Cotsen Children’s Library

The disreputable printer Jemmy Pitts was highlighted in the post for Twelfth Night 2013, but he was not the only no-good early nineteenth-century job printer in the seedy Seven Dials district near Covent Garden in London's West End.  Seven Dials marked the convergence of Little and Great White Lyon streets (now Mercer), Little and Great Earl (now Earlham), Little and Great St. Andrews (now Monmouth), and Queen (now Shorts Garden).  

Seven Dials was also home to Jemmy Catnach (1791-1841), who was vilified for catering to the reading public's insatiable appetite for rude ballads, accounts of violent crimes, sensational divorce cases, and the like.  He was the subject of the chapter "Catnachery, Chapbooks & Children's Books" in Percy Muir's Victorian Illustrated Books (1971).  Muir, who knew how to turn a phrase, damned Catnach for having printed his stuff with "mean and old typefaces" and adorning them with blocks "worn to a degree of indecipherability that hid their almost complete irrelevance to the text they were supposed to illustrate." 

In Cotsen there's a stout volume consisting of thirty-odd  pamphlets, many issued by Catnach, which make a liar out of  Muir.   Bound in are several titles in the so-called Catnach "series" of Large Books.   Here is a typical list, from the rear cover for Little Tom Tucker, [ca. 1835?].

 

The advertisement doesn't given any clues as to what the pamphlets looked like.  If Muir is to be believed, it whould be taken for granted that a jobbing printer like Catnach will always produce a shabby product with tell-tale signs of recycling other printers' cast-off type and blocks. 

Given Catnach's high marks for slipshod design, these delightfully exuberant covers on the nursery favorites in the Large Books come as a shock.   And not a broken font in sight. 

 

The style of the typefaces and wood-engravedblocks suggest the Large Books must have been issued relatively late in Catnach's long career.

 

 

But once a rogue, always a rogue, even one vying for respectability.   The rear cover of another Large Book in the Cotsen volume is illustrated with a block John Bewick made for the frontispiece of  Richard Johnson's False Alarms (London: E. Newbery, ca. 1787).   And where did old Jemmy come by the block?  Was it purchased from John Harris, Elizabeth Newbery's successor, or his son, John junior?

 

 

 

 I often get a glimpse of unfamiliar books in the collection when they circulate from the stacks to the reading room and back.  One such book was Rondes des quatres saisons(1884), which celebrates the passing of the seasons in four pieces, with lyrics by the poet Leon Valade (1844-1884), music by Leopold Dauphin (1847-?), and illustrations by several artists, including Maurice Boutet de Monvel (1851-1913), best known for his patriotic picture book biography of Joan of Ark.

 

Rondes crossed my desk on Monday, when winter was doing its best to reassert itself as it does when the weather finally starts to warm up.  While leafing through the volume, I found this chilling, but charming illustration of children stamping their feet to keep warm in a snow shower.

Rondes des quatres saisons came to the Cotsen Children's Library with the acquisition of the Diana Rexford Tillson Collection in the mid-1990s.   Its vast holdings of picture books, scores, sheet music, sound recordings, and toys documenting the history of music education and appreciation were thoughtfully selected by Miss Tillson, who was for years a Suzuki method violin teacher.  Small discoveries like this Boutet de Monvel illustration are reminders of how rich Miss Tillson's collection is.  Thanks to her vision, it will continue to support in the years to come both the musicologist looking for a rare edition of Sir Thomas Morley and the performer looking for a piece of sheet music to rearrange for barber shop quartet.

The Cotsen Library is home to an international poster collection that depicts children and reflects childhood from diverse historical periods, geographical areas, and cultural backgrounds. Through a pilot project in 2012, the Cotsen Library enhanced catalog records of a small set from its Chinese-language poster collection to allow researchers to search for posters by title, creator, or publisher information in both Chinese characters and pinyin phonetics. Subject headings were standardized to bring consistency to terms that describe the posters. A brief summary of the visual content is also provided.

The small set of about 50 posters dates from the early twentieth century through the mid-1980s. They cover a delightful variety of subject matter, including nianhua (年画, New Year prints) that decorated people's homes, instructional wall charts for classroom use, and Communist propaganda posters that sent political messages to children and adults alike.

An untitled and undated New Year print gives us a glimpse of multiple facets of Chinese art, culture, history, and political dynamics. The only text in the picture is a red stamp of "Tianjin Yangliuqing Painting Shop" (天津楊柳青畫店), a press based in one of the most famous production centers of Chinese New Year prints. Traditional Yangliuqing art was known for the so-called "half printed, half painted" woodblock New Year prints: combining mass production and original folk art, pictures were first printed in monochrome outline, and each piece was then hand-colored by artisans. The Costen's copy was printed and painted on a sheet of xuanzhi (宣纸, Chinese rice paper), measuring 30 x 20 inches.

