Field Trip: Visiting The Original Mixed-up Files!
Paging through the early drafts of a kid lit classic
The events of Snow Struck lead up to December 25th and it’s very much a Christmas book… so if you’re looking to order a copy for the holidays: now’s the time!
Last week I took my Writing Youth Literature class on a field trip to the Special Collections department at the University of Pittsburgh, where a very cool librarian named Clare Withers curates the Elizabeth Nesbitt Collection (which includes “12,000+ resources… comprised of children's literature and material related to the history of children and their books, dating from the 1600's through the present”).
I’ve been super-excited about this visit since I finalized my syllabus in August… and the main reason for that is because I saw that Pitt has 11.21 linear feet of (two-time Newbery award-winning author) E.L. Konigsburg’s archives in their collections.
Collections that—because of their size—haven’t been fully explored yet!
Clare and her colleague (the YA author and archivist Kathryn Miller Haines) pulled a ton of different materials for us to look through, including archives from America’s Agatha Christie, Mary Roberts Rinehart—she coined the phrase “the butler did it!”—and the Caldecott-winning author of Saint George and the Dragon, Margaret Hodges.
We looked at contracts, pay stubs, editorial letters, notes on napkins, marginalia, and folders full of rejection slips. But for me, the holy grail of the collection are early drafts and manuscript pages for The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
Pictured above: One of my students holding an unbound galley (or advanced copy) for Mixed-up Files, which was sent to the author in a small, thick envelope.
Pictured below: A weirdly tepid letter accompanying the galley from the author’s publisher, addressed to “Mrs. David Konigsburg” (sigh). This is the first time Elaine would have seen her manuscript in book form!
Mixed-up Files is one of those books that’s inspired a lot of authors, and it was definitely a book I thought about a lot while I was writing Snow Struck… so much so that one of the cover concepts my publisher sent me was an homage to the iconic cover that E.L. Konigsburg illustrated herself (so cool!), set in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
My Side of the Mountain was the book that inspired Storm Blown and I’d love to visit Jean Craighead George’s archives one day (her autobiography, Journey Inward, is hard to find but worth tracking down). For Snow Struck, though, seeing these typewritten manuscript pages with in-line revisions was really special:
Even better: The handwritten early draft with entire paragraphs exed out!
I’ve been talking a lot about revision in my class at Pitt—and during my school visits, too, where I let kids know that it’s normal to struggle with something (like writing or skateboarding or playing guitar) when they’re trying it for the first time.
And looking through drafts that dated to the early 1900s (not just in E.L. Konigsburg’s papers), I found all of those exed out paragraphs and pages—the struggle to find the right words and put them in the best order—so unexpectedly reassuring.
Because writing and revision isn’t always easy...
But even E.L. Konigsburg didn’t get everything right the first time!
If you’ve read this far, I hope you’ll pick up a copy of Snow Struck for yourself or a loved one this holiday season!
Your friend,
P.S. Every once in a while my books get 1-star ratings from adults who don’t want kid’s books to deal with climate change... so if you ever want to leave a five-star rating or review on Amazon to balance that out, you know I’d appreciate it!