Olive Beaupré Miller, 1883-1968
Olive Beaupré Miller, editor, My Book House
Olive Beaupré Miller founded her company, The Bookhouse for Children, in 1919 as an outgrowth of her reading to her own daughter. She hired an all-woman salesforce to sell the series by subscription door-to-door.
In choosing or creating the stories and illustrations for her six-volume My Book House, she listed these three criteria for her choices:
"First: To be well equipped for life, to have ideas and the ability to express them, the child needs a broad background of familiarity with the best in literature.
"Second: His stories and rhymes must be selected with care that he may absorb no distorted view of life and its actual values, but may grow up to be mentally clear about values and emotionally impelled to seek what is truly desirable and worthwhile in human living.
"Third: The stories and rhymes selected must be graded to the child's understanding at different periods of his growth, graded as to vocabulary, as to subject matter and as to complexity of structure and plot.”
Like N.C. Wyeth and other successful illustrators, Miller recognized that pictures add an extra dimension of vividness to the reading experiences of children.
Nursery Rhymes
Robin Hood and his Merry Men and Maidens Celebrating
(Illustration by Donn P. Crane)
Ivan and The-Little-Man-As-Big-As-Your-Thumb-With-Mustaches-Seven-Miles-Long
(Illustration by Donn P. Crane)
