Florence Silver has been on the same treasure hunt for more than 30 years. She’s panned in the ponds of catalogs, mined the rivers of bookstores and navigated the high seas of eBay in service of a single goal: to acquire the first printings of the first editions of celebrated American children’s books.
The Indianapolis collector is looking for every Newbery and Caldecott medal winner and honor book — an industry benchmark list with volumes often beloved to any student who’s ever completed assigned reading or frequented a library. So far, Silver has donated 547 of the more than 750 total titles, by her count. What’s more, she’s found them a home that’s well-known to her book-loving brethren: Indiana University’s Lilly Library.
Silver is a former English teacher and mail-order book dealer whose mission is to rescue volumes from their often inconspicuous places on shelves where they sit beside peers that lack the same pedigree. She operates by collectors’ standards of purity: The first editions’ first printings become more rare and valuable after the awards explode the titles’ popularity. All the better if they wear a dust jacket and the creator’s signature.
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Silver is officially retired, but book collecting isn’t a habit one simply casts off. As she puts it, “once it’s in your blood, it’s in your blood.” Fortunately for inquiring minds the world over, her adventure dovetails well with her goal to encourage access to visionary children’s literature.
At Lilly Library’s exhibition of book collectors earlier this year, Sarah McElroy Mitchell watched person after person hover over Silver’s section. Inside a glass case sat 1990 Newbery winner “Number the Stars,” 1975 winner “M. C. Higgins, the Great” and similar famous titles that cue a flood of memories.
“So many people had read these books in their childhood,” said Mitchell, who is the library’s reading room coordinator.
Shirley Mullin, the owner of Kids Ink Children’s Bookstore, calls the Newbery and Caldecott medal winners and honorees a sort of Academy Awards of books. Both are awarded annually by a division of the American Library Association. Since 1922, the former has honored distinguished work by an author. The latter medal was first bestowed in 1938 to celebrate an artist’s illustrations.
From there, libraries and stores purchase more, teachers assign and kids read. Silver, who grew up in Cleveland, taught literature at Woodbrook Elementary School and Clay Middle School in Carmel in the 1970s. She began in the profession after studying the subject at Indiana University, and her teaching supervisor prodded her to select good children’s literature. Silver found reading the books rewarding, too.
“They take me to another world, they take me to another time, they take me out of the present,” Silver said, “although some are social issues and are very current and are very heart-breaking.”
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The competitive nature of children’s literature means that publishers over the years might have wanted to assess how well a book would sell before printing more, Mitchell said. First runs of modern books especially can be scattered throughout stores before they’re honored and therefore tough to find, she said.
“You might have a first run that’s only a couple hundred books, so to track all those today — particularly if they’ve been through the hands of children — is really extraordinary,” Mitchell said.
She calls Silver’s prowess a gift. The collector didn’t acquire it overnight.
Silver, 73, jokes she has a split personality that used to manifest itself through the family’s landline. When a caller requested “Renny,” her longtime nickname, her two kids knew it was a close friend or family member. When someone asked for “Flo,” from her business “Flo Silver Books,” they’d say “Oh, Mom, it’s a book order.”
If teaching instilled her love of children’s books, then learning the mail-order book trade taught her to ferret out rare copies. After reigning over classrooms of kids and adults, Silver left and had her first child, assuming she’d return. Instead, a happenstance conversation at a mid-1980s book show guided her foray into dealing.
A man who’d recently acquired 5,000 volumes of mostly Texan and Western Americana topics knew the finer points of cataloging but needed help to do it. Silver was eager to learn on a parent-friendly schedule. After a few years of working for him, she launched her own mail-order book business in 1987.
Her area of expertise came easily. A canceled vacation to Europe in the early 1970s led to Silver and her husband to explore the Yucatan. The couple fell in love with Central and South American cultures, art and archaeology.
So, first with a typewriter and then a computer, Silver assembled four catalogs a year, with 500 titles each, on Mesoamerican and South American travel, history, art, archaeology and anthropology until she retired in 2016. Several times a week, she’d wheel a dolly stacked with books from her trunk into the post office to mail to buyers.
The trade took Silver to Cincinnati, Columbus, Chicago and Dayton, where she would hunt for volumes at shows and antiquarian booksellers. She’d pore over others sellers’ catalogs, too, which is how she found the impetus for her children’s book passion project: a Stillwater, Oklahoma, librarian loaded with first printings of Newbery and Caldecott books.
