This article by Janet Gray was published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on December 17, 1997.
Neither the adult nor the child in us can occupy the world of a good children's book on its own. When we read as children, we grow; when we read as adults, we move back toward childhood. We're like Lewis Carroll's Alice getting bigger or smaller as we take in the substance in front of us.
At "Go Anywhere, Anytime," a new mini-museum for children in Princeton University's Firestone Library, you can step on a couple of pedals (a tricky maneuver for anyone over four feet tall) and watch yourself grow to a great height as Alice's voice bemoans the distance between her and her feet.
What shrinks you, whatever your size, is the 22-foot-high wall of glass-cased books, to the right as you enter the exhibition space, that constitutes the Cotsen Children's Library, a premier historical collection of children's books. Large, plush beasts from Maurice Sendak's illustrated stories, seated among bindings of murky leather and swirling handmade paper, lend modern whimsy to the intimidation looming in these shelves. There are countless copies of "Aesop's Fables" and "Don Quixote," fat history books and skinny Bibles, and over 100 editions of Charles Perrault, the French, 17th-century folklore collector whose versions of "Cinderella" and "Sleeping Beauty" kept in all the mayhem that Disney eventually smoothed out.
To the left as you enter, you pass the exhibition's logo, designed by Sendak. Beyond it, a bear reads quietly at a table in a glassed-in space. He looks like a scholar, but Andrea Immel, the curator of the Cotsen Library, insists he is not. His name is Harry, and he came from Neutrogena Inc., of which the donor of the library, Princeton alumnus Lloyd E. Cotsen, is a former CEO. The book Harry is reading is "The Kids' Guide to Social Action." Half-hibernating as the other staff prepare for visitors, Harry is something of a subversive presence.
As you approach the "Go Anywhere, Anytime" installation, you see the shape of an old-fashioned wooden wardrobe. In C. S. Lewis's "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," four English children on holiday enter Narnia, a world rich in danger and magic, through just such a piece of furniture. The wardrobe frames a bright, back-lit image of a child meeting a faun in a wintry forest. These are Lucy and Mr. Tumnus at the westernmost edge of Narnia.
Standing between the wall of books and the installation, you have entered a rare other world, one where scholarship and childhood mix.
If you slip behind the wardrobe, you enter a 14-foot-tall acrylic structure in the shape of an open book. There are three little rooms, one each for Narnia, Wonderland, and the barnyard where E. B. White's pig story, "Charlotte's Web," takes place. Each space has objects to manipulate. Standing on Narnia's icy-blue floor, you can push buttons next to the names of places in Lewis's fantasy world and light up their locations on a map. Or you can use keys labeled with descriptions of characters to open boxes that tell in words, images, and sounds about the characters' origins in folklore and mythology. (Mr. Tumnus's box plays pan-flute music.)
Standing on Wonderland's green astroturf, you can turn gizmos that generate nonsense verse, push a button and get a voice to recite "Jabberwocky," and use word magnets to replace "reading" and "writing" in a text on the wall with "reeling" and "writhing," just as Carroll did in describing the curriculum of a school of fish.
In the wood-floored barnyard room, E. B. White himself reads you fragments about the changing seasons as a diorama of illustrations from "Charlotte's Web" slides by. Magnetized words lie in a container under a graphic of a tree showing four seasonal stages of foliage. You're to associate the words with a season and compose something with them.
Behind "Go Anywhere, Anytime" is another installation, "Be Anyone," where you can play at being different characters. Telephones alter your voice. A camera set-up changes your face. In a "Screen Test" room, there are scripts of updated fairy tales (two pigs ridicule their brother's paranoia about the Big Bad Wolf). You can choose a script, act it out, and record it. In the final product, you'll be superimposed on an animated background.
Imagination is the theme that connects both parts of the exhibit. And the practical side of imagining underlies the exhibit's purpose, to present books as "sources of personal empowerment that increase awareness of life's options" (including, perhaps, the option of going to Princeton University).
