The Kerlan Collection

This week I attended part two of an institute devoted to studying authors as mentors. Our overall objective as teachers was to explore ways to use published authors' works in our teaching as exemplars for our students and even as a way to aid our own writing. Part one involved four days in the classroom and Part two was a field trip to Minneapolis to visit the Kerlan Collection in the Anderson Library on the University of Minnesota campus. For three days we studied the collected artifacts in a variety of authors' files.

The Kerlan Collection presently contains more than 100,000 children’s books as well as original manuscripts, artwork, galleys, and color proofs for more than 12,000 children’s books. One-eighth of the books are inscribed by the author or illustrator. The Collection includes books that are significant in the history of children’s literature, award books, classics, and representative books from Great Britain, Australia, Denmark, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany and others. Also included are over 300 periodical titles and more than 1,200 reference titles as well as many other items including letters, posters, toys, photographs, audiovisuals, publishers' catalogs, and even a figurine collection.

I started my exploration by examining a few of the files of poet Eve Merriam. Next I discovered Margaret Sutton, author of the Judy Bolton books, a girls series similar, if not superior, to Nancy Drew. In her collection I found mainly letters to and from her editor. Notes on her books. Plot outlines. Original drawings. A mock-up for a book complete with fragile typed strips pasted in the pages and loads of images cut from magazines for the illustrations. It felt like a treasure. Mary Roger's Freaky Friday galley proofs and original manuscript and analysis by the editor was another treat, but getting to see and hold (with gloves of course) Carol Ryrie Brink's Newbery Award for Caddie Woodlawn was seriously cool.

I saw some original drawings by Beatrix Potter. A storyboard for an animated version of William Steig's Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. An 1895 correspondence between Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and someone named Winnie. Later I read editor's notes on The Giver, a book by Lois Lowry and found some initial analysis by the editors and revisions the author made which definitely affected the tone the book. There was also a file of 31 different images for the cover art of the book Gathering Blue (a companion novel to The Giver) and it was cool to discover the title was almost Blue Yonder or The Gathering. I also looked at several drafts of Kate di Camillo's Because of Winn Dixie and could see evidence of revision even in the first page of each draft. Finally, the folder that seemed to have the biggest wealth of material was the Karen Hesse one for the book Out of the Dust. This is a 1930s novel written in verse and it turns out that nearly EVERYTHING in that book was based on a real event. Hesse had tons of notes and newspaper clippings from the 1930s that she used to work into the story. She had many more poems than actually appeared in the book and the only problem I had was in not having read the book recently enough to spot all the adjustments. I would love to return to Anderson Library and dig deeper.

We toured the facilities as well. All the archives are stored in two large climate controlled underground caverns carved out of limestone and lined with concrete blocks. Each cavern is 600 feet long, 70 feet wide and 25 feet high. The caverns are lined with 400 precast concrete panels. (each panel is 10 feet wide, 25 feet long and 8 inches thick) The ceiling consists of a thin layer of shale topped with 10 feet of reinforced limestone. Each cavern holds approx. 1.2 million volumes. In order to find the materials you would like to see, researchers can go online to their website and use the finding aids in the Author and Illustrator Holdings and Links category . Or if you are at the facility the most updated versions of their collection can be found in a set of red binders.

The Kerlan collection is just one of the collections housed in the caverns. In fact, it's part of the CLRC (children's literature research collection) which contains six core collections and several smaller collections. They are the Kerlan Collection of Children's Literature, the Hess Collection of Dime Novels, Story Papers, and Series Books, the Paul Bunyan Collection, the Laura Jane Musser Collection of Oziana materials, and the Illustrated Treasure Island Collection. All the material is accessible to anyone, who needs to consult it, but use by readers is confined to the reading room, where attendants bring requested material.


For folks who treasure children's literature, are interested in the process of publishing, or in author's personal journeys with a particular book, I would highly recommend spending a day exploring the Kerlan Collection.