Sorry that header is cock-eyed- I can't figure out how to straighten things out on our photo-program, but that' s because I think it's broken. Illustration is from a 1925 set of childrens' encyclopedias, a set it is now illegal to sell for the use of children.Libraries themselves are now scofflaws.
I was recently told that if only I would protect my minds and thoughts like I do my body, using "Common Sense, confidence, and a clear mind," I wouldn't have to worry about what the law says.
Common Sense, confidence, and a clear mind is not going to protect you from a lawsuit or legal charges brought against you for selling untested books published before 1985, especially when Congress and the consumer groups promoting those laws are not displaying any of those commodities, and the CPSC has pretty much said that applying common sense to their interpretation of the law is pretty much in violation of the law:
The [publishing] industry has made assertions and done very limited testing, but the Act requires more, as it should, before we can exempt a children’s product from the lead content requirements of the law. We cannot act on the “everyone knows children’s books don’t contain lead” and “historically there has never been a problem with lead in children’s books” assertions, particularly when we now know that children’s books have indeed contained lead in the past. ... They need to provide all of the information that our staff believes is necessary in order for the Commission to act based on sound science and comprehensive market coverage.Please note the great gulf between 'never been a problem with lead in children's books' and 'children's books have contained lead.' That chasm is where Common Sense apparently plummeted to death. There is no evidence that lead in a child's book has ever harmed a child.
The ALA is not happy, and the CPSC cannot offer a useful remedy:
"The American Library Association wants the law changed. The group is lobbying members of Congress to exempt libraries from the provisions of the far-reaching law, said Jenni Terry, who works in the association’s Washington, D.C. office. The inclusion of libraries, she said, is “an unintended consequence of the law.”
“Ordinary books are safe and do not pose a threat,” she said, noting that members of Congress are “pretty surprised” to learn they are included in the terms of the law.
The law places libraries under the purview of the law. But Kang said local libraries will not have to close their doors or be required to test books to ensure books are safe. On Friday, the Safety Commission issued a ruling stating children’s books printed after 1985 are safe.
In some older books, Kang said, lead was used in inks."
Congress wrote a law where they specifically included "All products" for children 12 and under, and they are surprised to discover it included books. What does that tell you about the consideration they gave it, the time they spent on it, the gravitas of their deliberations?
Or did none of them read as children or allow their children to read?
Ed Kang is a spokesman for the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, and while he's saying libraries do not have to close their doors, he also makes it pretty clear they can't use books published before 1985. Neither can they legally be sold.
There are so many things wrong with this that it's hard to know where to begin, but let's start with the utter fatuousness of regulating books for the 10-12 market as though they posed the same threat as a teething baby's board book.
Books for ten year olds should not be subject to the same testing requirements as board books for babies. Babies slobber all over their books, chew them, suck them, gum them, etc, so it's not unreasonable to test them, although I still think it's a wee bit of overkill, for this reason:
Babies chew the edges of the books. Illustrations are generally centered, and the lead seems to be in the dyes and ink- more in the center of the book. I am not aware of a single case of a child getting lead poisoning from a book, even one with high lead levels. They'd pretty much have to do a Very Hungry Caterpillar number and eat right through the center of the book in order to get sick. Who leaves their child alone and unsupervised long enough for them to eat through the center of every single page in a book?
Lead has to be ingested or inhaled to make you sick. If your kids are rolling book pages and smoking them, there is no law strong enough to protect that child from himself.
How many pages of the book does a kid have to eat in order to get elevated lead levels, and how many kids over four are likely to stick their books in their mouths and suck them down to pulp? Has there ever been a case of a child getting lead poisoning from a book?
Publisher's Weekly remains concerned:
... the Commission said it would “not impose penalties against anyone for making, importing, distributing or selling” a list of specified products, including “an ordinary children’s book printed after 1985.”
