibility of the private press, the university press, and a handful of brave, small publishers who struggle to get noticed.

Q: But avarice and cowardice have always been around. What makes children's book publishing vulnerable now?
A: I think the overall dumbing of America has affected children's book publishing. I don't know the origin of this problem, but a president who has difficulty speaking the English language doesn't help. Right or wrong, people look up to him. And if he "misunderestimates" the value of articulate speech and clarity of thought at the highest levels of governmental responsibility, then why should those who look up to him do otherwise? Why should they read books that make them think in new ways, drive them to use a dictionary, or even "depress" them--an excuse given by four members of the Alabama Textbook Commission as a reason to ban The Diary of Anne Frank. Actually, they said students shouldn't read Anne's diary because it was a "real downer." I wonder if those same people think that the stories of the rape of Tamar (2 Samuel 13:14) or Rizpah's guarding the dead bodies of her two sons (2 Samuel 21:10) make the Bible a "real downer" that ought to be banned too?

Q: But can't a close relationship with an editor counteract the avarice in a publishing house?
A: I used to have several very close relationships with editors, editors who were able to call the shots themselves. And while such editors and such relationships still exist, they are rare and seem to be getting rarer. And too, from my point of view, editors change their publishing houses pretty near as often as they change their underwear, and this has a huge effect on developing a sense of loyalty. And without a sense of loyalty the whole of the work suffers. Loyalty creates the desire to go that extra mile, if for no other reason than to produce something that pleases the smart eye of my editor, and not just to get the book done and get me paid. When one of these editors changes houses, I usually go with her. It's my way of showing loyalty to individuals, not corporations. In fact, with the recent corporate debacles like Enron and the current spectacle of Haliburton's obscene profiteering in Iraq, I wouldn't trust a corporation as far as I could throw it.

Q: Describe the kind of children's books these avaricious houses are publishing.
A: They are publishing books for children that emphasize and glory in cuteness. Lord God, how I despise cuteness. And of course they are being published by the legions because they are easy. They raise no issues or hackles. And because, by Jesus, they sell. To me it's a further evidence of the dumbing of America and a further manifestation of the scorn with which art, poetry, and literature are held in this great nation of ours--that old "I don' know nothin' 'bout art, but I knows whut I likes" attitude. As if liking something is a criterion for art--for the making of things well! This is an attitude that, so far as I can tell, says "Don't bother me with anything that is hard. Don't get in my face (or in my classroom or library) with anything that challenges my belief system, that is difficult--or, God knows--unpleasant."

My problem with this attitude is that it ill-serves children. Don't misunderstand me. I am not saying that funny, lighthearted, even cute stories, ought to be censored (and how I do hate that word and the restrictive, simple-minded, Manichean concepts behind it). It's just that nobody, especially children, is well-served by such obsequious pabulum. Avoiding thorns and stings, avoiding confrontation and unpleasantness, does not gird their little thighs for the road ahead. And, almost as an addendum, I have to say that cuteness and lack of artistic ability go hand in hand.

Q: Describe the kind of children's books you respect.
A: Simply put, I respect books with an edge--for children and adults alike. Books with twists and turns. Books with an attitude, you might say. Books that are courageous. Look at Maurice Sendak's work, for instance, or Chris Van Allsburg's. Some of it is downright disturbing. Some of it's flat out scary. And that's the way it should be. Yin and yang. Sweet and sour. Light and dark. Heraclitus, 2500 years ago, said that harmony needs low and high just as "progeny needs man and woman."

Q: Where do you think children's book publishing is headed?
A: Until there is a reversal of core values in the industry, which is to say a return to an industry that recognizes its responsibility to educating the public taste and to publishing things of lasting value--and not to pandering to the lowest intellectual and artistic denominators and the bottom line--the industry will eventually run itself into the mire of mediocrity and schlock. I can't see that children's books will fare any better than the books of the industry at large, except in the hands of a few well-intentioned, independent publishers, and autonomous imprints at some of the larger houses.

