Lilian Moore, 95; Author, Editor of Children’s Books Pioneered Paperback Sales

Lilian Moore, a writer and editor of children’s books who pioneered the paperback book market for young readers and worked for greater ethnic diversity in children’s stories, has died. She was 95.

Moore died July 20 at her home in Seattle. The cause of death was not reported.

Born Lilian Levenson in the Bronx, N.Y., to Russian immigrant parents, Moore studied literature at Hunter College in New York City and planned to teach college students. She graduated during the Depression when jobs were scarce, and instead found part-time work teaching elementary school. There she discovered her skill at helping young people learn to read.

Since childhood, Moore had carried stacks of books home from libraries, and she wished that all children could own more of their own books -- “to reread, dog-ear and love.”

She made the idea a priority when she joined Scholastic Books as an editor in 1957 and helped launch the lower-priced, paperback series Arrow Book Club, for fourth- through sixth-graders, and the Lucky Book Club for younger readers.

After her stepson Richard Moore, who did civil rights work in Mississippi, said black children there had no books about their own experience, she helped establish the Council on Interracial Books for Children to encourage minority writers and to eliminate racial stereotypes in stories for the young.

In writing her own stories for children, starting in the early 1950s, Moore continued to use her teaching skills. Her popular “Little Raccoon and the Thing in the Pool” (1963), about a raccoon’s surprise at discovering his reflection in the water, was praised for the way it repeated difficult words and phrases to help slower readers.

Starting with “Old Rosie, the Horse Nobody Understood” (1952), many of Moore’s storybooks were included in the “best of the year” selections of book reviewers, literary guilds, library associations and teachers councils.

Her poetry faithfully described such first-time experiences as eating peanut butter or playing in snow from a child’s perspective. In one collection of nature poems, “I Feel the Same Way” (1967), she wrote about rain, fog, wind and ocean to intrigue young minds: “a sea breathes in and out upon the shore.”

Moore spent her last nine years in Seattle after leaving New York City.

Married three times, she wrote as Lilian Moore because at the time she became an author, she was married to William Moore, her second husband.

She is survived by her son, Jonathan Moore of Seattle, and her brother, Milton Levenson of New York City.