The Commission says it will not prosecute makers or sellers of these products even if they are found to contain higher-than-permissible lead levels, as long as they did not knowingly sell unsafe products. These rules will remain in effect until the Commission takes further action—such as exempting “ordinary” books entirely—not just for the one-year stay of enforcement announced a week ago.
This announcement is good news for publishers, but it still leaves some gray areas. State attorneys general, for example, could still prosecute companies for violations of the Act, even though the CPSC itself has said it won’t take action. In addition, there is no clear definition of what an “ordinary” book is. Most experts interpret the term as meaning ink-on-paper or ink-on-board books, but what about books that are bound with metal staples, which could contain lead? Finally, it seems to put libraries’ older holdings back in the spotlight, raising the question of what they should do with books printed before 1985; the latest announcement suggests they could be prosecuted or fined for lending those out.
Indeed, it does.
Here are some children's books that, based on the best research I could find on Sunday night, have been out of print since before 1985, and are now illegal to buy or sell or 'distribute in commerce,' and thus, would have to be destroyed rather than sold:
Click on the picture to enlarge- this is the first two pages of The Plain Princess by Phyllis McGinley, who won the Pulitizer for her sweet domestic poetry. This edition published in 1945.You can get a post-1985 edition of Stone Soup by Marcia Brown in paperback, and you can get other versions in hardback, but this special edition has been out of print (oop) long enough to make it illegal.
Millicent Selsam's very well written, solid, and informative science titles for younger children- now illegal to sell them. This edition published in 1963.
It is also instructive to head over to Amazon to look at The King's Stilts, by Dr. Seuss, and see how many of the available editions were printed before 1985, and how many after. Even those books that were sold in reprinted, post-1985 editions will soon become scarce and expensive, as Congressional meddling results in those pre-1985 editions being removed from the market.
Some, but by no means all, of the Childhood of Famous American books have been reprinted in paperback. But the marvelous orange hardbacks so dearly beloved by many homeschoolers (and my mother, who read them all in her library during the forties) are now illegal to sell.
The Chestry Oak, by Kate Seredy
Mother Carey's Chickens, by Kate Douglas Wiggin
Manual Komroff's excellent Marco Polo biography for children, published in the late 50s.Several excellent biographies of Marco Polo could go the way of the incinerator:
Marco Polo: A Story of the Middle Ages by Edna Mitchell Preston
To Far Cathay by William C. Bagley Jr.
Marco Polo by Manuel Komroff, illustrated by Edgard Cirlin
Marco Polo by Charles P. Graves
All of the lovely Messner biographies, which are so special,
because they include historical figures not addressed by other popular out-of-print series' and second, because they contracted with some excellent children's authors! Enid LaMonte Meadowcroft, Jeannette Covert Nolan, Gladys Malvern and others on this list wrote well-researched, engaging living books. Books by many of these authors are worth finding whether they were published by Messner or some other house!
A number of the Dorrie the Witch books by Patricia Coombs
The Gateway to Storyland by Watty Piper, a favorite from my childhood and many of yours, to judge by how well older editions sell. I can't even imagine how expensive third party testing of each and every component of this book could be.
My hardback copy of the Provensen's A Peaceable Kingdom is from 1981, and listings at Amazon indicate this is the last publication date of this book in hardback.
The REscuers books by Margery Sharp (Miss Bianca, Bernard the Brave, Miss Bianca in the Orient, The Resucers- illegal, all banned as effectively as any organization has ever banned a book. and the Disney movie wasn't even a close approximation.
The King with Six Friends, a favorite of my brothers and I when we were small- part of parents' magazine press publications, very popular with parents who want to buy their chidlren the same books they read as children. But if nobody has reprinted them, you can no longer buy them legally unless they've been lead tested. After August, the lead testing has to be wet testing, which destroys the product.
All the Happy Hollisters books were published before 1985, and I can't find that any were republished after that. These were very popular with all my children when they hit that 'series' age. Another person telling me this law was irrelevant scoffed "How many kids under 12 do you know who read books published before the fifties?
