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Florence Silver has been on the same treasure hunt for over 30 years. She’s panned catalog ponds, dug bookstore rivers, and sailed eBay seas for her one goal: obtaining first editions of famous American children’s books.

Indianapolis collectors are looking for all Newbery and Caldecott Award winners and honorary titles. This is an industry benchmark list that is often loved by students who have completed an assigned reading or have been to the library. So far, Silver has donated 547 of the over 750 total titles. In addition, she found a home familiar to her book-loving siblings, the Lilly Library at Indiana University.

Silver is a former English teacher and mail-order bookseller. Its mission is to save a book from an obscure spot on a shelf sitting next to a companion who doesn’t share the same lineage. She operates according to collector’s standards of purity. First editions become rarer and more valuable after awards explode the popularity of titles. All the more so if they wear dust her jacket and creator’s signature.

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Silver is officially retired, but collecting books isn’t just a habit of throwing them away. As she puts it, “When it’s in your blood, it’s in your blood.” It fits nicely with her goal of promoting access to children’s literature.

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At the Lilly Library’s book collector’s exhibition earlier this year, Sarah McElroy Mitchell saw people floating in Silver’s section. Inside the glass case are famous titles that evoke a flood of memories, including the 1990 Newbery Award-winning “Number the Stars” and the 1975 award-winning “MC Higgins, the Great.” was

“So many people read these books when they were kids,” said Mitchell, the library’s reading room coordinator.

Shirley Mullin, owner of Kids Ink Children’s Bookstore, calls the Newbery and Caldecott Award winners and winners a kind of Academy Award book. Both are awarded annually by a division of the American Library Association. Since 1922, the former has honored the author’s distinguished work. The latter medal was first awarded in 1938 to honor the artist’s illustrations.

From there, libraries and stores buy more, teachers assign, and children read. Raised in Cleveland, Silver taught literature at Carmel’s Woodbrook Elementary School and Clay Middle School in the 1970s. She took up this profession after studying the subject at Indiana University, and her academic advisor encouraged her to choose good children’s literature. She found Silver reading her book rewarding as well.

“They take me to another world, to another era, to take me out of the present,” Silver said.

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Due to the competitive nature of children’s literature, publishers may have wanted to assess how well a book would sell before reprinting it for years, Mitchell said. She said first runs of modern books, in particular, are hard to find because they’re scattered all over the store before they’re awarded.

“The first edition may only have been a few hundred volumes,” Mitchell said. “To keep track of them all today, especially when they’re in the hands of children, is pretty amazing.” said.

She calls her silver prowess a gift. Collectors didn’t get it overnight.

From a mail-order bookstore to an expert collector

Silver, 73, jokes that he has a split personality that used to manifest through his family’s landline. When her caller requested her longtime nickname, “Renny,” her two children knew it was either her close friend or her family. When someone asked for “Flo” from her business, “Flo Silver Books,” they said, “Oh mom, that’s a book order.”

If teaching fostered my love of children’s books, learning to mail order books taught me to seek out rare books. After she dominated a classroom of children and adults, Silver left and had her first child on the assumption that she would return, instead a chance conversation at a book show in the mid-1980s , led her foray into her trade.

A man who recently acquired 5,000 volumes of mostly Texas and Western American topics knew the finer points of cataloging, but needed help doing it. Silver was keen to learn on her parent-friendly schedule.After working under him for several years, she launched her own mail-to-order book business in 1987. .

Her specialty was easily obtained. Canceled vacations to Europe in the early 1970s left Silver and her husband to explore the Yucatan. The couple fell in love with Latin American culture, art, and archeology.

There, first with a typewriter, then with a computer, Silver published four annual publications of 500 titles each on travel, history, art, archeology and anthropology in Mesoamerica and South America until his retirement in 2016. I created a catalog. d She moves a trolley loaded with books from her trunk to the post office and mails it to the buyer.