Catalogers occasionally find themselves facing the little-envied job of coming up with titles for library materials that carry no such information. This New Year print posed such a task. How would you name an image portraying three children on the back of an elephant? The old catalog record suggested a title about celebrating the harvest. In order to justify that theme, one might have expected to see depictions of abundant grain overflowing from containers. However, could the basket of fruit in the young Chinese girl's hand be an Eastern equivalent of cornucopia?

New Year print: [Ji xiang ru yi] (吉祥如意, An auspicious and wish-fulfilling year). Tianjin, China: Tianjin Yangliuqing Painting Shop, circa 1958-1980. Cotsen Children's Library, call number 64129

Boy on the back of an elephant. A common pattern for traditional Chinese folk art. (Image source)

It is unclear whether this New Year print was made around 1958-1959, when the Yangliuqing Painting Shop was established but not yet merged into the Tianjin People's Fine Arts Publishing House, or around 1974-1980, when the shop name was restored.1 The picture is a fascinating manifestation of how tradition underwent adaptive transformations and survived a new political environment under the Chinese Communist regime.

Traditional Symbols and Communist Twists

Chinese New Year prints traditionally employ visual symbols and homophonic riddles to convey good wishes for the coming new year. Young children are among the favorite subject. Often portrayed with pink cheeks and chubby torsos, healthy-looking youth symbolize the success of family reproduction and a hopeful future. It is important to point out that images of children in Chinese New Year prints did not denote a child audience, but were intended for all viewers, particularly adults who wished to accomplish the foremost Confucian virtue and goal of raising a large family with sons and grandsons. Children were nonetheless an important part of the viewing experience. Superstitiously believing that children's naïve voice carried some realizing power, an adult would engage a child in observing and talking about the pictures on the morning of the New Year's Day, hoping that those lucky words from a child's mouth would make happy things happen.

This New Year print from Cotsen is both a continuation of that "baby-loving" tradition and a departure from certain age-old characteristics. In a society that favored sons over daughters, boy figures dominated the subject of traditional New Year pictures. The presence of two young girls in this post-1949 picture, however, reflects an adherence to the idea of gender equality promoted by the Chinese Communist Party. All three children wear red scarves, indicating their membership in the Young Pioneers, which is a school children's organization that answers to the Chinese Communist Party. (Former Chinese president Hu Jintao was the national leader of the organization in 1983-1984.)

Giant-sized peaches, shown in the basket on the right, are a traditional symbol of longevity in Chinese culture. The golden pineapple on the left also conveys wishes for good things, because the name of that fruit and the word for "prosperity" are homophones in southern Fujian dialect. Another homophone is played on the elephant. In the Chinese language, qixiang (骑象, riding an elephant) and jixiang (吉祥, auspicious) sound similar. The visual motif of elephant riding can actually be traced to the popular depiction of Samantabhadra, a bodhisattva often seen perched on an elephant in Chinese art and sculptures.

A final point of interest is the blossoming branch held high in the girl's hand on the left. Traditionally, a more common object held by the elephant rider would have been an expensive-looking ruyi (如意). The term literally means "wish fulfillment," and, according to popular belief, it has originated from the use of the handheld object as a self-sufficient backscratcher. Ruyi made from precious metals and stones used to be royal possessions. In Communist China, it would likely be a distasteful object associated with wealth, power, and privilege, and thus wisely avoided by the anonymous folk artist of this picture. The position of the girl's arms, and the way she tilts her head closely resemble what we see in a ruyi-holding boy in traditional depictions. Is the pink flower branch an earthly substitute for rich men's ruyi for political safety?

You may find this picture in our library catalog by its new title: "Ji Xiang Ru Yi" (吉祥如意, An auspicious and wish-fulfilling year). Attesting to the flexibility and resilience of a folk art tradition, "Ji Xiang Ru Yi" has merged old and new, catered to both popular and political tastes, and wished for another new year of good luck to come.

(The author thanks Mr. Don Cohn for offering insightful cultural information about Samantabhadra.)

Note:

1. Tianjin Yangliuqing hua she. (n.d.). Retrieved May 23, 2012, from http://www.tjwh.gov.cn/whysz/0906meishu/meishu-0102.html

Among the traditional Christmas songs is "The Twelve Days of Christmas," a memory-and-forfeits game   played by the fire that describes the staggering array of gifts bestowed upon one person.  The song s  has inspired many parodies, most of them too lame to stick in the mind, with the notable exception of Alan Sherman's, with the diabolical substitution of  a "naked lady with a clock where her stomach ought to be" for the fifth day's bling.  Then there's P. D. Q. Bach's "Twelve Days after Christmas" or Craig Courtney's  "Musicological Journey Through 'The Twelve Days' of Christmas...'"  

