Last Thursday,  I went to New York to meet with my publishers, and I stopped in at the New York Public Library’s  exhibit called “The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter.”

Here are some personal highlights:

A book from Puritan times. In case you can’t make out that last stanza, it says:  “The Idle Fool/Is whipt at School.” Oh those funsters.

From the rare books collection: an original copy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile: An Essay on Education. 1763. This was Rousseau’s radical proposition that children should be taught by nature, rather than reason, and has been regarded as the first philosophy of education. By extension, Rousseau argued, children should be permitted to shed their corsets and wear comfier clothes. Or at least, boys should. Girls don’t make an appearance in Emile until book five, and there’s nothing in there about what they should be wearing.

Also on exhibit: Heinrich Hoffman’s Slovenly Peter, a parody of overly moralistic children’s stories, first published in 1845. The display announced that it had been translated by Mark Twain and is dated 1935. I looked it up—copyright issues prevented the translation from being published until 25 years after Twain’s death (in 1910).

There was an exhibit featuring serialized fiction by the wildly successful publisher Edward Stratemeyer, who churned out, among other things, the Nancy Drew series, written by the fictional/composite person Carolyn Keene. As I, too, earn a good living writing series fiction under a pseudonym, I was especially pleased that they included this addition.

Ditto with the display featuring the first Little Golden book. I’ve written Little Golden Books! See? It’s all about me.

There was a pretty awe-inspiring obelisk of titles that have been banned for one reason or another.

And of course, what exhibit about children’s books could be complete without paying obeisance to the original stuffed toys belonging to the real Christopher Robin?