Children's Literature, an Annotated Bibliography

Some of my favorite children's books.

The greatest difficulty I face in most of these units is figuring out what to write about. I like to keep my writing interesting and the best way for me to do that is to write about what interests me. Last Saturday, I was perusing the of topics we could write our annotated bibliographies about. I came across visual arts and how these were affected by printing. This led me to think about illustrations in books, which led me to thinking about picture books, which led me thinking about children's books, which led me to writing my last post on Monday. The more I have learned about the history of children's literature, the more enamored I become with it. THEREFORE I give you an annotated bibliography about children's literature, its history, criticism, and evaluation of the genre as it affects the printed word.

Typography annotated bibliography

I began this assignment with a general search on Wikipedia. I found the Typography article and looked at its sources to find some books that might be found at the HBLL. I looked up these books at lib.byu.edu and wrote down the first few characters of their call numbers.  I just recorded the general area of the call numbers so I could browse the proper section of the library.

Browsing

I found {1} and {3} browsing the library stacks.

I noticed a couple of interesting things while browsing. First, there is only a very small area dedicated to typography in the library—only about three cabinets. Additionally, I found that the topics covered in this area were broad. They included connections between typography and the following fields: graphic design, web design, print design, history, and international typeface references.

I used the bibliography in {1} to find {2}.

Finding a reference work

I found an encyclopedia {4} through the HBLL website. I found {5} in the references section of {4}.

Finding a periodical

I found a typography periodical {6} by searching “typography” at lib.byu.edu, and then selecting “Journals” under “Resource Type” in the navigation bar to the left of the search results. I found {7} via {6}. It is important to note that {6}, my periodical print reference contained no actual bibliography, footnotes, or endnotes (!). But Milton Glaser, the author of {7}, was listed as a contributor. I searched for him on the library website and found a work he authored.

Bookselling and Publishing

Bookselling and publishing address the main points of the economy of the printed book.  This bibliography lists some books that cover these two topics.

Of Printing Presses and the Publishers who use them...

Knight, Death and the Devil by Durer

I had the opportunity Monday to spend a few hours sitting between the bookshelves of the library and in researching some of the topics I found myself getting lost just taking in all the knowledge around me! In creating my bibliography, the first thing that I learned is that five hundred years is too much time to have only a handful of authoritative sources for research purposes. Many of the books that I perused contained the same information, maybe with an emphasis on one part of the story over another, or explaining how it related to their perspective. I learned to love the fact that books are grouped by subject and finding one good source usually means you've found two or three others next to it on the shelves! This isn't necessarily the case with search engines that return a search based on your input.

Many of the texts that I looked through were surrounded by older sources written in Italian, a point that we have an amazing library at BYU. I served as a missionary in Rome for two years and my Italian definitely was helpful for more than a few of the books that would reference a quote by Aldo Manuzio the way he said it, or even the Latin which I could sort of make out. In all, I actually enjoyed looking through the books and in its own way I felt immersed in the research.