Accumulative rhymes like "The Twelve Days of Christmas" were enjoyed in the days when people passed the time playing all kinds of complicated word and memory games.  While the Cotsen Children's Library does not have a copy of Mirth without Mischief (London: Charles Sheppard, ca. 1780), where the rhyme made its first appearance in print, it has a delightful one issued ca. 1810 by of all people the disreputable printer James Pitts in the notoriously seedy Seven Dials district of London.   

In 2012, the Huffington Post asked PNC Wealth Management to cost out the true love's haul and the numbers came to a hefty $107,000.  But that's actually way below cost, as Iona and Peter Opie , authors of The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, could have told the money men.   If they had read the rhyme carefully (close reading is a skill everyone needs), they would have realized the mistake in basing the estimate on the last day's worth of presents only.  The true love had to shell out for not one, but twelve partridges (1 x 12 days), 22 not two doves (2 x 11 days), 30, not three French hens (3 x 10 days) and so forth for a whopping total of 364 items instead of a Grinchy 78.  

On to the main point...

In The Twelve Days of Christmas, Sung in King Pipin's Hall, the text begins as usual, illustrated with fine large cut of the partridge in the pear tree.

But it does not conclude with the drummers drumming (the version of the text animated in the Jacquie Lawson e-card and circulated widely on web sites), but with the lords a-leaping, the earliest version cited by the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes.   Note that Jemmy Pitts's cut of the twelve lords shows them pole vaulting down a hill, instead of executing grand jetés,which is how they are frequently portrayed.   

Be that as it may, at least Pitts adorned one page of his Twelve Days of Christmas with a fine cut of a couple kissing under a ball of mistletoe suspended from the ceiling that Joseph Crawhall might have been proud of.

Our inquiring readers may be wondering what King Pippin has to do with "The Twelve Days of Christmas."  This could be an allusion to the hero of The History of Little King Pippin (London: F. Newbery, 1775), who was king of the good boys and presumably had premises suitable for large-scale holiday entertaining!

By Andrea L. Immel

Some of the most adorable images of the 1950s were reproduced on the covers of paper doll and coloring books, proclaims the web site Paper Goodies from Judy's Place.

Merrill Publishing Company in Chicago is considered to have published some of the best of its kind.  The proprietor Marion Elizabeth Merrill demanded--and got--quality artwork for printing on thin cardboard stock of books that would sell for just 29¢.  Jean Woodcock bought Merrill in 1979 and in 2008 a selection from Merrill's archive of original artwork for cover designs was offered for sale by Mitch Itkowitz. 

Among Merrill's popular illustrators was Elizabeth Anne Voss (1925-1969).  Her pretty little Caucasian girls with almond-shaped eyes wearing dresses  bedizened with bows, ribbons, and trims are instantly recognizable.  Their continuing appeal  is confirmed by the fact that high-quality pdfs of her paintings can be purchased for  printing out and recreating the originals at home in a slightly smaller format.  Voss's fans have speculated that there were two sisters working for Merrill at the same time because covers in the same style are signed "E. Voss," "E. A. Voss," "B. Gartrell," "Betty Gartrell," and "Elizabeth Gartrell."  

Thanks to a recent gift of a small group of covers and artwork by Voss from the late 1950s and early 1960s from her husband Donald H. Voss '44, *49, I've pieced together some information about Betty Anne, as she was known.  She was the daughter of Nancy Reynolds and the engineer Robert D. Gartrell, who is famous in horticultural circles for the Robin Hill Azaleas, a group of hybrids he developed while living in New Jersey.  One cultivar was named after his artist-daughter.   Before her marriage to Donald Voss in 1952, Betty Anne signed her work with her maiden name Gartrell.

Covers in the Voss donation suggest that cover designs signed "Gartrell" or "Voss" could be in simultaneous circulation for some years, so it's no wonder  people have assumed that E. A. Voss and B. Gartrell were two people.  This confusion might have been cleared up much sooner if Voss had illustrated picture books instead of covers, in which case it's more likely that she would have been the subject of articles in standard reference sources.  

Some of Voss's best loved images appeared on the covers of books with holiday themes, although typically she did mostly outline drawings for the coloring books.