And, I have to add as I watch my three-year-old granddaughter sit at the computer playing games and making pictures, I suspect that a wide and lucrative market will open on the cybernetic front, especially given the relative ease of the designers and cyber-nerds to make their products interactive and attractive. What will finally take shape there is anybody's guess.

I also feel compelled to add that prognosticators are wrong an embarrassing amount of time and I don't want to join their ranks by predicting any sort of market. It will go where the money tells it to go and where the technology takes it. I suspect that as time goes on, less interest will be paid to literature and poetry and more interest will be paid to entertainment and education. What impact this will have on illustrators, I couldn't say. More than likely it will broaden their venue for making a living, especially if they have honed their cybernetic craft. I don't imagine, however, that old goats like me who still value the feel of the object and the beauty of hand-crafted work will fare very well.

Q: Where are you personally headed as an artist?
A: That would be the world that provided me with the creativity, the opportunities, and the growth before I got into children's books--the world of the private press. Now, this is not to be mistaken for the so-called "vanity press," where anybody with some money can hire a commercial, for-gain publisher to print and publish anything that the person with money wants. The private press is one where the book as an art object reigns supreme, where design, typography, paper, binding, and illustration hold equal importance with an eye towards making the object--the book itself--into an object that has a chance of lasting as a work of art. These books are produced in very limited numbers--sometimes as few as twenty-five or thirty--and are made by hand, which, interestingly enough, is what the original meaning of the word "manufacture" was.

In this world I am the master of the domain. I have no worry about what the public is going to think since the public will never see the work unless they come across it in a museum or in a shop that sells rare books. I have no concern for what an editor or art director's opinions are since I am, in this world, the art director and editor. And I am not beholding to the vagaries and fads of commercial publishing since I am the publisher.

Q: What made you step from the world of the private press into children's books in the first place?
A: I began in this business as the proprietor of a private press dedicated to publishing belle lettres, broadsides, pamphlets, portfolios, and my own etchings and engravings. It was very much a shoestring operation. I had moved to New England from Tennessee in 1967 and was teaching myself how to make wood engravings. I really didn't know how to print them, so one day a friend advised me to have one of them printed properly, and that led me to the Gehenna Press, the private press of Leonard Baskin who later became my drawing teacher. That day was a true epiphany for me. That was when I met Harold McGrath, who became, in a few years, my best friend and my pressman. And that was when I saw handmade books for the first time, books beautifully printed by McGrath on beautiful hand made papers with exquisite bindings. I was in love. Over the next three or four years I taught myself (with a lot of help and instruction from McGrath) how to set type and run a printing press. And I kept busting my ass trying to master wood engraving, which is probably the most demanding printmaking medium there is, other than mezzotint.

Eventually I got to be pretty good at engraving wood, and illustrated books became the major focus of my artistic life. My books attracted the attention of some of the other private presses (it's a really small community) and I was invited in 1978 to make a hundred illustrations for the Arion Press edition of Moby Dick. That was the big dam breaker for me. Moby Dick was enormously successful and I benefited from that success by being offered yet more jobs from other presses. Not long afterwards, my Pennyroyal Press published a limited edition of Alice in Wonderland that the University of California Press published as a trade edition. It won the 1983 American Book Award for design and typography. And the next year, Bonnie Verberg at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, who had seen my work, asked me to make some images for six Br'er Rabbit stories.

Q: Why did you say yes to the Br'er Rabbit stories?
A: I think that if I had been asked to make pictures for The Three Little Pigs, I would have turned my nose up at it--and I can say that today because I have done a Three Little Pigs that I am quite proud of. I almost turned my nose up at the Br'er Rabbit stories Bonnie offered me because they were "adapted." Adaptation of such stories, especially if they have elements that are controversial--as the Uncle Remus stories do--are ordinarily sanitized and bowdlerized, and I wanted to have no truck with any of that kind of nonsense. But, I asked to see the manuscript, just in case it was an honest treatment of these favorite old stories. And, by god, they were. They were retold by Van Dyke Parks, who is a musician and a native of Mississippi, and Malcolm Jones, Jr., who is also a Southerner and is presently the book critic for Newsweek magazine.

