Ursula Nordstrom Would Never, No. 10

Attack of the didactic subtitles

Happy Friday, readers!

One thing that has long irked me about children’s publishing is the way book for kids are made with so much marketing for grown-ups printed right there on the cover.

Do we do this to toys? Goodness no! Sure, we tattoo all kinds of marketing copy on the box. But good God we don’t print it on the toy itself! But with books, we forget that they are a physical object for the pleasure and use of children and slap our adult nonsense all over them, slowly teaching kids that they should go ahead and ignore a lot of things about a book.

I’ll give this the full treatment in a future post.

But for today, we’re zooming in on one particularly egregious trend: Ursula Nordstrom would never publish a book with a didactic, adult-targeted subtitle.

Here are some recent offenders: