I first met Holly Ramsey when she was hired to design a catalog for the Minneapolis publishing company where I was working. The publisher was Carolrhoda Books, and Holly's name had been suggested by Susan Pearson, Carolrhoda's editor at the time. We were trying to give Carolrhoda a new look in keeping with its new editorial thrust.

Holly, a former designer at Winston Press (then a CBS subsidiary, now folded into Harper San Francisco), had just begun trying to reenter the workplace, having battled her way back from the disabling effects of multiple sclerosis. Much later, I learned that her disease had confined her to a wheelchair, and only through the enormous ettort of daily physical therapy had she been able to regain use of her muscles-her legs, her hands, even her eyes. At the time, I only knew that she spent her mornings working and her afternoons resting. Suffice it to say that her work was splendid, an artful blending of classic design and attention to the readers' needs.

When I left my job in the spring of 1986 to see what else the world had to offer, Holly gave me a call, inviting me over for coffee one morning. She had an idea for a magazine about children's books that would treat the subject thematically-in fact, she had come up with the idea some years previously, but the circumstances had never seemed right. (Her husband, Dan Dailey, recalls the very moment she got the idea, because she woke him up at three in the morning to tell him about it.) By midsummer, she had developed a prototype. We were also forming the basis that was to lead to our warm friendship. and at some point soon after she asked if I'd like to be the editor.

Saying yes was easy; working through the details involve in publishing our first issue was hard. We formed an editorial board from the abundance of talented and knowledgable children' s book people in the Twin Cities; Dan Dailey joined us as marketing and circulation consultant. The Five Owls became a family affair, with Holly and Dan's son, Henry, pitching in to apply mailing labels and shelve books and her father signing on as bookkeeper. We felt our way through the first few years, rejoicing in the mail that brought enthusiastic encouragement as well as subscriptions and lamenting our many errors and oversights. Through it all, we sometimes stopped to look at each other in disbelief: "It's really working," Holly would say.

Two-and-a-half years ago, Holly learned that she had ovarian cancer. After she recovered from surgery, she underwent an eight-month series of chemotherapy treatments. While her physical strength was sapped, her spirits were undiminished, and remarkably she carried on her work as usual. What joy everyone took in celebrating the end of her treatments, and what dismay we experienced when further cancer was discovered a few months later. Numerous subsequent treatments were effective for only months at a time, and by last spring, her condition was termed inoperable. Yet even then she was eager to look at the new books as they arrived, and throughout her last summer, nearly up until her death on September 6, she was still percolating with ideas for future issues and ways to enlarge our readership.

My favorite times will remain the long afternoons we spent with the books themselves, reading them silently and then sharing them with each other, our cups of coffee at hand. That love of reading was at the heart of Holly's inspiration to start The Five Owls, for she hoped that through its pages, more parents and children could come to discover the satisfying pleasure that can be found in reading a good book together.