 

The copies of Little Miss Christmas and Santa and Little Miss Christmas and Holly-Belle in the Voss donation suggest that Merrill must have asked her to redo the cover paintings periodically to keep them fresh.   Voss designed new gowns and accessories,  added and subtracted figures, which necessitated  rearranging the composition, etc.  The typefaces and their layout could vary significantly from cover to cover, although at first glance they look rather similar.

One of the nicest items in the Voss gift is the copy of Little Miss Christmas and Holly-Belle with Santa Claus in the background.  It's not a coloring book, as I discovered while processing the collection, but  Betty Anne's preliminary drawings for the costumes for the two characters fastened into printed covers.

Cotsen is most grateful to Donald Voss for this tribute to his wife, whose work is so characteristic of the period.  

So a Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

There's a new pamphlet available free of charge to visitors of the gallery of the Cotsen Children's Library.  It's a coloring book designed by Mark Argetsinger that reproduces eight illustrations from Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit Painting Book (London: Frederick Warne & Co., Ltd. [ca. 1917]).  

It's no coincidence that Paint Like Peter Rabbit ready for distribution in early November when the Morgan Library and Museum in New York opened the exhibition Beatrix Potter: The Picture Letters (2 November 2012-27 January 2013), which was favorably reviewed by Edward Rothstein in the Friday November 1 New York Times.  The Cotsen Children's Library loaned thirty-two items from its important collection of Beatrix Potter's books, manuscripts, drawings, and objects to the Morgan, so there's a marvelous opportunity over the holiday season to see treasures that haven't yet been exhibited at Princeton.

The Morgan also has an online version of the exhibition.

The text below was kindly provided by Amanda M. Brian, recipient of a 2012 Princeton Library Research Grant, following her August 2012 research project with Cotsen Children's Library special collection materials: "The Wider & Whiter World in German Mechanical Books."  Dr. Brian is currently assistant professor of history at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC.

Lothar Meggendorfer's Mechanical Books
by Amanda M. Brian

Beginning in the 1970s, pop-up books enjoyed a kind of renaissance in the United States. Within this trend, the name of Lothar Meggendorfer (1847-1925) was continually floated as an early master of movable illustrations in children's books. Meggendorfer began his career as an illustrator for the Munich-based humor magazines Fliegende Blätter and then Münchener Bilderbogen. Like several of his colleagues at these publications, Meggendorfer became a crossover success in the world of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century children's literature. His books became bestsellers during his lifetime; the most popular went into multiple editions and were translated into many languages.

It seems he was aware of both his influence and its monetary reward, for he included a telling self-portrait in which he stood at an easel and received a commission in Gute Bekannte. This discovery was one of several unexpected and deeply satisfying moments that I experienced as a researcher in the Rare Book Division at the Princeton University Library. 

Moreover, Meggendorfer's books were frequently reproduced and widely distributed along a German-British publishing network, which then collapsed in the face of World War I. After the war, Meggendorfer continued his work in puppet theater, a passion that had clearly influenced his figures' exaggerated physiognomy, especially their large noses and wide mouths.

Then in 1975, the New York book dealer Justin G. Schiller purchased and prepared a catalog of a cache of production files found in J. F. Schreiber's Esslingen warehouse for what was believed at the time to be the entire surviving Meggendorfer archive. Maurice Sendak provided an aptly named "Appreciation" in Schiller's The Publishing Archive of Lothar Meggendorfer, adding to a certain frenzy for Meggendorfer's books, particularly his movable books. Following this advertising, between 1979 and 1982, five of Meggendorfer's most popular movable books were reissued and reproduced, culminating in 1985 in a kind of anthology of his most intricate and humorous pull-tab illustrations, The Genius of Lothar Meggendorfer. This relatively recent attention has cemented Meggendorfer's reputation as a paper-engineering master on both sides of the North Atlantic. It is, therefore, not too surprising to find such an extensive collection of Meggendorfer's children's books in the United States; the Cotsen Children's Library has perhaps the best examples of his works States-side, which is particularly impressive considering the wear and tear movable illustrations from over a century ago have taken.

Cotsen Library also houses an almost equal number of Meggendorfer's non-movable books to his movable books. This acts as a kind of corrective to the amount of attention afforded his pull-tabs and panoramas at the expense of his overall production of texts and images. His self-portrait, after all, was in the non-movable Gute Bekannte. A collection that just focused on Meggendorfer's elaborate pull-tabs--which, do not misunderstand me, are impressive with their simultaneous movements achieved by paper levers attached to small copper rivets hidden between the pages--would overlook the non-moveable (in the scholarly definition of movable parts) but equally interactive Nimm mich mit!

