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Marianne Carus Marianne Carus Induction Speech “The shining silver moon/ Is a coin hung in the sky/ To
pay the old Dream Maker/ That poem, called “Dream Maker,” by Jane Yolen, appeared in the July 1990 issue of Cricket magazine, and I think of it when I think about how Marianne Carus made a dream come true. She paid for that dream, not only with long, hard work, but also with a piece of the silver moon, a vision that would bring magic to hundreds of thousands—even millions—of children. It is almost impossible to measure the impact Marianne Carus has had on America’s young readers and readers-to-be. We can consider quality—art, stories, and information created by the best writers and illustrators in the world and published in an accessible magazine format. We can consider the emotional, spiritual, psychological, and intellectual bonding between parent, child, and literature that results from interactive reading from birth through adolescence. We can look back nearly 35 years at the array of magazines that Marianne has started for children: Babybug for 6-month-old babies to 2-year-olds, Ladybug for 2 to 6-year-olds, Spider for 6 to 9-year-olds, Cricket for 9 to 14-year-olds; and Cicada for readers 14 and up. And that doesn’t even count Click, Ask, and Muse, three nonfiction magazines published with the cooperation of the Smithsonian Institution, and 7 others, Cobblestone, Faces, Dig, Odyssey, Calliope, Footsteps, and Appleseeds. It doesn’t count the award-winning Cricket Books imprint. It doesn’t tell how Marianne involved the likes of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Lloyd Alexander, Sid Fleischman, Astrid Lindgren, Arnold Lobel, Trina Schart Hyman, Jean Craighead George, Julius Lester, Nikki Giovanni, and Gwendolyn Brooks to contribute to the very first issue of Cricket magazine, and then went beyond those famous contributors to discover and publish new talent. And it doesn’t recognize how much Marianne has contributed to international understanding through connecting and translating the best for children, from many cultures. To do all this involved creative energy supported by realistic editorial strength. Marianne would be the first to say she did not do this alone. She has lived happily ever after with her supportive husband Blouke since their courtship in Germany, and she has galvanized the leaders of the children’s book industry with charismatic charm. But one has to go back 134 years, to 1873, to find someone who has done what Marianne Carus has done—and that would be her inspiration, Mary Mapes Dodge, who founded the fabled St. Nicholas Magazine, a children’s publication that featured work by Emily Dickinson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rachel Carson, Jack London, and Eudora Welty. The goals, quality, and consistency of Marianne Carus’s Cricket Magazine Group rival this glittering galaxy. In her book Celebrate Cricket, Marianne cites a passage from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s autobiography A Day of Pleasure, as inspiring her name for Cricket magazine: “There was a tile stove in Shosha’s apartment behind which there lived a cricket. It chirped the nights through all winter long. I imagined that the cricket was telling a story that would never end.” And Marianne adds, “That was exactly what I wanted our new magazine to do: ‘tell stories that would never end.’” And she has done that. I have known Marianne since I became Children’s Book Review Editor of Booklist in 1974, just a year after Cricket was born, and in the intervening years as I joined faculties at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois, and joined the Advisory Board of the Bug Mags, as she calls them. I have met with her at conferences of the International Board on Books for Young People all over the U.S. and Europe and have even traveled with her to a children’s literature conference in Iran. In all that time, I have never known her enthusiasm, diplomacy, and determination to fail. If anyone ever deserved to enter the Educational Publishing Hall of Fame, it is Marianne Carus, for delighting and informing our children. There’s another poem published in Cricket, a June 1982 issue that featured New Zealand writer Margaret Mahy’s story “The Cat Who Became a Poet.” The poem goes like this: “The
great mouse Night with the starry tail I think of that poem when one of my grandchildren chews the rounded corners of Babybug, ingesting good literature with every bite. Thanks, Marianne, for this magical feast.
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