STORYBOOK TALE : Sales of children’s books are growing faster than any other category as baby boomers introduce their youngsters to the wonders of reading.

In a circle they sit

On the floor in the store,

And their mommies and daddies

Will pour out much more

Of their two-income paychecks

To score books galore

In a trend that the

Publishers surely adore.

It may not be Dr. Seuss, but it’s true.

As the parents of any 5-year-old who has attended a story hour can attest: Books for the littlest of us have become very big business.

Sales of children’s books are the fastest growing in the industry, publishers are expanding their children’s divisions and bookstores catering to the small set are opening at a rapid clip. There are even several book clubs for young readers and readers-to-be.

The reason is obvious to anyone who has dropped by a hospital maternity ward lately or tried to find a baby sitter on a Saturday night.

“We baby boomers are all breeding,” actor Bruce Mahler said recently after a visit to Happily Ever After, a Los Angeles children’s bookstore, to buy a present for his daughter Zarah’s upcoming fourth birthday.

“It’s the most important thing in the world, reading,” said the 40-year-old Mahler, who starred in the movie “Police Academy” and its five sequels. “Thank God for children’s bookstores, if you’ve looked at Saturday morning cartoons.”

It seems appropriate that in a decade capped by the Year of the Young Reader, a campaign sponsored by the Center for the Book and the Children’s Literature Center in the Library of Congress, that sales of children’s books have increased at a faster pace than any other category, said Ginger Curwen of the American Booksellers Assn.

“It’s been an amazing time for the industry,” Curwen said.

“We’re seeing general stores with concerted attempts to establish a sizable children’s book department. Also, the rise in children’s specialty book shops has been fantastic,” she said. “Publishers who aren’t in the business want to get into it and those that are, want to expand.”

An estimated $967.3 million will be spent this year on hardback books for children and another $536.5 million on paperbacks, according to the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research organization. That’s up 115% for hardbacks and 156% for paperbacks compared to five years ago.

Southern California is the nation’s strongest area for children’s book sales because of its affluent, well-educated population, said Louise Howton, marketing director for children’s books at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, a San Diego-based publisher. HBJ saw a 27% increase in children’s book sales last year and is adding two new lines of books in the next year.

The boom in children’s books has been aided by curriculum changes in schools that supplement textbooks with literature, a need by independent bookstores to specialize to survive the onslaught of well-financed chains, and the popularity of the public television show “Reading Rainbow,” industry watchers say.

The market for children’s books ranges from novels and nonfiction for teen-agers to books for those whose taste in literature runs more to tasting than anything else.

“We do have a selection of edible books,” quipped Sharon Hearn, owner of Children’s Book World in West Los Angeles. Actually, cloth and board books for babies sell quite well, she said.

It all goes back to a well-educated generation of conspicuously consuming parents who have begun reading to their children at a very young age-- in utero at the extreme, but definitely before the first year is over.

Started Reading Early

Gale Gest started reading to her two sons when they were about 6 months old.

“We probably have every book there is,” she said as she watched Justin, 7, and Darren, 5, inspect books at Waldenkids, a toy and book store in the Westside Pavilion.

Mahler admits to reading a book in the direction of his wife Gayle’s stomach during her seventh month of pregnancy, but added that they didn’t get down to serious story time for several more months.

“It all comes down to conveying the excitement,” Mahler said. “If you push too early, you can damage.”

Such demand has led to larger children’s sections in general-interest bookstores as well as a proliferation of specialized children’s bookstores with quaint names such as Once Upon a Time (Montrose), Yellow Book Road (Corona) and Ted E. Bear & Friends (Huntington Beach).

The 5-year-old Assn. of Booksellers for Children now has about 600 members; some 350 of them are bookstores. That compares to a scant scattering before the group formed, said Betty Takeuchi, owner of San Marino Toy & Book Shoppe and president of the national association.

When Karen Rosenberg opened Imagine That! in Riverside 11 years ago, a bookstore carrying only children’s books was more than an oddity.

“The common wisdom was that you couldn’t succeed in a specialty that narrow,” Rosenberg said. “It was quite a risk. But a lot of people are taking that risk now.”

Waldenbooks, the nation’s largest bookstore chain, launched its Waldenkids division two years ago. Most of the 24 stores sell toys and books, but a few carry nothing but books, said spokeswoman Dara Tyson.

In addition, Waldenbooks has been paying special attention to the children’s sections in its general stores because of a 15% to 20% growth in the past few years, Tyson said, adding that the growth estimate is conservative. Besides increasing the size of the sections, Waldenbooks has been trying to appeal to its little readers by installing small benches in some stores, she said.

Some Book Clubs

“They are the next wave of customers,” Tyson said. “They are our little customers. . . . In a lot of cases the child makes the selection, so you have to appeal to the child.”