This small, 8 centimeters by 24 centimeters, picture book was designed for the non-reading, or read-to, child to "take along" around the home and into the field to compare the drawn object to the real object. It presented a comprehensive catalog of things in the child's "garden and room" to be examined "with love," as the introduction explained. For example, pages 125 to 184, the largest section of the book, portrayed animals with skill at expressive caricatures. Many of these animals could have been found in the child's backyard (e.g., chicken and grasshooper), nearby woods (e.g., deer and hedgehog), or traveling menagerie (e.g., elephant and parrot), but some of these animals (e.g., whale and ostrich), the child would not have seen in nature.

In Meggendorfer's oeuvre, animals were the most pervasive theme, followed by music. Focusing on the content and not just the mechanics of his works, it is clear that Meggendorfer's audience was expected to identify and enjoy both domestic and foreign animals. But there were clear differences between how he portrayed domestics--meaning both native to Europe and pervasive in his audience's lives, like dogs, horses, and sparrows--and exotics--meaning non-native to Europe and perceived as wild by his audience, like elephants, lions, and apes. How domestic and exotic animals behaved differently became instructive in Meggendorfer's books, representing hierarchies among and between Europeans and non-Europeans, and teaching his middle-class youthful audience about their place in the world.

To offer but a single example, compare the poem with the movable illustration "Good Friends" [left]  in the British production All Alive, which featured rabbits, a goat, and a cat as a "happy family," to the poem with movable illustration "Die Heimkehr" [right] in the original German version Reiseabenteuer des Malers Daumenlang und seines Dieners Damian.  In "Good Friends," the ideal middle-class home was portrayed by domestic animals "living in such harmony." Domestic animals continued to model appropriate behavior for bourgeois children in Meggendorfer's works. By contrast, in "Die Heimkehr," the young lord, Daumenlang, and his servant, Damian, have traveled the world, including Africa, and have headed for home loaded down with booty, including the skins of the tiger and black bear that they had encountered and mastered, and live apes and birds. They found danger, but not harmony, among exotic animals, which were perceived as part of the conquerable landscape of certain non-European territories. I first saw the illustration of the tiger "attack" from Reiseabenteuer in the Cotsen Library; those pages have been excised in the late-twentieth-century reproduction of the book.

The books by Lothar Meggendorfer that delighted audiences in the late nineteenth century and were embraced with enthusiasm in the late twentieth century were not simply examples of paper acrobatics. Rather, they both reflected and shaped the historical context of the expanding German empire at the turn of the twentieth century.

One strength of the Cotsen Library is Chinese-language children's magazines published during the twentieth century. Prominent titles include early volumes of Er Tong Shi Jie (儿童世界, Children's World) and Xiao Peng You (小朋友, Little Friend), both launched in Shanghai in 1922. Little Friend is arguably the longest-running children's magazine in China, having remained active to this day despite two major suspensions--first during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) and later during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76).

Another important group of magazines is Hong Xiao Bing (红小兵, Little Red Guard), which sheds light on Chinese children's reading, learning, and socialization during a specific period of political chaos, as well as lends a nuanced view of Chinese history and culture that concern the youngest members of the society. These were reorganized through a recent cataloging project at Cotsen.

From "Young Pioneers" to "Little Red Guards"

The "Little Red Guards" was the name of a selective children's organization sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party from December 1967 through October 1978. Prior to that, most school students from six to fourteen years old were members of the Young Pioneers, who wore trademark triangular, bright-red scarves around their neck. During the Cultural Revolution, children who allegedly failed to meet certain political criteria were denied membership, and eligible ones savored the great honor of being part of a new organization called the "Little Red Guards." This organization should not be confused with the "Red Guards" (红卫兵), which consisted of older teens and college-age youth and played a far more aggressive role during the Cultural Revolution.

The Many Faces of Little Red Guards Magazines

Hong Xiao Bing Bao (红小兵报, Little Red Guard's Paper) was first launched in Shanghai on July 20, 1967 as a children's weekly. After the term "Little Red Guards" replaced "Young Pioneers" as a formal name by the end of 1967, a squadron of children's magazines sprouted from all over China, all named after the revolutionary buzzword "little red guard." When the Young Pioneers was restored in 1978, these "little red guard" magazines either ceased publication or adopted various new names.

Cotsen holds issues of Little Red Guard (hereafter LRG) magazines from eighteen provinces, in addition to one newspaper, pamphlets, and books with the popular term LRG in their titles, all dated from the late 1960s through the 1970s.

Each blue placemark represents one Chinese publisher that distributed a children's magazine called LRG, or with a similar title, during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). The identical title shared by different publishers has caused confusion among researchers today, who have sometimes referred to it as a single children's magazine.

