A Letter From The Publisher, Dec. 10, 1973

Every year it is the pain and pleasure of Senior Editor Timothy Foote, Associate Editor R. Z. Sheppard, and the other members of the Books section to fight their way upstream through a torrent of titles and find, judge and write about the books that are eventually reviewed in TIME. “There are some 30,000 new titles published every year,” says Foote, “but only about 6,000 are actually submitted for possible review.” This week Foote and Sheppard collaborated in producing a section devoted entirely to children’s books; it includes an article (by Sheppard) on Maurice Sendak, who has just illustrated a collection of Grimms’ fairy tales, a four-page color insert of illustrations by Arthur Rackham, N.C. Wyeth and Peter Spier, plus brief reviews of a few of the year’s best juvenile books.

A Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, Foote has been an English teacher, a foreign correspondent and an associate editor of LIFE. He worked in Paris for six years, two of them as editor of Time Inc.’s International Book Society, before becoming TIME’S Books editor in 1968. Foote is still fond of children’s books, but feels that what children need in books today is not “blobs and treacle but heroic nourishment, a sense of wonder, and pictures with enough texture and detail to be worth poring over again and again.” He remembers “getting up at dawn, creeping into the room where N.C. Wyeth’s Scribner’s Classics were kept, and long before I could read, brooding over the pictures in Robinson Crusoe, The Boy ‘s King Arthur and Jules Verne’s Michel Strogoff.”

Like most other book reviewers today, Foote passionately believes that what this country needs is fewer but better books. He once wrote an article urging that each publishing house produce no more books than its editor in chief could personally read in a year and successfully defend at a dinner party of his most literate friends.

In reviewing Sendak’s version of Grimms’ fairy tales Sheppard found them quite different from the majority of children’s stories. “Most books published since 1950,” he says, “seem to have been written by moonlighting matchbook copywriters and have all the cultural significance of a between-meals snack.” After four years with the now defunct New York Herald Tribune, first as a literary editor and then as managing editor of the Book Week supplement, Sheppard joined TIME in 1967. Today he samples as many as 30 books per week before choosing the ones he will review. “This week’s story is partly a news story,” he says, “because Maurice Sendak has risen to such prominence as an illustrator. It is also a review of a book that I don’t happen to think is necessarily a children’s story. But my main concern is good books — even if they’re written for kids.”