Hundreds, madame, hundreds. I could say I know of thousands.
The Norman Conquest, by Walter Hodges, ahhhh, me. Illegal. It makes me weep.
This Fujikawa Child's Garden of Verses, a very charming version.
Clyde Robert Bulla's Viking book and several other titles that are especially appealing to boys who are just learning to read.
Other titles:
Paganini Master of Strings by Opal Wheeler
Sing for America by Opal Wheeler and Gustaf Tenggren
Giotto Tended The Sheep by Sybil Deucher Opal Wheeler
Millet Tilled the Soil by Sybil Deucher, Opal Wheeler, Dorothy Bayley
Curtain Calls for Joseph Haydn and Sebastian Bach: Musical Plays for
Children by Wheeler, Deucher, Greenwalt
The Story of Peter Tschaikowsky; Part One by Opal Wheeler Opal and
Christine Price
The Rainbow Book of Nature, by Donald Culross Peattie
The Story of Spiders, by Dorothy Shuttlesworth
Gee Wiz! How to Mix Art and Science or the Art of Thinking Scientifically,
by Linda Allison (Illustrator), David Katz (Author)
The Secret Life of School Supplies, by Vicki Cobb
A Trip to the Pond, by Melita Hofmann
Edwin Tunis--Chipmunks on the Doorstep
Miss Suzy was reprinted in 2000, but I think it's gone out again.
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| From The Common Room |
Or the Silver Brumby books.
Crystal Mountain, by Belle Dorman Rugh
Some of the Eleanor Farjeon / Walter de la Mare / Edward Ardizzone
books.
The Enchanted Forest, by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers
The Iliad of Homer, retold by Barbara Leonie Picard
The Odyssey of Homer, ditto
Landmark titles
Titles by the D'Aulaires, Marguerite de Angeli, Tasha Tudor, and Rumer Godden
Ellen Raskin's The Tattooed Potato andOther Clues
A Pony for Linda by C.W. Anderson
Gypsy Girl's Best Shoes, by Anne Rockwell
Two Stories About Wendy, by Marjory Schwalje
Blue Mystery, by Margot Benary-Isbert
The Big Fish, by Barbara Greenough Johnson
Pamela and the Blue Mare, by Alice O'Connell
Miss Twiggley's Tree, by Dorothea Warren Fox
Fireman, Save my Cat! by Tony Palazzo
Tasha Tudor's Sampler (A Tale For Easter, Pumpkin Moonshine, and The
Dolls' Christmas)
A Little Old Man by Natalie Norton
Blue Barns by Helen Sewell
I Went to the Animal Fair: A Book of Animal Poems selected by William Cole
A Child's garden of Verses illustrated by Eulalie
The Box with Red Wheels by Maud and Miska Petersham
The Circus Baby by Maud and Miska Petersham
Linda and the Indians by CW Anderson (quasi-part of the Billy and
Blaze series, but this one wasn't reprinted)
Insects: A Guide to Familiar American Insects, (A Golden Nature Guide)
by Herbert Spencer Zim
Any Opal Wheeler book that Zeedok Publishers hasn't yet re-published
A Child's History of Art by V. M Hillyer
A Child's Geography of the World by V. M Hillyer
All About Famous Inventors and Their Inventions by Pratt Fletcher
I don't believe that even scratches the surface.
Esther explains why libraries cannot comply.
KraftyMommas mentions five favorites that will no longer be possible thanks to Congress.
An official statement just released from the CPSC.
Here's the excerpt about vintage kids' books
Question 17: Can I sell vintage children’s books and other children’s products that are collectibles?
Yes. Used vintage children’s books and other children’s products sold as collector’s items would not be primarily intended for children. Because of their value and age, they would not be expected to be used by children. Therefore, they do not fall into the definition of children’s product and do not need to comply with
the lead limits.
The above books are not collector's books. They are just out of print. Pin It
