Toy Tie-Ins Rate an ‘A’ With Children’s Book Publishers

At the White Rabbit children’s bookstore in La Jolla, the usual weekend chaos was at full throttle. A 4-year-old clutched a stuffed creature called Muffy Van Der Bear. A grandmother eyed a Little Mouse lunch box, while a godmother studied a “Little Engine That Could” windup train. A mom watched her 5-year-old try out a fluffy white polar bear puppet. Amid the cheerful cacophony, the mother shouted out, “That is soooo cute!”

Ostensible book buyers, these shoppers were drawn to a product category that is bolstering an already booming children’s book market, but which few outside the industry have heard of. “Merch” is the catchall term for products inspired by children’s literature, but often--as in the case of a “Madeline” toothbrush--bearing only the vaguest relationship to it. Merch is a giant, self-replicating marketing phenomenon that has children’s publishers scurrying to identify the next quasi-literary cash cow--or, better yet, cash caterpillar.

But the proliferation of book-related toys troubles some reading specialists. Merch, they maintain, represents the most-philistine form of cultural commodification. The flourishing children’s book market itself also raises concerns, as some librarians and some within the industry worry that a narrow, comparatively affluent segment of the population has access to these glossy books and toys. They point to a disquieting paradox: Children’s book sales are going up, but reading scores are going down. Among children, apparently, the reading rich are getting richer--and the reading poor are getting poorer.

As Jennifer Roberts, a marketing director for children’s books at Houghton Mifflin, observed, “It feels a little bit like a banana republic. All the growth is with the ‘haves.’ ”

From plush toys to plastic purses, merch is multiplying quickly, though no one in the industry tracks its sales patterns. Asked about the revenue brought in by merch, Douglas E. Whiteman, president of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, said “we are talking pretty good dollars.” Though his company’s emphasis is still very much on books, merch may account for as much as 10% of the product line. Some independent children’s bookstore owners say they dedicate up to 30% of their space to merch, and the children’s book areas of big chains like Wal-Mart or Target are filled with merch.

10 Years of Growth in Children’s Publishing

For at least the last decade, children’s publishing has been on a steady growth curve. A report by the Book Industry Study Group showed that consumers spent $2.3 billion on juvenile trade books in 1997. This year, the market for juvenile trade books was was projected to grow by 3.5% compared to a decline of 0.7% for adult trade groups, according to the group. The group also found that 66% of children’s book buyers had some college education, and 21% had postgraduate degrees. The median income for children’s book purchasers, according to this research, was $46,477, with one-third of buyers earning more than $60,000.

Increasingly, the industry is turning to tie-ins with movies and television. This holiday season, books about “Antz” and “A Bug’s Life” abound. The “Rugrats” TV series spawned books about those characters, as did “Mr. Rogers” and “Sesame Street.” “Arthur,” publishing history’s first best-selling aardvark, was a well-established literary figure before lending his name to what has become public television’s most popular animated show for children.

The robust children’s book market has brought wealth and fame to superstar children’s authors such as Marc Brown, Jan Brett, Tomie de Paola and John Scieszka. In a field traditionally marked by low advances, small print runs and literary obscurity, top-selling writers for children now more than hold their own against major adult authors.

Big discount chains now hawk kids’ books, often at cut-rate prices. Mega-bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble have huge areas for children. Kids’ books are sold at grocery stores, at Starbucks, even at some car washes.

But if the engine driving the children’s book business is more powerful than ever, not everyone is on the reading train. In Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties last spring, more than 100,000 third-graders failed to read at grade level. Worse, about 67,000 of those third-graders could barely read at all. The poor-reading profile in these counties was most accentuated in low-income urban areas, a trend seen throughout the country.

Dr. Leslie E. Holt, director of youth services and family literacy at the St. Louis, Mo., public library, said she welcomes the boom in children’s publishing because it brings more choices. But Holt cautioned: “Obviously the expansion of the children’s market has a higher impact on middle- and upper-income families. I don’t see lower-middle-class or poor folk having real access to buying books.”

Holt, president of the American Library Assn.’s children’s division, said that sometimes in her central-city library, “you give a child a book, and you know that he has never had one that is his. That breaks my heart.”

In assessing the state of children’s reading, said reading consultant Jim Trelease, “climate has an awful lot to do with it--and I’m not talking about the geophysical climate. I’m talking about the print climate of a particular state or community.” Trelease, whose 1995 book “The Read Aloud Handbook” has sold almost 2 million copies, is based in Springfield, Mass. He said his home state is no different from any other in that “you can go into one part of the state and every classroom has its own reading room, complete with a sofa. In the same state, you can go to an urban district, a poorer district, and you find none of it. You also find that the reading scores will be down.”