Yet the choice to focus on fantasy literature gives the exhibition a nostalgic feel, as if the childhood installed here belongs to a couple generations back. Today realism dominates young people's literature. This year, for instance, four of the five finalists for the National Book Award in young adult literature addressed often harsh social themes.
Says area author Mary Ann McGuigan, whose "Where You Belong" -- about growing up poor in the racially mixed Bronx -- was one of the finalists, of the books featured in the exhibition: "They're classics for very good reasons. But they became classics at a time when we all wanted to believe we were protecting our children. Folks thought a lot of what was going on in the adult world went right by kids. It doesn't."
And for all the emphasis on imaginative play, experiencing the installation as an oversized child feels uncannily like being a student at Princeton. Despite the multiplicity of media, printed texts dominate the spaces. The voice-changing phones have scripts to read so you know what to say in a wolf voice or a Red Riding Hood voice. And, if in doubt about how to proceed with the poem-tree in the barnyard, you can find examples of seasonal poems in three circular gizmos to the right.
It is also very like being at Princeton University in that the three major writers represented are Dead White Males. The examples of seasonal and nonsense verse peripherally integrate this picture by way of three women, Langston Hughes, and an unnamed Cherokee -- much as a quarter century of slow change has integrated white male bastions.
Very unlike Princeton, or any research institution, is the fact that such an installation exists here at all. School groups often visit the campus, but as U.C. Knoepflmacher (who holds an endowed chair in Victorian literature and teaches courses in children's literature) puts it, this is the first space designed to appeal to the "double audience" of children and researchers. The impetus came from Cotsen, who wanted his donation of a scholarly showcase paired with a freestanding, interactive children's space. It was a challenge that past administrations might not have taken on. But it caught the enthusiasm of President Harold Shapiro and his wife, Vivian Shapiro, a psychologist who specializes in children and the family.
A team consisting of Immel and Stephen Ferguson, of the library's rare books staff, gallery designer Lynne Breslin, and architects Henry Smith-Miller and Laurie Hawkinson spent 18 months in give-and-take discussions planning the exhibit. Jane Bloom, who has set up children's literature installations in New York City, curated the giant book, and Ben Rubin of Ear Studios created the "Screen Test" section. Maltdie and Associates, a New Jersey firm that builds museum installations internationally, did the construction.
On opening day, children mingled with scholars who were participating in a conference on 18th-century instructional books and toys. Knoepflmacher, who moderated the conference, observed that the giant book passed its first trial run with young users: "They were just enchanted."
Designed primarily for fourth to sixth graders, the installation should also appeal to younger and older readers. Immel has heard "whoops and shrieks" from toddlers visiting with their mothers. If the installation instructs, clearly it is an "Amusing Instructor" (the title found on one of the ancient spines in the wall of books).
"Go Anywhere, Anytime" is an opportunity for casual visitors and school groups to immerse themselves in what scholarship does best, which is often the opposite of what mass culture does best. Scholarship complicates things.
In the quiz-like key-and-box set-up in the Narnia space, for instance, the information in the box can be relentlessly detailed and contradictory. (How old or young you have to be to discover that the boxes can be opened without a key isn't clear.) The box matching the key for benign Mr. Tumnus informs you that mythological fauns did a lot of mischief. You are not meant to leave here with the sense that knowledge is tidy or that all disruptive forces are contained. Imagine such a set-up for the characters of today's Disney feature "Anastasia." The boxes would need to be big enough to hold the Russian revolution.
The task that lies ahead for Immel is much like the task that E.B. White's Charlotte, a diminutive adult, undertook on behalf of Wilbur, an overgrown child. Charlotte, you remember, saved Wilbur's bacon by crafting slogans into her web ("Some Pig") and mobilizing a staff of barnyard animals.
By spring Immel plans to have a packet ready for teachers explaining how to organize a visit, what they'll see, and how many adults to bring along. In the meantime, this year's holiday-season visitors will be beta-testers contributing to the exhibit's "shakedown period," during which the ways that children actually use the space will help Immel plan for the future.
-- Janet Gray