I first encountered Cricket, the literary magazine for children, at the home of my best friend, Elaine. Elaine was the most sophisticated child I knew. She always chose coffee ice cream. The tooth fairy brought her not crumpled dollar bills but smooth stones painted with miniature landscapes. She had traveled a lot, visiting family, and the Inwood apartment where she lived with her parents was filled with art and books and the smells of the elaborate meals her father cooked — the fact that he worked nights, and so was available to take us to museums after school, was itself glamorous. Even the apple juice they served us, in vividly painted Turkish tea glasses, tasted richer and finer than any I had ever tasted.
Cricket was beautiful. Its logo looked as if it had been painted by a calligraphy brush, moving from elegant but clear lettering into a delicate image of its namesake insect. The cover of the first issue I remember seeing featured a Margot Zemach illustration of a regal tiger reclining on a green bench; the back cover showed the equally regal back of his head. Inside were poems, stories, cartoons; work by Madhur Jaffrey and Hilary Knight — but also by other children, my age and younger.
After that, I started looking for Cricket at the library. I read it conscientiously, aware that it signified something about the kind of child I wanted to be. And when my birthday came, around five months later, I requested a subscription. My parents were happy to oblige. It was the first magazine I’d ever received in the mail. Each issue was a delight, a challenge — and slightly scary. These were thick, book-quality magazines, with volume numbers, to be treated not as disposable objects but as treasures. The title, I would learn, was a reference to an Isaac Bashevis Singer story in which a cricket chirps continuously, “telling a story that would never end.”
I wasn’t allowed to read Highlights. I guess my mother didn’t think it was good literature. So I had to covertly mainline “Goofus and Gallant” at the dentist’s office, as I would later sneak the Baby-Sitters Club books. (Ranger Rick was for that alien species, animal kids.)
For those of us with literary or artistic pretensions — however amorphous — Cricket wasn’t just our best option; it was our only option.
I’ll admit it: I didn’t always keep on top of my Crickets. Sometimes schoolwork took precedence, or I became absorbed in a book that wasn’t “good literature” or in a Newbery-winning novel where a child experiences tragedy. Crickets would then accumulate in a reproachful stack — an early lesson in the pile-of-serious-magazine-induced guilt I’ve always felt needs its own German compound word.
This was appropriate. When she founded Cricket in 1973, the (German-born) veteran publisher Marianne Carus intended her magazine to be “The New Yorker for children,” an antidote to the pablum offered to her three school-age kids. (The magazine’s founding was underpinned by a robust phonics-based philosophy of reading.) The opening party, in New York City, reportedly attracted so many luminaries that one guest remarked to Carus, “If a bomb had gone off during your party, the entire children’s book world would’ve been wiped out.”
Instead, they became contributors. In concert with a staff that included the original art director, Trina Schart Hyman, and the former New Yorker editor Clifton Fadiman, nine times a year she published a product of unbelievable quality, with work by Singer, T.S. Eliot, Nikki Giovanni, Ursula Le Guin, John Updike, Charles Ghigna. The folksy “Old Cricket Says” column that bookended every issue was frequently written by Lloyd Alexander. “We only accepted stories and art of the highest quality,” Carus told a writer for Medium in 2017. (Carus died in 2021.)
Over the years, the magazine has been the cause of well-deserved raptures from many literary types. The typical Cricket reader, this newspaper wrote, “was intelligent and urbane, often far beyond his or her preteen years, and felt constrained by a culture that in the 1970s still relegated children to the edges of adult life.”
I wanted to be that urbane child — but the truth is, I wasn’t, really. Perhaps it was the whiff of parental approval that made Cricket feel slightly intimidating, but I was also in awe of the kids who wrote poems and stories and got them published. How were there children confident enough, bold enough, to show their work to the world — and worse, submit it to judgment? I imagined them swanning around, sipping pear nectar (for some reason I thought pear nectar was soigné), making puns and knowing the names of colleges.
When I brought up Cricket around my co-workers here at the Book Review, I learned that several of them had done just that — well, maybe not the pear nectar. Alexandra Jacobs won a third-place prize at the age of 7, before winning a silver, at 10, for a poem called “March Gossip.” A.O. Scott submitted a story. “I was in third or fourth grade and won second prize,” he wrote me. “It was kind of an important moment in my development as a writer, in that it was the first recognition I ever received and it helped me form the idea that this might be something I could do.” Me? At 9, I sent a surly letter to the editor requesting more doll fiction. I never heard back.
If I am honest, my favorite part of Cricket was the regular cast of insects — Cricket, Ladybug, Spider — who drifted through the margins, annotating and commenting and defining words.
Many of my friends, literary and otherwise, were Cricket readers and, like me, have saved all their old issues (though others who I’d assumed were nectar-swiggers now admit they were intimidated by the magazine). They are too fine, too precious and too imbued with power to throw away. Like the most formative influences, they were aspirational.
As an adult, then, I came back to my Crickets. Without any weight of expectation or idea of what I should be reading, I sat down in my parents’ basement and read through years’ worth of issues, finally able to really enjoy the quality, the beauty, the ambition of the project.
In 2011, the Carus Publishing Company was sold to ePals Corporation, a Canadian digital education platform. But you can still read the paper edition.
This past year, my small son was given his first subscription to one of Cricket’s magazines for young children, Ladybug. He loves getting it in the mail. We read the stories and do the word search. He likes to see Cricket and Spider and Ladybug pop up in the margins. The paper is slick and I don’t feel any compunction about recycling the issues, especially since he’s always read them closely. (He also reads Ranger Rick Jr. — he’s an animal kind of kid.)
I take pictures of him paging through each issue on my phone and send them to his godmother, Elaine, knowing she is probably in another time zone, where she is asleep, but wanting her to know he has received her gift.
