Summoned by Books Quotes

“A wide reading in folklore not only gives the storyteller access to story resources, but it gives him also increased perception of the telling quality in books and stories other than folklore. Having acquired a new regard and respect for the integrity of the folk tale, he will have a standard of excellence by which he will be better able to judge everything he seeks to tell. He will judge the modern fantasy tale with a new understanding. Does it have respect for the character and quality of the nature of the animals with which it deals, or is it merely a pretty toying with rabbit or tiger or elephant? Is it rooted in a genuine sense of wonder, or is it based on a flimsy pretense of whimsy? Does it have form and structure, not necessarily of action but of idea? Is the supernatural treated as the unpredictable forces of evil as well as of good, or are the fairies little creatures all gauze and lace? Does it have point, climax, resolution of conflict? Does the story contribute to delight, to a child’s understanding of life? Does it increase perception? Does it leave “a residue of remembered emotion?” These are questions to ask oneself before choosing the tale to be told.”
― Frances Clarke Sayers, Summoned by Books

“[...] But in my own field, I can tell you what happens to books when they are put to these uses. They are examined for "developmental values," or read because they teach the concept of "relative size," or because of "good human relations," or "interracial concepts," or "vocabulary content." But when one searches for values and pushes them as if they were plums in a pudding, one destroys the texture and proportion of the pudding itself, and the art of pudding-making and the eating thereof are destroyed.”
― Frances Clarke Sayers, Summoned by Books

“In the new courses which are now to be introduced into library schools, we are to stress the psychology and sociology of reading! The study of the motivations, needs, and purposes of readers! I cannot predict what this will mean for the adult readers. It conjures up in my irrelevant mind a grim picture of some gentle old lady who has been reading for years along her own lines of interest suddenly encountering a bright young thing just out of library school who insists upon psychoanalyzing her before she is allowed to read Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker. [...]”
― Frances Clarke Sayers, Summoned by Books

“This initial impulse, this enduring faith in reading books to know them and to make them useful, has somehow been lost - not, I feel, because we are of lesser stature than our predecessors, but because, perhaps, there have been such pressures, such multitudinous forces at work upon the culture of our generation - economic, political, mechanical, and inventive - and the joyous obligation to read and to induce others to read seemed too simple a function in a world where everything and everybody were being mechanized, organized, industrialized, streamlined, geared for action in two wars, emotionally adjusted for a depression, progressively educated, and made socially conscious.”
― Frances Clarke Sayers, Summoned by Books