Of the nineteen titles of LRG magazines held at Cotsen, the earliest two were released 1968-69 in Shanghai, including one issue of Shanghai LRG (上海红小兵, Jan. 1968) and more than 30 issues of LRG (Jun. 1, 1968-Dec. 25, 1969), but their relationship with each other is unclear. At least half of China's provinces and municipalities--from Shanghai in the east to Gansu in the west, from Heilongjiang in the north to Guangdong in the south--produced their own LRG magazines, which varied in size, frequency, and content.

1. Shanghai, 1971, no. 21
2. Jiangsu, Feb. 1971, no. 4
3. Liaoning, 1974, no. 16
4. Ningxia, 1973, no. 2

A Publishing Miracle and Wealth of Information

The Cultural Revolution is widely known as a period of suffocating ideological control over print and media. Juvenile reading materials were no exception. Children growing up during the Cultural Revolution had few reading choices, when old popular titles were banned, and writers, illustrators, and editors were imprisoned or banished to labor camps in rural areas. Under the aegis of a politically correct title, these vibrant LRG magazines, issued as frequently as twice a month in some provinces, were short of a publishing miracle.

Written at the reading level of primary school students, LRG magazines typically include rhymes, songs, news and current affairs, short stories with illustrations, comic strips, and drawings by children. Many carry fine, off-set printed pictures of hand-colored woodblock prints, watercolor paintings, and oil paintings. Anecdotes suggest that some schools would subscribe to LRG and make it available in classrooms for supplementary reading. The magazine has been mentioned in people's fond memories of their childhood reading.

By virtue of their quick publication cycles, LRG magazines capture the vicissitudes of political turmoil and provide a wealth of information about Chinese history, literacy education, propaganda and censorship, gender role, and political socialization of youth during the 1970s.

China's daughters...and the evil queen

In 1961, MAO Zedong saw a photo of a rifle-carrying female militia member and was inspired to write a poem, "Militia Women," in which he commended "China's daughters" for "having high-aspiring minds / They love their battle uniforms, not feminine dresses." Visual depictions of revolutionary, progressive females during the Cultural Revolution strived to meet Chairman Mao's aesthetic standards for women and girls, wiping out as much difference between male and female body features as possible. A typical image of masculine-looking, strong Chinese women can be seen on the cover of a 1965 Little Friend issue.

Left: Cover image of Little Friend (1965, no.24). Shanghai, Dec. 25, 1965.

Right: A satirical illustration of JIANG Qing in "大寨人勇斗白骨精" (Dazhai people bravely fight the White-Bone Demon). LRG (1977, no. 4), unpaged. Hunan, Apr. 1, 1977.

After the death of MAO Zedong on September 9, 1976, his fourth and last wife, JIANG Qing, was made to shoulder much of the blame for the damage and devastation caused by the Cultural Revolution. LRG issues published after her downfall ridiculed Jiang in stories and cartoons. In one illustration (shown above) that accompanies spoken rhyming lyrics, the then sixty-three-year-old former First Lady is satirically portrayed with a slim waistline and a long dress, making her the most "fashion-conscious" female in all LRG publications.

Sugar-coating learning with political messages

The Cultural Revolution has been remembered as a period when intellectuals were censured, schooling was disrupted, and students were encouraged to challenge teachers and even physically assault them. LRG magazines, however, carry a surprising amount of writing that encourages literacy and learning, using revolutionary rhetoric and quotations from MAO Zedong to legitimize the call. Pinyin exercises, which drill the crucial Chinese literacy skill of pronouncing phonetics, spell out political slogans. A math problem is couched in the practical scenario of children dividing up liquid pesticides while working on a farm, as Mao had instructed students to learn through manual labor. A science essay explaining the physics of audio amplifiers begins with the importance of listening to news and political messages through radio broadcasts first thing in the morning.

Pinyin exercise in LRG (1975, no. 5). Shanghai, Mar. 10, 1975.

A rhyme that celebrates China's new 1975 Constitution.
The last two lines mean "Chairman Mao made the new Constitution / The red regime is as stalwart as steel."

A Mirror of Chaos

It must have been especially confusing for a child to grow up during the Cultural Revolution. Traditional values were turned upside down. Countless old authority and power figures were demoted to "untouchables" in the new political caste system. "Red Guard" factions attacked one another, each claiming to be Mao's truest followers. LRG magazines reflect that chaos, sometimes with immediate responsiveness to contemporary events, and other times with a curious length of delay. As one of the few accessible and appealing children's reading materials of the time, their content could further add to the sources of confusion for young readers.

