
Luke Batterham
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BEATRIX POTTER TO BERTHA MAHONY ON THE IMPENDING WAR: Bertha Mahony, doyenne of the American children's literature movement, was founder of the Boston Bookshop for Boys & Girls and of the influential Horn Book Magazine, the first periodical devoted exclusively to children's books and reading. She and Beatrix Potter formed a close epistolary friendship, one which came to public notice when she printed a letter by Beatrix Potter about her work in the Horn Book. In 1927, following an appeal by Peter Rabbit, readers of the magazine helped save a strip of land near Lake Windermere from being sold to builders. This letter also mentions the visit that summer of an equally influential pioneer of children's literature, Anne Carroll Moore, credited with introducing Beatrix Potter to the American public and editor of The Art of Beatrix Potter (1956).
This evocative letter was printed by Jane Crowell Morse, Beatrix Potter's Americans: Selected Letters (1982), pp. 89-90, although with the omission of the end of the final sentence and a possible misordering of pages.