Their collective ear for music and the language of their native South just bowled me over. They were wonderful retellings. And, in 1985 I published my first book for young readers: Jump! The Adventures of Br'er Rabbit. I have to say that I was mighty lucky that Bonnie Verberg was my first editor. She was smart and plucky, and single-handedly convinced me that books for children were no less important than the classics or books for adults. She was part mentor and part guidance counselor. She taught me how to tell stories with pictures, something I had never done before.

Q: What's your advice to illustrators struggling to make it in today's children's book business?
A: The only responsible thing I can say is that I, and my colleagues in this community, should work as hard as we can to divest the inferiority complex we seem in general to have. We tend to share the notion that illustration is a second class citizen in the world of art. Our community too often plays into this notion, reinforces it, in fact, by producing work that is substandard and doesn't measure up when compared to the best of the work of serious "easel painters." I think this arises from the fact that too many people within the community consider their work something that almost anybody can do if they set their mind to it, something that needs no formal training. After all, "it's just a children's book, and I can draw--or paint--well enough for kids." I think this may be further evidence of our contempt for children--substandard providence for them is okay.

Every illustrator of books for children ought, if for no reason other than pure intellectual and artistic exercise, to have a go at illustrating a classic like Paradise Lost where the problems are, on a literary scale, more dense. There the illustrator will encounter problems that are challenging on a level beyond the purely narrative, which is where an awful lot of illustration for children's books ends up. And I can just hear the moans and see the eyes roll of some illustrator who is reading this and saying, "Moser's full of crap. Why should I have to do this? I'm not interested in Milton." And I would answer, "Because, like eating your greens, it's good for you. It'll make you stronger, better, more perceptive, a cut above, less mediocre, a mensch."

Q: What's your advice to writers struggling to make it in the same children's book business?
A: The most important advice I can give anyone--and forgive me if this seems glib--is to work. Work. Work. Work. Everyday, at the same time, for as long as you can take it--work, work, work. You can't depend on talent. I've taught for over thirty years and never met an untalented student. Talent is as common as house dust, and--in the long run--about as valuable. But nothing is as valuable as the habit of work, and work has to become a habit.

I advise anyone to listen to music. Listen to Bach's Art of the Fugue and The Goldberg Variations. Listen to them over and over, everyday, day after day until you begin to sense, if not understand, what Bach is up to. Then implement what you intuit from your listening into your own work. I don't care if you don't like classical music, or if you feel that it has nothing to do with what you do. Do it. It is invaluable. Let the music fill your mind. Let it flow over you and into you until you are aware of nothing else. Bach and others of his ilk will teach you form and structure and rhythm and all sorts of things you've never imagined, especially about the unexpected element--if you will only listen.

What else? Experiment and fail. Move on. Always keep in motion and finish the job, even if it's not exactly what you hoped it would be or not as good as it could be. The fact is that it will never be as good as it could be, and that's okay because it's all part of the never-ending, self-perpetuating growth process--and failure is the foundation of that process. I've done over two hundred books and not one of them is perfect. But I'll tell you this: I would rather have the two hundred and fifty-six imperfect books that mark the vectors of my journey through my art form than to have one perfect book that marks nothing but its own perfect self.

More I can't advise, except (as corny and prosaic as it may seem) to put love first in your life: love of your work, and of other people, and of yourself, and of whatever things of the spirit move you. Have fun and maintain a fierce sense of humor. There are few things so serious or important that they can't be laughed at, or even poked a little fun at.

And lastly, a short litany of dos and don'ts:

• Avoid the cute, corny and obvious in your work.
• Read Ben Shahn's The Shape of Content--a few times.
• Don't be afraid to do better work than you already do.
• Bathe and brush your teeth before an interview.
• Never underestimate the value of luck.
• Practice safe sex.
• Don't do heavy drugs.
• Don't get drunk and drive a car.
• Get plenty of sleep.
• Eat your greens.

Copyright 2003 Barry Moser and Anna Olswanger. This interview originally appeared on the website of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators at www.scbwi.org. Anna Olswanger's other interviews with Barry Moser have appeared in Children's Writer's & Illustrator's Market, Children's Writer, and online at www.olswanger.com.

Added 10/21/03

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