On one hand, LRG magazines are full of folkloric stories befitting young readers' level of cognitive and moral sophistication. Stories about Communist heroes and class struggles painted a binary world of black and white, good and evil. On the other hand, exactly who the "good guy" and the "bad guy" was could change drastically as a result of power struggles. Two of the political leaders that received about-face treatment in LRG were Marshal LIN Biao and China's future No. 1 leader DENG Xiaoping, as shown by the following illustrations.

Cover image of LRG (1971, no. 18). Shanghai.

This LRG issue was published September 25, 1971, nearly two weeks after the death of Marshall Lin (in green military uniform on the right, standing close to Chairman Mao). According to the dominant account--among competing versions of the event--Lin had allegedly attempted to assassinate Mao but failed, before being killed in a plane crash on September 13, 1971. For some complicated reasons, the cover image did not reveal the colossal political crisis, but continued to portray the late Lin as Mao's "closest comrade-in-arms," as was officially stated in the Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party. Could the magazine editors be as ill-informed as the general public of Lin's secret coup? Or were they "insiders" conniving to cover up the Party's biggest embarrassment?

LRG magazines offer rich raw materials to help us imagine the intellectual life of a generation of Chinese children--now having approached middle age--growing up in a world of conflict and confusion. Cotsen holdings of these magazines can be most easily located by searching for titles in Chinese characters ("红小兵") or pinyin Romanization ("hong xiao bing").

Note: The Friends of the Princeton University Library offer short-term Library Research Grants to promote scholarly use of the research collections, which are awarded via a competitive application process.  Researchers usually offer a short informal talk or presentation to library staff and others in the Princeton academic community near the end of their work on campus about the results of their research and how it fits into their broader research project or interests.  

The text below was kindly provided by Megan Brandow-Faller, recipient of a 2012 Library Research Grant, following her July 2012 research project at Princeton in both the Cotsen Children's Library and Marquand Art Library, following her July, 13, 2012 talk entitled: "An Artist in Every Child--A Child in Every Artist: Avant-Garde Frauenkunst and Kinderkunst in Vienna, 1897-1930."  (The images accompanying the text are adapted from select slides in her PowerPoint presentation.)  Dr. Brandow-Faller is currently Assistant Professor of History at the City University of New York/Kingsborough. Her research focuses on women's art institutions in early twentieth century Habsburg Central Europe.

Vienna Secessionist Book Illustration for Children 
by Megan Brandow-Faller

The art of the child found fertile ground in Vienna 1900, cultivated by Franz Čižek's renowned Jugendkunstkursen (Youth Art Classes), at important exhibitions of children's art, and in the pages of Ver Sacrum and other periodicals.  Rejecting the elaborate technological miniatures popular in the nineteenth century--toys intended to 'dazzle' but which would ultimately leave a child cold--artists associated with the Vienna Secession and Wiener Werkstätte (the applied arts commercial workshops co-founded by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser in 1903) designed objects conceived 'with the eyes of a child.' Secessionist toys, illustrated books and graphics using simple shapes and bright colors were designed to awaken children's creative impulses in a design language that children could understand.

In designing these so-called 'reform toys,' Secessionists tapped two main sources for inspiration: the untutored drawing of children and traditional turned wooden peasant toys. The January 1906 issue of Alexander Koch's progressive journal Kind and Kunst, for instance, devoted a richly-illustrated twenty-three page article to Wiener Werkstätte items (including finely-illustrated children's books, games, silver rattles, and furniture suites) for children, including toy designs by Hoffmann, Moser, and Carl Otto Czeschka.

Kolo Moser's crudely-shaped wooden figurines (illustrated in Figure 4b) reveal how Secessionists interpreted traditional toys in a highly-stylized manner verging on the grotesque.

 Yet, it was actually the female students of Hoffmann, Moser, and Czeschka who produced some of the most important work in artistic toys and children's book illustration. Contemporary critics found toy design and book illustration particularly appropriate fields for female craftswomen, given women's 'natural' stake in childrearing (i.e. that women were believed to better understood children's thought processes than men). Female craftswomen training at Austria's progressive School of Applied Arts and Vienna's Women's Academy exploited such discursive linkages to the fullest.  

One popular method of graphic art and book illustration for children involved the use of painted stencils to produce clear, simple images. Stenciling had experienced a recent revival during the English and Scottish arts-and-crafts movement. In conjunction with the so-called Schablonieren Kurs (Stenciling Course) taught by Secessionist Adolf Böhm at the Women's Academy, Böhm's students published illustrated fairy tale and picture books and gained recognition through replication of such illustrations in the pages of Ver Sacrum, die Fläche and other periodicals. A special September 1902 issue of the Secessionist periodical Ver Sacrum featured the work of Böhm's students. (Figures 1a & 1b)  His students' toy designs were regularly featured in the pages of The Studio.

