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THE LITTLE INDUSTRY THAT COULD
Dozens of cardboard packing boxes bearing the blue-and-white Harper logo were carried by a conveyor belt past shelves loaded with fast-selling books. Workers known as ''pickers'' rapidly pulled titles off the shelves, filling the moving boxes. In the warehouse were pallets with titles that sold so fast there was no reason to put them on shelves. With three exceptions - new books by the writer Erma Bombeck and the television comedian Roseanne Barr and a longtime [Harper] best seller titled ''The 8-Week Cholesterol Diet'' - all the books Gordon could see were Harper & Row children's classics: Maurice Sendak's ''Where the Wild Things Are,'' Shel Silverstein's ''The Giving Tree,'' Margaret Wise Brown's ''The Runaway Bunny,'' E. B. White's ''Charlotte's Web.'' For Liz Gordon, who had devoted herself to Harper's children's books for 16 years, it was a scene of personal triumph. But in retrospect it was a bittersweet moment. Just seven weeks later, Harper & Row issued a terse announcement that Gordon had decided to leave the company. She said later, ''You either accept another way of doing things, or you go. And my decision was to go.'' Industry speculation was that [Rupert Murdoch], the new owner, was going to broaden the marketing of juvenile books and that Gordon's bailiwick would soon find itself with a new look. Murdoch has made sweeping changes in virtually all of the publishing properties he acquired. But after Gordon's resignation, George Craig, Murdoch's choice to head Harper & Row, insisted, ''We are in the business of maintaining the classy, high quality children's book publishing that is our inheritance and the company's heritage.'' Gordon has nothing against ''light'' literature for children, she says. ''I've always been of the mind that adults don't have to go home and read 'War and Peace' at night. Neither should kids.'' On the other hand, she does not feel that ''popcorn,'' as she calls romances and mystery stories, should become a main part of a child's reading diet. ''Children will not become book readers if all they have are comic books . . . or a steady diet of formula fiction,'' Gordon wrote in a 1986 essay in Publishers Weekly. Formula fiction is just what Eddie Bell, the publisher of Harper Paperbacks and a senior vice president of the company, has ordered.
Newspaper Article
TELEVISION; Holiday Fare For Youngsters? Scout Around
LEAD: QUICK, MOMS AND DADS, WHEN did you first see ''The Year the Grinch Stole Christmas'' and how old were you? The television perennial made its debut in 1966 and is part of a festival of holiday viewing at the Museum of Broadcasting from Dec. 13 through Christmas Eve. The retrospective includes other prize memory ornaments, such as ''Kukla, Fran and Ollie'' from 1979 and ''John Denver and the Muppets'' from the same year, and underscores the point that really outstanding holiday fare is rare. QUICK, MOMS AND DADS, WHEN did you first see ''The Year the Grinch Stole Christmas'' and how old were you? The television perennial made its debut in 1966 and is part of a festival of holiday viewing at the Museum of Broadcasting from Dec. 13 through Christmas Eve. The retrospective includes other prize memory ornaments, such as ''Kukla, Fran and Ollie'' from 1979 and ''John Denver and the Muppets'' from the same year, and underscores the point that really outstanding holiday fare is rare. While the networks have consistently invested in substantial quantities of holiday programming for family viewing, the dross is replayed as often as the gold. Later this evening, on most public-television stations (though in New York City on Channel 13 tomorrow from 7 to 8 P.M.) is an American/Scottish/Czechoslovak drama called ''Silent Mouse.'' It is in the spirit if not the style of Robert Lawson's glorious pseudo-biography of Ben Franklin, ''Ben and Me,'' which was purportedly narrated by Amos, his mouse. This is an account of Franz Gruber's much-loved Christmas carol ''Silent Night.'' According to Lynn Redgrave, the narrator, it was all the work of A. Nonny Mouse, a professional organ mouse who went to work in the church in the little Austrian village of Oberndorf in the autumn of 1818, the fateful year the organ didn't work on Christmas Eve.
Newspaper Article