Each issue of
Cricket is 48 pages. The magazine was published nine times a year (monthly, with some of the summer months combined) 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.
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. Hyman contributed to the magazine until her death in 2004. 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. 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 they 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 offers a bit of wisdom, cracks 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==