With that, Silver’s inner teacher and treasure hunter converged, and a new goal materialized.
As voracious readers often do, Silver calls her books friends. They reside in every space in her and her husband’s north-side home except for the laundry room and bathrooms. They’re stacked around a lamp on a bedside table, on shelves beside artworks that depict scenes including a mini Ecuadorian fruit stand. Behind a ring of warm-hued living room seats, rows of spines stand at attention — quiet participants waiting for their pages’ ideas to be invoked in conversations.
The paper friends have connected their owner to a circle of human ones in the industry. One such companion is Mullin, who can’t pinpoint exactly when she met Silver because she feels like she’s known her forever. Mullin said the collector was among her early customers when Kids Ink opened 36 years ago at 56th and Illinois streets.
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Over the years, Silver has visited Mullin before the awards were announced. Who will win this year? she’d ask.
“It was always kind of a joke because I would tell her: Flo, here’s what’s probably going to win — at least if not the main award than an honor,” Mullin said, laughing. “And, you know, sometimes I was right. And then sometimes I was really wrong.”
Silver’s taste and eagle eye have aided her acquisitions. She pre-ordered “Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre” just because she thought it was good — before it became a 2022 Caldecott honor book.
About five years after “Sarah, Plain and Tall” won the 1986 Newbery Medal, the collector spotted a first printing at Kids Ink — a find Mullin said could have been caused by a returned purchase that the publisher shipped out again. Phone calls to Indiana Barnes & Noble locations earned her 2022 Caldecott Medal winner “Watercress” for the retail price of about $20 instead of the $125 to $250 sellers asked online.
Silver carries a list of first printings she’s still seeking in her wallet. Folded into her files at home are memorabilia from bygone independent bookstores and tools she’s used, like the dog-eared gold pocket guide to identifying first editions that has a sticky note with smudged penciled notes stuck inside.
Some rare printings have eluded Silver. Sometimes she just hasn’t found them. Other times, they’re beyond her budget. The collector has purchased a for as little as $5 and has jumped up to $350, though she doesn’t spend that much now. That’s kept books, including the 1963 Newbery winner “A Wrinkle in Time” — which Silver has seen for sale between $5,000 and $10,000 — out of reach.
Undeterred, the collector still combs the aisles and scrolls through screens to look for their pristine first printings. The hunt, she says, is 90% of the fun.
Even as Silver vows to be a literary treasure seeker for life, she remains ever the teacher who wants people to read. She doesn’t eschew trends like the “Sweet Valley” books or her grandson’s penchant for Minecraft.
“I have bought him books on that because he loves to read them,” Silver said. “Anything that you can get a child excited about to read is OK by me as far as I’m concerned — I mean within limits.”
In 2015, she donated the first load of children’s books to the Lilly Library — an institution she chose because it would keep the collection together and make it available to anyone who makes an appointment.
United, they show how the field has developed over the past century. Mitchell noted how the arc bends toward expressing human emotion that impacts the stories coming after it.
1978 Newbery winner “Bridge to Terabithia,” for example, chronicles a boy who deals with grief after his friend dies — a topic she said had not been mainstream in children’s literature.
“It’s become an issue that children are more likely to encounter in their books,” Mitchell said. “That was a trendsetter in a way and changed the standards of what could be.”
Silver wants the collection to be a starting point for discussion without censorship, too. As creatures of their time periods, first printings of the some of the books — like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” series — can contain depictions that are more widely seen as insensitive and racist today.
“I think what you need to do is, if you’re going to teach Huck Finn, if you’re going to teach Laura Ingalls Wilder … you talk about the time it was written in, what the political and social atmosphere was and how things have evolved,” Silver said. “But don’t whitewash it.”
Beyond the Newbery and Caldecott books, Silver has donated famous children’s series to the Lilly Library and more volumes to the Indianapolis Public Library, among others. Across her years of collecting, she has delighted in connecting people with books whose subjects they’re interested in.
“My philosophy now at age 73 is: from my house to your house,” Silver said. “I want them to go to a good home and have the next person to be able to appreciate them.”
Treasure enjoyed, of course, completes the satisfaction of the hunt.
Contact IndyStar reporter Domenica Bongiovanni at 317-444-7339 or
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