Weston Woods Newbery Caldecott Banquet Speech Cassette, June 1973

The Piece

A presentation case containing a limited edition cassette of the 1973 Newbery and Caldecott Medal acceptance speeches, given to guests at the award banquet in June of that year.

The case is black, hinged in brass, and lined throughout in a deep gold velvet with a die cut recess sized to hold a single cassette. Set into the inside of the lid is a printed card reading Newbery Caldecott Award Banquet, June 1973, with the two winning book emblems either side of it and the line Presented by weston woods in association with E. P. Dutton and Harper and Row.

The cassette carries the same two emblems on its label, over the words Limited Edition, Newbery Caldecott Medal Acceptance Speeches.

Side one is the Caldecott Medal acceptance speech, abridged, by Blair Lent, illustrator of The Funny Little Woman. Side two is the Newbery Medal acceptance speech by Jean Craighead George for Julie of the Wolves. The shell is printed with the Weston Woods logo and the line P 1973 Weston Woods.

A folded insert card sits under the cassette giving the full credits for both books, and the words Printed in U.S.A. at the corner.

History & Provenance

This object dates itself to a single month, which is close to unheard of.

The card in the lid says June 1973, and the cassette carries a 1973 recording claim. The two books named on it were the two medals awarded that year and no other. The Newbery Medal for 1973 went to Jean Craighead George for Julie of the Wolves, and the Caldecott Medal for 1973 went to Blair Lent for his pictures in The Funny Little Woman, retold by Arlene Mosel. Those are the correct pairings for that year and for that year alone, so even without the printed date the object could only be from one banquet.

What it is matters as much as when. The Newbery Caldecott banquet is the evening the medals are actually handed over and the winners give their speeches, and this is not a commercial recording of those speeches made afterwards. It is the souvenir handed to the people in the room, produced by Weston Woods with the two publishers, E. P. Dutton for the Caldecott book and Harper and Row for the Newbery. The case, the velvet, the brass hinges and the printed lid card are all the language of a presentation piece rather than a product.

Weston Woods, of Weston, Connecticut, was the house that adapted picture books into film and sound for schools and libraries, and it had the relationships with the publishers and the authors to make something like this possible.

The two voices on the tape are worth naming. Jean Craighead George wrote more than a hundred books for children and died in 2012. Blair Lent illustrated and wrote across four decades and died in 2009. A recording of either of them accepting a medal, in their own voice, on the night, is the sort of thing that ends up in a university special collection rather than on a shelf.

Complete examples are the exception. Banquet giveaways get separated: the case is kept and the tape is lost, or the tape survives without the case and the insert. This one has the case, the cassette and the insert card together.

Offered as a document and an object. The tape has not been played and no claim is made about the condition of the recording on it.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Most literary collectibles are objects that a writer touched. This is a recording of two of them speaking, on the night the work was recognised, made for the hundred or so people who were there.

It reads properly on a shelf with the books. Julie of the Wolves and The Funny Little Woman are both still in print and still widely loved, and the case sits beside them as the evidence of what happened to them in 1973.

For an institution it is the sort of thing that fills a real gap. Banquet ephemera from the medal years is thinly held, and a complete case with its tape and insert is a catalogue record most special collections would be glad to make.

For a dealer, this is the rarest kind of stock: an object with a printed date, a named producer, two named speakers, and nothing about it that needs to be argued.