One such book of children's stencils (housed in the Cotsen Collection) created by Women's Academy classmates artist/designers Minka Podhajska and Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka around 1903 employs a fresh and original graphic language using negative white space in lieu of the black borders that Čižek encouraged his students to bound their drawings.

Packing a strong expressive punch into a minimal number of marks expressed as abstract geometrical shapes, Harlfinger-Zakucka's stenciled image of a reform-clothing-clad mother, sporting what looks to be Wiener-Werkstätte style textiles, guiding her toddler plays on negative and positive space to reveal the interconnected forms and hence psychological closeness of mother and child (Figure 2b). Her stencil of a children's Jause (snacktime) employs similar techniques (Figure 2a). These stenciled images reveal a striking encounter with Japanese printmaking techniques in their unusual manipulation of spatial perspective and boldly 'cropped' nature.

Likewise carving her images out of negative white space, Podhajska's depiction of a dancing couple (Figure 3a) reveals her fascination with folk art, an important source of influence for the turned-wooden toys she and Harlfinger-Zakucka produced. Her stencil of a witch conjuring her brew employs a wonderfully expressive sinuous curve associated with the new art movement (Figure 3b), which also relates well to the idiosyncratic use of turning-lathe methods in her turned-wooden figurines. The tangible figure of the witch and cauldron is expressed in a curvilinear fashion. Yet it is the intangible aspects of the image--the suggestion of smoke, fire and more abstractly the witches' incantations--lending it its fiery expressiveness. While both artists tapped into folk imagery and design idioms, their work freely reinvented and modernized traditional folk design into images that were designed to awaken children's creativity through subtle narrative elements. Images stood alone to leave the rest of the story to children's imagination.

 

Noah's Ark Toys
For centuries the story of the flood in Genesis 6-9 has been an inspiration to toymakers. Thanks to the biblical connection, miniature arks are the best known of the so-called Sunday toys or quiet amusements appropriate for the Sabbath.

Examples as early as the seventeenth century survive and famous German toymaker Georg Hieronymous Bestelmeier advertised elaborate, expensive sets in his enormous 1803 catalogue. During the nineteenth century the entry into the ark came into its own as a subject for high-end toys, novelty book formats, and nursery friezes.

The recently-opened Cotsen Gallery exhibition features two of Cotsen's most spectacular arks--one a building toy, the other a panorama:

• Le déluge universel: Construction de l'arche de Noé (Paris: Matenet, ca. 1880);
• Lothar Meggandorfer's Artist's Dummy and Color Proofs for Arche Noah: Ein lehrreiches Bilderbuch (Esslingen: J. F. Schreiber, 1903).

These toys were displayed against two different backgrounds, reproductions of illustrations adapted from related children's artwork:

• Warwick Hutton's Noah and the Great Flood (New York: Atheneum, 1977), a Margaret K. McElderry Book;
• Peter Spier's Caldecott Medal-winning Noah's Ark (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1977).

Le déluge universel: Construction de l'arche de Noé (Paris: Matenet, ca. 1880).

This toy with its combination of pictorial blocks and stand-up figures, including animals, people, and background scenery, is something of a departure from the traditional ark with a removable roof or top deck that allows it to double as storage for the accompanying sets of paired animals.

The design was not unique to Le déluge universel: there is a similar set representing the fall of Canton in 1858 during the second Opium War at the Getty Research Institute.

Like many elaborate late nineteenth-century French toys, a very showy illustration lithographed by the H. Jannin firm decorates the box lid.





This previously "hidden collections" item was "rediscovered" in 2011 when Cotsen's toy collection was shifted into a new vault.


Lothar Meggandorfer's, Artist's dummy and color proofs for Arche Noah: Ein lehrreiches Bilderbuch (Esslingen: J. F. Schreiber, 1903).

The German artist Lothar Meggendorfer is best known for his humorous mechanical book illustrations, but he also designed table games with playing boards and cards, as well as "theaters" in the round showing scenes in the city park, the zoo, or the circus, constructed of cardboard leaves hinged together with fabric.

Meggendorfer's mock-up of this panorama depicting the animals' stately progress into the ark shows his flair for large-scale scenic effects. It came from the publisher's archive of Meggendorfer's artwork, which was dispersed some years ago.




Gift of Justin G. Schiller in honor of the opening of the Cotsen Children's Library in 1977

(Note: The text here is based on the exhibition labels by Andrea Immel, Cotsen Curator.)