Book clubs for children also have flourished, said Tracy Tang, managing editor of Books of My Very Own, the children’s book club owned by Book-of-the-Month Club.

Books of My Very Own started soliciting members from Book-of-the-Month Club and Quality Paperback Book Club, another BOMC subsidiary, in 1986 and began advertising for members in 1987.

“It’s been very successful and we have pretty aggressive plans for future growth,” Tang said. The club sends packets of books roughly every five weeks to its members, who range in age from birth to about 10 years old. Some other book clubs work through schools.

The world of children’s publishing is different from the adult market and can be very lucrative for publishers, said Diane Roback, children’s book editor at Publishers Weekly, the industry’s trade magazine.

“In the adult market, a book will go to market and six months later if it hasn’t taken off, it’s dead,” Roback said. “A children’s book has at least 18 months” and many old favorites continue to sell well even though the authors have been dead for decades, she said.

Consumers are also relatively insensitive to price increases on children’s books, said Barbara Marcus, vice president of marketing for Scholastic Books.

“The price insensitivity and longer shelf life makes it a profitable business,” she said.

But even for publishers, the business isn’t exactly the goose that laid the golden egg. “Most children’s books don’t sell hundreds of thousands of copies,” said Howton of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

The business can be tough for book retailers, who must contend with low markups and the high labor costs associated with the fact that customers need more help than in the no-frills stores that grown-ups frequent. Store employees also spend a good deal of time with teachers, librarians and writers helping with research and book selection.

Supports Book Habit

Takeuchi of San Marino Toy & Book Shoppe said she devotes more than half of her floor space to toys, even though she sells more books than toys.

“There’s more of a markup on toys and it supports my expensive book habit,” she said.

Hearn of Children’s Book World said retailers “can make a living, but you’re not going to get rich at it.”

“A lot of people are opening stores and I don’t think people know how much work it is,” she said.

Classic children’s books--the Madeline and Babar series, for example--continue to be popular because parents want their children to read the books that they enjoyed, retailers say. But many classic stories can now be purchased as books, audio cassettes or videotapes.

And increasingly, the content of books has changed. More and more books deal with such modern issues as drugs, child abuse and divorce.

“The biggest selling areas are toilet training and new baby, but we sell a lot of books on moving and death,” Hearn said.

Susan Kirvin Cox said she looks for black children in books for her 2-year-old son, Kevin, because “I want him to see his own image in books.” Books with multi-ethnic characters are easier to find now than when she was a child, Cox said, public relations manager of the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau, “but they’re still not as accessible as they might be.”

The price of books is a concern, many parents say. The price of all books has risen steadily since 1984, but children’s books are a relative bargain compared to other types of books, according to the 1988 Gallup Annual Report on Book Buying.

Pricing Is Difficult

“I have trouble paying $15.95 for a book my kid is going to outgrow in six months,” said Terry Wang, a special education teacher. Wang said the trick is shopping for books that her 9-year-old daughter Jamie “can hang out with for awhile,” such as books by Maurice Sendak.

Laurie Sale, co-owner of the Children’s Book & Music Center in Santa Monica, said book pricing “is hard for me.”

“The price just keeps going up and up,” she said. “It’s become almost an elitist kind of thing. I don’t know how kids in low-income areas get books.”

The future for children’s books promises an inevitable slowing in growth.

The 1988 Gallup Annual Report on Book Buying projects a 13% decline in the sales of children’s fiction by the year 2010 as the baby boom ages and its children grow up.

“It has to slack off,” said Roback of Publishers Weekly. Elementary school enrollment will peak in 1996 at slightly less than 35 million and will begin to decline.

“In 10 years we may have to reassess . . . (but) people aren’t going to stop having children any time,” she said. “The bottom is not going to drop out of this market.”

Sale isn’t too worried about a slackening in demand.

“Toys break, but books just keep going on and on,” she said. “Children want to hear it again and again and again and again.”

PERENNIAL FAVORITES The following list is based on a survey of booksellers and not actual sales. For babies and toddlers: Pat the Bunny by Dorothy Kunhardt Where’s Spot? by Eric Hill The Real Mother Goose illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright Farm Animals by Hane Helweg What Do Babies Do? / What Do Toddlers Do? compiled by Debbie Slier Picture books: Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, illus. by Clement Hurd Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, illus. by Clement Hurd The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle The Little Engine That Could by Wally Piper For younger readers: Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss The Frog and Toad series by Arnold Lobel For middle readers: Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White, illus. by Garth Williams Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume, illus. by Roy Doty The Ramona series by Beverly Cleary Sixth Grade Can Really Kill You by Barthe De Clements Nothing’s Fair in Fifth Grade by Barthe De Clements For young adults: Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls The Anne of Green Gables series by L. M. Montgomery A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor, illus. by Jerry Pinkney Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt Source: Publishers Weekly, April, 1989