Dealings took Silver to Cincinnati, Columbus, Chicago, and Dayton, searching for books at shows and secondhand bookstores. She also looked through the catalogs of other sellers. That’s how she found the impetus for her Passion for Children’s Books project. She was a librarian in Stillwater, Oklahoma, loading first editions of Newbery and Caldecott’s books.

Thus, Silver’s inner master and treasure hunter became one, and a new goal was realized.

Silver’s Road to Finding Hundreds of First Editions

As voracious readers often do, Silver calls books his friends. They live in all the spaces of her and her husband’s north house, with the exception of the laundry room and bathroom. They are stacked around a bedside her table lamp and placed on a shelf next to artwork depicting scenes including Ecuador’s Mini Her Fruit Her Stand. A row of spines draws attention behind the ring of chairs in the warmly hued living room. Quiet participants wait for page ideas to be invoked in conversation.

Paper Friends connected owners to the human circle of the industry. His one such companion is Marin. She cannot pinpoint exactly when she met Silver. Mullin says the collector was one of her early customers when Kids Ink opened on her 56th and Illinois streets 36 years ago.

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Silver has been visiting Marin for years, even before the awards were announced. Who will win this year? she asks.

“It’s always been kind of a joke, because I tell her. Flo, this is what you’re probably going to win. At least, if not the major prize than the honor.” Sometimes I was right and sometimes I was really wrong.”

Silver’s taste and eagle eye helped her win. have pre-ordered.

Almost five years after “Sarah, Plain and Tall” won the 1986 Newbery Medal, collectors found their first print at Kids Ink. Indiana He called a Barnes & Noble store to find out that the 2022 Caldecott Award winner, “Watercress,” was sold online to her $125 to her $250 seller. Got it for a retail price of around $20.

Silver has a list of the first prints he is still looking for in his purse. Folded in a file at her home are memorabilia from her old independent bookstore and the tools she used, like her guides in gold pockets with dog ears.

Some rare prints have missed silver. Sometimes she hasn’t found them. Also, she sometimes goes over budget. Collectors bought her for just $5, which jumped to $350, but now she doesn’t spend much. Among them is her 1963 Newbery winner “A Wrinkle in Time” (Silver saw her sell for $5,000 to $10,000). .

Unexpectedly, the collector combs the corridors, scrolling through the screens to find the first pristine print. According to her, hunting is 90% of her enjoyment.

Now the Lilly Library’s collection shows how literature has changed

Silver vows to be a literary treasure hunter for the rest of his life, but remains a teacher who wants people to read. She doesn’t shy away from trends like “Sweet Valley” books and her grandson’s taste for Minecraft.

“He loves reading books, so I bought him the book,” Silver said. “As far as I’m concerned, anything exciting for kids to read is OK. So within limits.”

In 2015, she donated her first children’s book to the Lilly Library. This is the institution she chose because it keeps her collection together and available to anyone who reserves it.

Collectively, they show how the field has developed over the past century. I paid attention.

For example, the 1978 Newbery Award-winning “Bridge to Terabithia” chronicles a boy dealing with grief after a friend dies.

“This has become a problem that kids are more likely to run into in the books,” Mitchell said.

Silver also hopes the collection will be a springboard for uncensored debate. may contain depictions that are widely seen today as more insensitive and racist.

“If you teach Huck Finn or Laura Ingalls Wilder, I think you need to talk about the time it was written, the political and social climate,” Silver said. “But don’t whitewash it.”

Besides Newbery and Caldecott’s books, Silver donated a well-known children’s series to the Lilly Library, and even more books to the Indianapolis Public Library. Over the years she has been collecting, she has found joy in connecting people with books on subjects that interest her.

“At 73, my philosophy is to go from my house to yours,” Silver said.

Of course, enjoying the treasure increases the satisfaction of the hunt.

Please contact Indystar reporter Domenica Bongiovanni at 317-444-7339 or d.bongiovanni@indystar.com.follow her Facebook, Instagram Or Twitter: @ Domenica Report.