Acknowledgments

This volume is a result of scholarly exchanges at – and after – two academic conferences arranged as part of the research project “Children and Books – Enterprises and Encounters”, led by Charlotte Appel and Nina Christensen, and funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. We owe many thanks to this foundation, and to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters as well as the Royal Danish Library for co-hosting our conference in Copenhagen, 31 May – 2 June 2018. Papers, workshops, and informal discussions at this event gave immediate rise to the idea of a second conference to further develop the implications of a transnational approach to books for children. M. O. Grenby joined the organizing committee, and Andrea Immel from the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University offered to host and finance this “second leg”, which took place at Princeton University Library, 31 October – 2 November 2019. We are most grateful for this generous support.

Both conferences featured participants from different countries and different disciplines, and after the second conference scholars who had presented were invited to submit chapters for this edited volume. The aim was to encourage diversity regarding empirical cases as well as applied methodologies. Our volume was conceived before, but composed and completed during, the Covid-19 pandemic, which resulted in reduced access to archives and libraries along with numerous other challenges. Many thanks to everybody involved for helping each other during this difficult time.

Financial support from the Cotsen Children’s Library made it possible to include a number of high-quality illustrations and to have the same copyeditor revise all manuscripts prior to publication. Again, we are very grateful for this support, and for the excellent work done by Christopher Culver as our copyeditor. Finally, our thanks go to the series editors, Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, for accepting the edited volume as part of the John Benjamins series ‘Children’s Literature, Culture and Cognition’ (CLCC).

It is our hope that this book will travel across many countries and disciplines and help inspire more research into transnational aspects of books for children 1750–1900. The journey has only just begun.