Looking at California, Trelease said, “They ranked ninth in the nation for the number of children who are living in poverty. We know that poor children have the least access to print.”

California ranks last in the nation in public library support, Trelease continued, and last in school library support. Coupled with the number of children living in poverty, he said, “they can never change the scores until they change the print climate.”

But Joan Irwin, director of publications for the International Reading Assn. in Newark, Del., made up of 95,000 teachers of reading, warned against overinterpreting the drop in reading scores against the growth in book sales. The material on reading tests for young children often bears little resemblance to what these children actually read, Irwin said.

Reading a Skill Requiring Practice

It is usually at around age 7 or 8, said Anne Connor, coordinator of children’s services for the Los Angeles Public Library, that teachers begin assigning students to read at home, on average for 20 minutes a day. Adults who take the habit of reading for granted tend to forget, said Connor, that reading is no different from baseball or piano: It’s a skill that requires practice.

From that perspective, the plethora of children’s reading material is a boon to educators, parents and young people alike. The earlier and more consistently a child--even an infant--is read to, many experts believe, the more likely that child will be to gravitate toward reading. The huge selection of titles means that at most bookstores or libraries, there is a book to grab almost any kid’s fancy, and that children’s books have branched strongly into multicultural areas in recent years.

Holt said an increase in very simple books geared to early readers has helped to make reading more accessible. Parents who themselves may not be skilled readers can guide a child through these uncomplicated stories, Holt said, adding: “It’s becoming a point of pride that your kid reads a book. That was not true 10 years ago.”

In the meantime, the culture bombards kids with book-related merchandise. Whether the prospect of owning a “Tom Sawyer” fishing pole will actually increase a child’s interest in the Mark Twain book is anybody’s guess.

“Several years ago, when all these merch items started, I remember thinking, oh wow, this is fabulous because if you’re going to give a toy, why not give a toy that celebrates a character in a book?” said Valerie Lewis, owner of a children’s book store called Hicklebee’s in San Jose.

But the merch proliferated so quickly that now “it’s not about being related to books, it’s about selling,” said Lewis. “I own an independent bookstore, and you’ve got to stay in business. Percentage-wise, I couldn’t, if I just stocked books.”

Lewis, co-author of “The Very Opinionated Guide to Children’s Literature,” laments that “in some ways, it’s as if merchandise, because of our society, will sell the book, rather than the other way around.”

Merch can help “extend the life of a character,” said Whiteman of Penguin Putnam Books. Attaching a product to certain nonfiction works also can enhance a book’s educational value, Whiteman said. As an example, he offered a do-it-yourself kiddie time capsule for the millennium.

Penguin Putnam’s Workstation line came out about five years ago, offering books and products priced at $20. One book covered cake decorating, complete with tools, and another explained bead jewelry, with beads included. “In its heyday, that line alone was doing $10 million a year for us,” Whiteman said.

It may be a dubious distinction, but John Cassidy, head of Klutz Inc. in Palo Alto, is willing to accept the mantle of godfather of merch. Cassidy’s “Juggling for the Complete Klutz,” featuring a set of goof-proof juggling squares, came out in 1977, when “Curious George” was still a book character, not a line of clothing. This year’s hot ticket, the revised edition of “The Klutz Yo-Yo Book,” has sold more than 300,000 copies.

Where Merch Shines Most

Merch is at its best, Cassidy believes, in “Zap Science” or “Explorer” books inspired by interactive museums. “But if you take some cheesy little dinosaur book and attach a plastic dinosaur, that’s trivializing it,” he said.

One argument in favor of merch, said Whiteman, is that “we as book publishers have all cottoned on to the fact that we are in real competition for readers’ time.” Children turn to the Internet or to video games as willingly as they turn to books, Whiteman said.

Marketing specialists say many young readers display an acute visual design intelligence. They want sharper colors and sophisticated graphics. With more books to choose from, many have become discerning critics, demanding, in essence, that a book dazzle them.

The wacky works of Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith fall into this category. Smith’s illustrations look like Hieronymous Bosch on acid, and Scieszka’s stories--”The Stinky Cheese Man,” “The Math Curse” and others--deliver major headaches to some parents. But to Scieszka, it’s all part of a grand scheme aimed at “getting kids to read, whatever it takes.”

Cynically, said Susan Malk, owner of White Rabbit in La Jolla, the balkanization of the market might be viewed as “the publishers saying: ‘How many ways can we sell a book? We can do it as a board book, a pop-up book, then more and more products.’ ”

But, more generously, Malk said, “I think the idea is to grab a child in some way, and to get them hooked on reading. The whole thing is to make it fun and enjoyable.”

For more information about the Reading by 9 initiative and how you can participate, go to The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/readingby9