Some years ago, when the Boston Public Library was considering closing a few branches, I wrote to the Boston Globe. To make fresh a point about the value of reading, I mentioned Bill Watterson’s popular comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes. Remember, I suggested, how many times Calvin is pictured standing in gloomy half-light by the bedside of his parents, who are either lying there groggy, disbelieving, or are bolting upright, horrified. Whenever Calvin is alarming his drowsy parents, glance at the bedside table. Under the lamp. You’ll always find a book upside-down on spread pages, half-read. Calvin’s parents are always in the middle of a book. Is it any wonder that Calvin has the cranial firepower of a Merlin, a Charles Dickens, a Steven Spielberg? He comes from a reading family.

The venerable Horn Book Magazine is eighty-six years old. When I first came across it as an undergraduate, the journal was only fifty-two years old (though it spoke with Solomonic confidence born of the convictions of its erudite editor, Paul Heins). As I’ve grown older, it has grown young — partly because its current editor in chief and executive editor, Roger Sutton and Martha V. Parravano, know that to evaluate contemporary books they are obliged to pay closer attention to contemporary life than earlier editors might have done. The world changes faster than it used to (or is that just me?).

It’s grown young as I’ve aged because children beginning to read are almost always young. A secret benefit of working on the sidelines of children’s literature is that access to the newest of children’s books is better than Botox at rejuvenation. Watching the dubious reader experience the nitroglycerine jolt of the right book at the right time is one thrill that never grows old.

The Horn Book Magazine is to children’s books what the Blue Book is to automobile assessments. (Yes, it can be wrong, too: inflated here, distracted there. But only often enough to keep its devoted readers on their toes, kicking the tires of recommended books for themselves.) I bet Calvin’s parents flip through The Horn Book at their local library, or maybe even have their own subscription. As a parent, I read every issue cover to cover the day it arrives. Maybe I’m something of an anomaly — but hey, so is Calvin. And I like that company.

Once upon a time, the more authoritarian of Horn Book editors — including my dear departed friends Paul and Ethel Heins — would have frowned at my choosing a comic-strip character as a thematic device to introduce a discussion about books and reading. They’d have preferred a fairy-tale favorite: Cinderella, Bluebeard, Rapunzel. Or someone from the classic British fantasies — Alice, Peter Pan, Pooh. They’d have expected (or anyway hoped) that every family would recognize the names of those new-world kids Tom Sawyer, Jo March, Anne of Green Gables, or the Ingalls family of all those little houses in the wilderness.

And since they never neglected to consider what the latest wave of immigrants might be best able to appreciate, they might have suggested I draw on one of those picture-book masterpieces so often known by one name, the way children think of themselves: Madeline. Babar. Eloise. If I were to strike out, to dare modernity, I’d be expected to turn to established twentieth- century heroes like Harriet the Spy, the Great Gilly Hopkins, or M.C. Higgins, the Great.

For me to instead employ a pint-size anarchist from the funny pages — what has reading come to? How has the nation’s literary life devolved if, in hoping to speak to everyone in the room, I need to rely on a pop-culture figure?

Those earlier enthusiasts for children’s books were old-fashioned, yes, but not stodgy. They thought hard and well. After a while, they’d have understood. The worthy missionaries who stocked the libraries we frequented in our childhoods, who talked up new books into classics, these pioneers were not only keen on narrative and cunning on message. They were visually literate, too. Those Horn Book editors of the past would recognize that the book on the bedside table of Calvin’s parents might more likely be Charlotte’s Web or Monster or When You Reach Me than the latest bestseller on the New York Times adult list. That open book, caught in mid-story, might well be something that The Horn Book Magazine recommends with a starred review. After all, those parents were two-thirds of a family of readers. (Or one-half, if you count Hobbes, and maybe you have to.) Those parents were smart. They knew what they were doing.

Picking up this book, so do you.