Celebrate Children’s Book Week with Us! Special Livestreamed Event 10am April 29th

This post was written by Lee Ann Potter, the Director of the Office of Learning and Innovation at the Library of Congress.

To kick off our celebration of Children’s Book Week (April 29-May 3), we invite you to tune into our live stream on Monday, April 29^th, beginning at 10 am EDT.

We will be livestreaming a special program from the Young Readers Center in the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. Local authors who are members of the Children’s Book Guild of Washington, DC, will be reading twenty special children’s books from the Library’s collections.

In honor of this being the 100^th anniversary of Children’s Book Week, the titles we have selected for this program were all published prior to the first Children’s Book Week in 1919!

Some of the books included might seem old-fashioned, but we hope they will delight you as they did previous generations. They span many generations, from The Little Pretty Pocket Book, printed by Isaiah Thomas in 1787, with its tiny illustrations of children’s games and moral instructions, to Peter Newell’s hilarious Rocket Book, 1912, about a rocket that pierces each floor of an apartment building, creating havoc on its way.

Selections also include examples from Randolph Caldecott, Walter Crane, and Kate Greenaway, all of whom created books in England during the golden age of book illustration for children at the end of the 19th century.

This year’s CBW theme, “Read Now – Read Forever” looks to the past, present, and the future of children’s books, and our celebration aims to do the same.

For more information about other Children’s Book Week celebrations, please visit Every Child a Reader.