Batchelder Guest Post: Mildred L. Batchelder and the International Youth Library: Part II – “Endless” Correspondence

[We are continuing our two part series by David Jacobson related to Mildred Batchelder, her life and work. You can find part one here]

When the Rockefeller Foundation put Jella Lepman in touch with Mildred L. Batchelder in 1948 ahead of a two-month trip to the U.S. to seek support for her planned international children’s library in postwar Germany, Batchelder was immediately on board. She provided introductions to top people during the demanding eight-city tour for the 59-year-old Lepman, who was already starting to suffer from the chronic heart condition that would plague her for the rest of her life. The visit took Lepman to see many of the nation’s most prominent children’s libraries and librarians, culminating in a dinner with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and a speech before the American Library Association annual conference in Atlantic City.

Batchelder’s support proved critical. In early 1949, the Rockefeller Foundation offered a $22,500 grant to support the opening of the library and its first two years of operation. As a condition of the grant, however, it required the American Library Association, its partner on multiple projects since the war years, to administer the funds. Predictably, Batchelder, the executive secretary of the Division of Libraries for Children and Young People at the time, was the ALA officer chosen to manage the grant. As a result, for over a decade, she was intimately involved with the funding and development of the Library. Batchelder reviewed all of Lepman’s budgets and operations, revised and submitted each of the three grant applications she made to the Rockefeller Foundation, and even nixed some of her wackier ideas, such as setting up a center for children’s psychology at the International Youth Library.

Lepman proved, at times, to be difficult to work with, and a number of the American librarians sent over to Germany to help her catalog the library and put it on a professional footing, came back soured on the Library and Lepman. “I am alternately hopeful and despairing about [the library’s] future,” librarian Marion Horton wrote privately to Batchelder in February 1953, in a letter she described as “confidential, better destroyed after you read it.”ⁱ “As you know, Mrs. Lepman is a prima donna. Her past experience, her family, her connections in Bonn and Frankfurt and her own tastes make her more interested in spectacular exhibits than in the usual forms of library work.”

However, Batchelder, to her great credit, stayed the course, trying to steer between Lepman’s “wonderful enthusiasm” and her disregard for library norms. “From the very beginning it has seemed to us defensible as an ALA activity only if it were supported as a demonstration of a type of book collection and library service which would be desirable in any country and, more specifically, as a demonstration of the value of making available to children the children’s books of countries other than their own.”ⁱⁱ

For nearly 20 years, the two women wrote back and forth (the correspondence was “endless,”^⁠iii according to Batchelder), though they only met in person a few times. Batchelder would visit the International Youth Library just once in 1965, long after Lepman had retired. They were tied together by their steadfast conviction of the importance of children being exposed to books from other countries, and for their dogged persistence in achieving their goals. “When Mildred Batchelder believed in something,” Dorothy Anderson writes, “few could resist her enthusiasm and determination. She wrote, called, visited, prompted, persuaded, induced guilt (perhaps un­consciously), and persisted until a belief or a dream became reality.”^⁠iv That could just as easily be said of Lepman.

In her correspondence with other ALA employees and librarians, Batchelder would sometimes mention her frustrations working with Lepman, especially Lepman’s insistence on cataloging poor quality books that had been donated to the International Youth Library by publishers. “Her ideas lacked what seemed to us to be acceptable standards of a working professional,” she told Anderson, though knowing that Lepman trained as a journalist, not as a librarian. She was also shocked by Lepman’s walking out of a congress when her successor as director of the IYL attended. “But as unforgivably as she sometimes behaved,” Batchelder reluctantly acknowledged, “she also worked very hard to get her projects going. I guess it is necessary to say that she was a genius.”^⁠v

The opening of that International Youth Library 75 years ago and the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), which soon followed, as well as the establishment of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair (which was organized by the Italian attendees of IBBY’s 1958 Congress in Florence) were major milestones in the forging of today’s international community surrounding children’s books. They wouldn’t have happened without “Batch,” who figured out a way that the US could support IBBY, by splitting support between the ALA (where there was opposition to joining) and the Children’s Book Council, a trade group of children’s book publishers. That is the origin of today’s USBBY.

Batchelder retired from the ALA in 1965, and lived another 32 years with her life partner, Margaret Nicholsen, at their home in Evanston, IL. At her death, she was 96 years old.

David Jacobson is a writer, journalist and Japanese translator. In 2016, he published Are You an Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko, a picture book about and by a beloved Japanese children’s poet. He is in the process of writing a biography of Jella Lepman and this September will be presenting at a conference on her life to be held at the International Youth Library in Munich.

i Marion Horton to Mildred Batchelder, Feb. 22, 1953, Children’s Services Division Executive Secretary, Subject and Committee File, Record Series 24/2/6. Box 11, International Youth Library, Marion Horton File, American Library Association Archives at the University Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

ii Mildred Batchelder to Marion Horton, Feb. 17, 1953. Children’s Services Division

Executive Secretary, Subject and Committee File, RS 24/2/6. Box 11, International Youth

Library, Marion Horton File, ALA Archives.

iii Dorothy Jean Anderson, “Mildred L. Batchelder: A Study in Leadership.” PhD diss., (Texas Women’s University. 1981). p. 313.

iv Anderson, p. 66.

v Anderson, p. 313.

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