Michael Rosen

The phenomenon that is Harry Potter has blinded many readers to the predicament of children’s books, their authors and their publishers. In a book market place that is ever more commercial and aggressive, children’s books have to sell very fast and very cheaply - and then they fall off the edge of the world. Bookseller chains, book clubs and supermarkets now demand such huge discounts that publishers cannot even cover their costs with a children’s paperback list, without a big bestseller.

Eight years ago, author Ann Jungman became a one-woman publishing house in order to rescue children’s books that had fallen out of print. Barn Owl Books reprints the books that deserve a happier fate than the dusty shelves in secondhand bookshops and the cobwebbed corners in grandparents’ lofts. With her own money and with just one modest Arts Council Grant, Ann put 60 well-loved children’s books back into the bookshops – and she keeps them in print too. Ann’s own pot of gold is now empty and the Arts Council budget was cut by 36% to pay for the Olympics.

The Barn Owl is threatened with extinction unless we all pay it some attention and feed it a little money. Barn Owl fulfils a vital function by keeping wonderful books in print – some authors are now only in print with Barn Owl – thus providing a kind of safety net for writers and illustrators. The Barn Owls are also the books that parents, grandparents and godparents want to give to children because they themselves enjoyed these worlds of imagination so much.

So this is the time for the profession to take matters into their own hands and for authors and illustrators and anyone interested in the well-being of children’s books to help keep Barn Owl publishing eight reprints a year. If just 400 people donate £50 each, this splendid owl will continue flying high and spreading it’s wings – but any sum is gratefully received.

Ann plans to invite a committee of authors and illustrators to decide which books will be reprinted. This Barn Owl will become a kind of co-operative: of, by and for the people in the children’s book world.

Sincerely

Michael Rosen, Children’s Laureate

Quentin Blake - The First Laureate

Jacqueline Wilson - Former Laureate

Michael Morpurgo - Former Laureate

Wendy Cooling - Initiator of BookStart

Professor Kimberley Reynolds - Newcastle University

Steve Skidmore - Chair of the C.W.I.G, Society of Authors

Elizabeth Hammill - Co-founder of Seven Stories

For more information email ann@barnowlbooks.com - Barn Owl Books, 157 Fortis Green Road, London, N10 3LX

A SHORT HISTORY OF BARN OWL BOOKS

Many moons ago, I squeezed into a packed hall to hear Roald Dahl talk about his books. In answer to the question Why did he write for children, when he was a successful adult author also? Dahl’s reply was that children’s books were less ephemeral, they had ‘a long shelf life.’ Dahl also made the point that every few years a new readership came of age and would discover the joy of writers who were brand-new to the child. He was right – in the 1980’s. At some point about 10 years ago, however, the publishing scene started to change and children’s books raced in and out of print just like adult volumes. Yet it has long been recognised that children’s books often take longer to take off than adult books; the slow burn success is far more common, based on one teacher saying to another ‘my class just loved this book.’ The new situation in which books can disappear in under a year takes no account of this word-of-mouth process. Moreover, much-loved books that provide some continuity between the generations were disappearing at a great rate. All these new realities led me to start Barn Owl Books, a publishing house devoted entirely to reprinting books that had gone out of print before their time.

Financed and run entirely by me, apart from one Arts Council grant of £21,000, Barn Owl has brought back 60 superb books from the dead in eight years. The books range from long and serious ‘cross-over’ novels on subjects such as slavery, the Siege of Leningrad and the Arab/Israeli conflict, to hilarious full colour comic books such as the Stanley Bagshaw series to shorter funny novels by Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Rosen, Kaye Umansky, the two Steves and myself. The books are all redesigned and printed on good paper, get enthusiastic reviews and generally sell quite well.

Alas, the economics of the publishing industry described in a recent letter to the Guardian, as ‘the economics of the mad house’, mean that it is impossible for Barn Owl to keep going without the occasional injection of cash from outside. Lacking a hardback imprint of a long-term bestseller like Tolkien or C.S. Lewis or T.S. Eliot to support it, so Barn Owl is in trouble, despite the high esteem in which it is generally held.