The Secret Language

New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1960. Very Good -/Very Good. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1960. First Edition. Octavo (20.5cm); publisher's cloth in pictorial dust jacket retaining original price ($2.75); vii,[1],167pp. Moderate wear to jacket margins, rear panel a bit soiled and quite unevenly toned, boards bowed; Near Very Good, contents clean and sound.

Increasingly scarce young adult novel by the famed editor-in-chief at Harper & Row Ursula Nordstrom (1910-1988), who handled classics like E.B. White's "Stuart Little" and "Charlotte's Web," Margaret Wise Brown's "Goodnight Moon" and "The Runaway Rabbit," Crocket Johnson's "Harold and the Purple Carrot," Louise Fitzhugh's "Harriet the Spy," Maurice Sendak's "In the Night Kitchen," and Shel Silverstein's "Where the Sidewalk Ends."

Like Brown, Fitzhugh, and Sendak, Nordstrom was also queer and the present work, her only book, is a veiled autobiographical novel of life at a girl's boarding school where two close friends share a secret language. A 1988 reissue of "The Secret Language" points to the scarcely veiled queer coded language, in which the word "leebossa is for when you like something. When something is just lovely or when something works out just right, it is leebossa. For anything especially nice you can say leeleeleeleebossa. But that's only for something really wonderful" (p. 24).

For further information, we recommend Kelly Blewett's article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, "Ursula Nordstrom and the Queer History of the Children's Book" (August 28, 2016).