Cricket (magazine)

Cricket began in 1973 as a deliberately literary magazine for middle-grade readers. Marianne Carus established the publication in the United States with an editorial model that placed original writing, folklore, poetry, and illustration beside one another rather than separating them into instructional departments.¹ The magazine’s name refers to the insect and to the tradition of the fireside storyteller, not to the bat-and-ball sport. Its visual identity, recurring framing devices, and carefully designed pages helped make each issue feel like a small anthology.

The core audience has generally been children roughly nine to fourteen years old, a period often underserved between picture-book periodicals and magazines aimed at teenagers. Cricket has therefore occupied a distinctive position in children’s publishing: accessible in length and presentation, but ambitious in vocabulary, narrative form, and subject matter.

The magazine’s central appeal is its mixture of literary forms and cultural traditions. Issues commonly bring together short stories, poems, myths, legends, humorous pieces, historical or natural-history writing, puzzles, and illustrations.¹ Fiction may range from realistic family episodes to fantasy, while nonfiction often introduces a place, practice, animal, historical subject, or artistic tradition without abandoning a narrative voice.

That variety gives Cricket a different rhythm from a narrowly educational periodical. A child can encounter a contemporary story beside a folktale, a translated work beside an original poem, and an image that carries meaning independently of the accompanying text. The format also makes the magazine useful in classrooms and libraries, where individual selections can be read independently or used to compare genres, cultures, and narrative perspectives.

Cricket became the flagship of a wider children’s-magazine publishing program associated with Carus Publishing and, later, Cricket Media. The related portfolio has included publications such as Babybug, Ladybug, Spider, and Cobblestone, each directed toward a different age group or editorial emphasis.¹ This family of magazines extended the original premise across childhood while preserving an emphasis on edited, age-appropriate content.

As publishing moved online, Cricket acquired digital-facing forms alongside print subscriptions and library circulation. Its continuing value is not simply that it supplies reading practice: it introduces children to the idea of a magazine as a curated literary space, where authors, illustrators, editors, and designers shape a shared issue. Library serials catalogs and children’s-literature collections document its long-running presence in the periodical field.^{2 3}

Cricket is notable for the breadth of its literary ecosystem, not only for its name recognition. Its compact stories and poems have provided an entry point to forms that children may otherwise meet only later, including frame narratives, traditional tales, verse drama, translated literature, and retellings shaped by oral storytelling. The magazine also gives illustration an interpretive role: pictures can establish historical setting, signal a story’s cultural context, or create a second imaginative layer rather than merely repeat the prose.

Another less visible feature is the editorial bridge between literary publishing and education. Individual pieces are short enough for shared reading, yet complete enough to stand as works of literature. That balance has helped the magazine circulate through public and school libraries as well as homes. Its broader significance lies in making high-quality children’s writing a regular periodical experience, not an occasional special purchase.^{1 4 5}

Carus Publishing

The publishing company associated with Marianne Carus and with the family of children’s magazines that includes Cricket.

literary magazine

A periodical centered on imaginative or literary writing, often including fiction, poetry, criticism, and visual art.

middle-grade literature

Children’s literature generally written for readers between early independent reading and the young-adult age range.

serial publication

A publication issued in successive numbers under a continuing title, such as a magazine or journal.