On working hands and the books they're missing

Walk into a good children's section and you will find books for almost every kind of childhood. There are books for the kid with two mothers, the kid moving to a new city, the kid afraid of the dark. This is right and good, and I am glad those books exist. But look for the kid who waits at the window for a particular truck — the one whose father comes home smelling of solder or sawdust or roofing tar — and the shelf goes thin in a hurry.

I noticed this first as an uncle, not as a publisher. I went looking for a book that showed my nephews their own fathers, plainly, without making the work into either a problem to escape or a quaint detail. I did not find many. The trades, when they appeared at all, tended to be costumes — the friendly firefighter, the cheerful mail carrier — rather than the actual, tired, skilled men and women these children eat dinner across from every night.

A child should be able to find his own father on a shelf, drawn with the same care the world gives to everyone else's.

There is a reason for the gap, and it is not malice. Publishing is built around the people who buy the most books and write the most reviews, and that has quietly shaped what gets made. A book about a contractor's daughter is assumed to be a niche book. A book about a professor's daughter is assumed to be a book. That assumption is wrong, and it costs us. It tells a very large number of children that their lives are not the kind that books are made about.

That is the gap Cordis House was built to close. Not by making earnest books about jobs, but by making good books — well-written, well-drawn, well-bound — in which working families are simply the people the book is about. The standard is the thing. A child should be able to find his own father on the shelf, rendered with the same craft and dignity the industry reserves for everyone else.

I do not think this is a large or radical idea. I think it is an overdue one. The people who hold up the world have been holding up the publishing industry's customers, too, for a long time. It is past time some of those books pointed back.