Abbeville Prints the Country Music Hall of Fame Collection at LP Size as Heinemann Builds a School Series on Kwame Alexander's The Crossover

Two publishing announcements landed on November 10, a day apart in subject and close in method. One puts a museum’s collection between hard covers. The other turns a novel into a classroom program. Both are books built for a buyer other than the casual reader in a shop.

A museum catalogue shaped like a record

Abbeville Press has published Treasures of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, made with the Nashville museum itself. Paul Kingsbury, the museum’s senior director of editorial, edited it. T Bone Burnett wrote the foreword. The museum’s own historians wrote the text. It runs to 348 pages in an oversize square format, about the size of an LP jacket.

That trim size is the smartest decision in the book. A country music collection is mostly flat things and things made to be held: sleeves, posters, publicity photos, handwritten pages. A square page close to 12 inches lets an album-era object sit near its real size.

The objects are the draw. Maybelle Carter’s 1928 Gibson L-5 guitar. Bill Monroe’s 1923 Gibson F-5 mandolin. Earl Scruggs’s 1930 Gibson Granada banjo. DeFord Bailey’s harmonica and the homemade megaphone beside it. Hank Williams’s handwritten manuscript for “I Saw the Light” and Dolly Parton’s handwritten draft of “Jolene”. Then the clothes, which carry most of the visual weight in country music: Rose Maddox’s embroidered cowgirl outfit, Johnny Cash’s early black stage suit, Gram Parsons’s Nudie suit, Shania Twain’s pink Ultrasuede outfit from the 1999 CMA Awards. The book also has biographies of every Hall of Fame member and a playlist for each era.

Museum books like this are a quiet part of the trade. They sell in the museum store, as gifts and to people who’ve already made the trip. Abbeville has spent decades on exactly this kind of large, image-led art book, and the release is timed for the holidays. The price wasn’t given in the announcement.

A novel turned into a reading program

Heinemann, which publishes for teachers, is building Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover Literacy for grades 3 to 5, due for back-to-school 2027. Alexander’s The Crossover, a novel in verse about twin brothers and basketball, won the Newbery Medal.

The program is 36 new short chapter books, 12 per grade, written as a prequel to the novel. Alexander leads, with new stories from Nikki Shannon Smith, Charles R. Smith Jr. and Kelly J. Baptist, and art direction by Dawud Anyabwile. Each book comes with 10 lessons, paired nonfiction articles and a student writing journal, plus a short “Warm Up with Coach Kwame” video. A teacher’s guide covers pacing and assessment. Pam Allyn led the advisors who set the scope and sequence.

Alexander is a bestselling author of 47 books and runs his own imprint at Sourcebooks. Building a whole-book curriculum around one fictional world is a bet that kids read more when they already care about the characters. It also makes the novel a franchise, and the school market is where a children’s book earns the most per copy.

What the two have in common

Neither book is really sold to a browsing reader. One is sold to a visitor who wants the object in their hands again. The other is sold to a district that wants children to finish books. In both cases the buyer is the institution, and the book is shaped around that buyer.