Each issue of Cricket is 48 pages. The magazine is published nine times a year by the Carus Publishing Company of Peru, Illinois. Its target audience is children from 9 to 14 years old. Until March 1995, Cricket was published by the Open Court Publishing Company of La Salle, Illinois, now part of Carus. The magazine was headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, when it was published by the Open Court Publishing Company. Cricket publishes original stories, poems, folk tales, articles and illustrations by such notable artists as Trina Schart Hyman, the magazine's art director from 1973 to 1979. Carus has solicited materials from well-known authors and illustrators, including Lloyd Alexander, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Hilary Knight, William Saroyan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Eric Carle, Stacy Curtis, Wallace Tripp, Charles Ghigna and Paul O. Zelinsky. Cricket also runs contests and publishes work by its readers. Hyman contributed to the magazine until her death in 2004. One distinct feature of Cricket is the illustrated cast of recurring characters that appears in the margins of each issue, similar to a comic strip. These characters include Cricket, Ladybug, and other friends, most of whom are also insects. The characters are involved in a storyline that runs throughout the issue, but also comment on the articles above them. They define difficult words, draw attention to unusual facts, and otherwise annotate the magazine's content. On the last page of each issue is the "Old Cricket Says" column, in which Old Cricket points out a bit of wisdom or a witticism, or introduces themes to be explored in the upcoming issues of Cricket. This recurring column has been ghostwritten by a number of authors and editors who worked for Cricket, but a preponderance of them were written by author Lloyd Alexander until his death in 2007. In 2003, Cricket Books published Celebrate Cricket: 30 Years of Stories and Art, a retrospective that republishes stories from the magazine and includes interviews with some of the founders and contributors.
Founding
Cricket was founded by a group of "historically minded writers and their artist and designer friends", led by Marianne Carus of Open Court Publishing. She had worked on "literature-based basic readers" for the school markets and had learned from teachers that there was a classroom demand for high-quality, short reading material. The time was right for a "new St. Nicholas Magazine. The founding Editorial Board comprised Carus, senior editor Clifton Fadiman, art director Trina Schart Hyman, prominent authors Lloyd Alexander, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Eleanor Cameron, Horn Book Magazine editor Paul Heins, "Kaye Webb, Virginia Haviland, and Sheila Egoff." Fadiman was a well-known literary personality, a New Yorker book critic and a Book-of-the-Month Club judge. The inaugural issue went on sale January 1973 with a launch party in New York City. One guest later told Carus, "If a bomb had gone off during your party, the entire children's book world would've been wiped out."
Cricket Media children's magazines
Cricket inspired a line of literary magazines for children of different ages: Babybug, Ladybug, Spider for newly independent readers, Cricket, and Cicada for young adults. In turn, Cricket Media now publishes 15 children's magazines, including the five "insects". Most of them are issued nine times annually. Ages 14+
