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John Newbery opens a bookstore in St. Paul’s Churchyard, London, where he published and sold books for children.
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Improving on the original printing press design by Johannes Gutenberg, American inventor Richard M. Hoe designed the rotary printing press that allowed millions of copies of a page in a single day.
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The first American book written specifically for children by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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one of the first books written that was purely to give pleasure to children with no trace of a lesson or moral.
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American children made no distinction among American books or books from other countries. They read Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (1883) from Italy, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1879) from Switzerland, and Selma Lagerlöf’s The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906) from Sweden
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The first child labor laws allowed children to go to school. As more children learned how to read and write, more types of books were published for them. Around the same time, public library systems were able to develop rapidly thanks to the generosity of of charitable individuals.
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The US publishing house Macmillan launched a department devoted entirely to children’s books. Louise Bechtel Seaman, who had worked as an editor of adult books and taught in a progressive school, was appointed department head.
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In 1922 and 1923, Helen Dean Fish and May Massee, became the first children’s books editors, each at a different company. also in 1922, the John Newbery Award was established by the American Library Association, followed by the Randolph Caldecott Award in 1938.
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May Massee moved to open a children’s
books department at Viking. Other publishers began
to open children’s books departments, and children’s
literature blossomed into the twentieth century. -
From the 1940s through the 1960s, children’s and young adults’ books became an increasingly important part of libraries, schools, homes, and publishing houses. The spread of public libraries
with rooms devoted to children’s and adolescents’
reading interests opened the floodgates, inviting an
eager audience to read books and magazines and to
listen to stories told aloud. -
A study conducted in the final decade of the twentieth century confirmed that the number of children’s books that present balanced racial and ethnic images of children seldom paralleled census figures. It was difficult in the 1960s and 1970s
to find books that presented girls and women in (at the time) “nontraditional” roles. Only 3 to 4 percent of the children’s
books published in 1990, 1991, and 1992 related to people of color.