the country's goals: a heightened awareness of children's literature so that we can make book lovers of children, and a determination to educate their parents to realize the importance of good books for children. Therefore, I urge you on behalf of children everywhere to keep their needs in the forefront of your deliberations: after all, our future is in their hands.” Touchstones In his 1978 presidential address, Stott asked the membership to establish a canon, "which would provide common texts for shared dialogue and curricula and presumably position the field within canonical strata of academic privilege". By 1980, a committee whose responsibility it was to formulate this canon, which consisted of two English professors, two librarians from a public school and one librarian from a public library, presented a panel discussion on the issues surrounding the development of the canon. The committee members had a variety of different views on the structure of the canon, for example, whether the list should reflect "literary excellence and/or historic significance". The librarians in particular suggested popular titles, arguing that the association must listen to the opinions of child readers. Scholar Perry Nodelman responded to the panel in the following Children’s Literature Association Quarterly issue, describing the process as "an undemocratic but praiseworthy endeavor" where "some books are more important than others". He also explained how providing a rationale for the list was crucial. The final list was published in 1982–83 as a pamphlet and consisted of 63 titles. It met with a hostile reception, so a revised version was presented as a series of "touchstones" (inspired by Matthew Arnold's description of a work as a benchmark). Nodelman edited the revised project, entitled Touchstones, and defended this method in his introduction, explaining that teachers need a set of books to go to when teaching a course for the first time and these books are those "beside which we may place other children's books in order to make judgments about their excellence". He explains that "a touchstone has to be unconventional enough to draw attention to itself, to cause controversy, perhaps to encourage imitators." He contends that the list is a way to "open discussion" about children's literature. Each of the titles in the series includes a scholarly essay that aims to provide "a clearer, deeper sense of the best in children's books, and all the strength and joy to be drawn from them". The