The New York Public Library has been loaning books for more than a century. To celebrate 125 years of inspiring readers of all ages, the library calculated the Top 10 Checkouts of All Time.
The most checked-out book of all time is The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. The book has been borrowed 485,583 times as of the latest accounting, besting Dr. Suess’ The Cat in the Hat by more than 15,000 checkouts.
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‘The Snowy Day,’ by Ezra Jack Keats, is the most checked-out book of all time at the New York Public Library. |
The book features a young boy, Peter, who explores his neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, after the season’s first snowfall. Although it’s never mentioned in the text, Peter is African-American.
“It wasn’t important. It wasn’t the point,” Deborah Pope, executive director of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation, told NPR in a 2012 interview.
“The point is that this is a beautiful book about a child’s encounter with snow, and the wonder of it,” Pope told NPR, which notes that Keats’ Peter was among the first non-caricatured African-Americans to be featured in a major children’s book.
“He said, well, all the books he had ever illustrated, there had never been a child of color, and they’re out there – they should be in the books, too,” Pope said. “But was he trying to make a cause book? Was he trying to make a point? No.”
Keats wanted to write and illustrate a joyful experience universal to children from all walks of life, and while Peter’s race didn’t seem important at the time, it quietly broke color barriers which clearly had an effect on its millions of young readers.
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“A stick that was just right for smacking a snow-covered tree,” reads one passage from the 1962 book. |
“This had a broad audience and it still does. That allowed African-American kids, white kids, Native American kids, Asian kids to see, ‘Oh my goodness — not all of the kids in books are white,'” Pope told AccuWeather National Reporter Dexter Henry.
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Ezra Jack Keats. (Ezra Jack Keats Foundation) |
According to The Horn Book Inc, in 1963, Keats directly addressed the social issues raised by the book’s publication in a Saturday Review essay titled “The Right to Be Real.”
“We are now entering a new era in children’s books, an era in which children of all colors and national origins are finding their way more easily into stories and pictures,” Keats wrote in the essay. “Soon, let us hope, we shall relegate to the past the kind of books, both trade and text, in which an entire people and a great heritage have been deliberately ignored.”
In 1963, The Snowy Day was awarded the Caldecott Medal for being “the most distinguished American picture book for children.” While it wasn’t the first picture book to feature an African-American child as its protagonist, it was the first such book to win the Caldecott Medal. Today, more than 55 years later, it is still just one of three Caldecott Medal winners with contemporary African-American children as protagonists.
During his Caldecott acceptance speech, Keats revealed that Peter was based on a real boy from Georgia he saw in a photograph series in Life magazine who was about to undergo a blood test.
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The Life magazine photo strip that inspired Peter, the protagonist of Ezra Keats’ 1962 book ‘The Snow Day.’ (Life magazine, May 13, 1940) |
“Years ago, long before I ever thought of doing children’s books, while looking through a magazine I came upon four candid photos of a little boy about 3 or 4 years old. His expressive face, his body attitudes, the very way he wore his clothes, totally captivated me. I clipped the strip of photos and stuck it on my studio wall, where it stayed for quite a while, and then it was put away,” Keats revealed in the speech.
“In more recent years, while illustrating children’s books, the desire to do my own story about this little boy began to germinate. Up he went again-this time above my drawing table. He was my model and inspiration.”
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Another page in the book shows Peter having fun in the snow and reads, “And slid all the way down.” |
From a real-life little boy to one of fiction who ultimately inspired millions of real-life children of all colors to see themselves in literature.
“There was a teacher [who] wrote to Ezra, saying, ‘The kids in my class, for the first time, are using brown crayons to draw themselves.'” Pope told NPR. “These are African-American children. Before this, they drew themselves with pink crayons. But now, they can see themselves.”
“It’s a perfect snowstorm of all of these elements come together that means that New Yorkers have checked it out of the New York Public Library more than any other book ever.” Andrew Medlar, director of Book Ops for the library, told AccuWeather.
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The Snowy Day Holiday Special, produced by Amazon. |
Perhaps Keats said it best during his Caldecott award acceptance speech.
“I can honestly say that Peter came into being because we wanted him; and I hope that, as the scriptures say, ‘A little child shall lead them,’ and that he will show in his own way the wisdom of a pure heart.”
Additional reporting by Dexter Henry in New York.
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