I’m really enjoying the discussions over on Calling Caldecott about this year’s winners. The comments, divvied up between the last two posts, mostly address 1) why The Farmer and the Clown didn’t get any love, 2) why This One Summer DID, and 3) why there are six honor books, a new record.

The last question provokes in me a word problem. If the committee’s charge is to honor the year’s “most distinguished books,” what’s the cutoff? I’m hearing that the high number of honor books is because it was such a great year for picture books, but that doesn’t really follow–the books aren’t being judged by some abstract standard of “being distinguished”; they are being compared only to each other, and the ones that are distinct from that field are supposed to be the ones that are honored. Maybe the question is not about why there are so many, but why there are so few, it being such a great year and all. The procedure for naming the winner of the Newbery or Caldecott is mathematical and sensible (it seems to me); I wonder if the honor books should be similarly selected.

I like the way we do things at the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards: one winner and no more than two honor books. The judges have the option of selecting fewer honors (or none) but that hasn’t happened since 1995. In the 1980s and earlier, three honor books were frequently named, and in 1968 they went crazy (didn’t we all), naming four in each category. In my sterner moments, I dream of going back to the tradition of the first year, 1967, when the BGHB judges named, for the then-two categories, only winners. Or if we could at least skip the euphemisms and go back to–unthinkable in this era–runners-up.