Experience Catalog Shopping in 19th-Century Germany

This post from 2018 is offered again to get you in the holiday spirit of consumption.  When you need a break clicking your way through the Christmas list on the Amazon website, try browsing this remarkable retail catalog in the Cotsen.

There is quite a selection of catalogs in the Cotsen collection and one of the most spectacular is among the most puzzling–an oblong volume  23 x 35.5 cm bound in scuffy marbled paper with a worn sheep spine.  It has no title page, but there is a ragged stub that suggests there was one once.   It has 149 leaves of hand-colored lithographic plates and the illustrated objects have printed captions in German and many have manuscript notes as well.  There is a description of the volume in two different hands on the front pastedown endpaper: “Album quincaillerie,”  “quincaillerie” being the French word for “hardware.”  Click here to link to the digital facsimile now.  There is also a link at the end of the text.

“Hardware” doesn’t accurately describe all the things this merchant–perhaps based in southern Germany–offered for sale.  Brass tools, candlesticks, and Shabbos lamps.  Cutlery of wood or horn.  Brushes and ornamental hair combs and decorated clay pipes and guns and swords and noodles in different shapes and sizes.  And toys.  Magic lanterns, jigsaw puzzles, minature kitchens, bilboquets, pull toys with wheels, china dolls’ heads, noise makers, bells, magnetic tin toys, papier mache figures of animals and great deal more.

Our mystery merchant could have been in the retail business,  distributing  for products manufactured by a wide range of craftspeople.  Below are leaves showing the materials available for  teaching geography.  The globe in the square box in the lower-left hand corner appears to be a miniature or pocket globe issued with an illustrated panorama attached to the bottom of the box entitled Die Erde und ihre Bewohner.   Here is Cotsen’s copy in a little orange box, with a round, unillustrated title label (the box appears to have been restored). But the panorama spilling out of the box in the plate illustrates  exotic foreign animals and not people from around the world as in the Cotsen copy.  So are they really the same thing?

Luckily the answer was there in the two objects at hand.  The label on the Cotsen copy has “2. Abtheilung” in small lettering below the title, which suggests there were two editions or versions of Die Erde und ihre Bewohner.  In the right-hand corner of the catalog’s plate is shown the second version, a lacquered wood cylindrical case with a slot that the panorama inside is pulled through.   The panorama there shows just the portrait of  the “Neuhollander” or Australian aborigine, but it is the same  “Neuhollander” in the Cotsen set.

The manuscript annotation below notes that there are two versions, one with twenty-eight illustrations and one with fifty-six.  There are fifty-six people represented in the Cotsen set, so presumably the natural history set illustrated twenty-eight animals.  Identifying the makers of the other toys in this catalog would be a wonderful research project, either for a dedicated soul or team of people.

You can see more of the extraordinary variety of materials that were for sale through this retailer here

Vivie Wivie Redesigns The Flapper’s Magazette: More Issues of a Child-Made Manuscript Magazine Acquired

Our favorite girl journalist resurfaced miraculously a few weeks ago, when the New Jersey antiquarian bookseller Between the Covers offered Cotsen two issues of The Flapper’s Magazine edited by “V. V.” and published in Teddington, Richmond by Vivie Wivie & Co. in 1918. The address, which is the same as the editorial offices of The Flapper’s Magazette, leaves no doubts as to the brains behind the operation.

Would the two issues contain information that would lead us to the real young woman? Absolutely!

One issue has no publication date, but the second carries an announcement that starting with this, the May issue, the magazine will be issued every two months.  Flip through the new issues and it’s obvious that Vivie Wivie & Co. decided that the magazine needed a make-over.  The silly jokes and contests that were an endearing feature of the Magazette are history.  More sophisticated young women in daring hats are featured on the covers.And the contents? Each issue consists of more portraits of devastating modern beauties billed as “V. V.’s famous girls,” any one of which can be obtained as a full-page picture from Vivie Wivie & Co., according to another announcement.  No price is given, however. V. V.’s glamorous creatures, some with bobs, a few with wide-brimmed chapeaus, others bedizened with huge bows or artificial flowers, and some with long braids down the back (a “flapper,” according to OED), are signed “Viven Furniss 1918,” “V. Furniss 1918,” or “ViviE 1918.”   The sole man admitted to the Magazine’s pages is a handsome square-jawed aviator,  whom the reader may suspect, is the object of the editor’s dreams.  The only copy in the two issues are the captions.  Vivien’s artwork in the 1918 issues of The Flapper’s Magazine is much more accomplished than that in the Magazette, so it seems safe to say the Magazine is the work of a teenager, and the other of a little girl.

But can it be puzzled out how old she was when she made the manuscript periodicals? publication?

Yes! Almost exactly.

It was pure wishful thinking on my part to have imagined that Vivien must have been the daughter (or other relative) of Harry Furniss (1854-1927), the Irish-born British artist famous for his humorous drawings and caricatures for Punch and illustrator of Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and its sequel Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1993).  He also illustrated G. E. Farrow’s Wallypug series, sometimes collaborating with his artist-daughter Dorothy.  Dorothy was Harry’s only daughter.

So it was back to the drawing board.  Now that I knew that Vivien F. Furniss put together those two issues of The Flapper’s Magazine in 1918, I could search Ancestry Library with a bit more confidence.  It didn’t take that long to find our girl journalist Vivien Florence Furniss.   She was the daughter and oldest of the four children of the assurance clerk Percy Furniss and his wife Maude of Richmond on Thames in Surrey.  Her birth in 1903, parents, place of birth can be found in England and Wales Civil Registration Birth Index 1837-1917.  That would have made her 15 when she drew the “famous girls” of the Magazine.

This inconvenient fact blows out of the water my original dating of the Magazette to the 1920s.  The only evidence I could squeeze out of the text appeared in a limerick.  I leapt to the conclusion that its first line “There was a young lady of Bow, / Who attended a cinema show. / She was heard to remark / “Oh George! It is dark….” (the reader to provide a last line) contained an allusion to the It Girl, Clara Bow (1905-1965) who made her first picture in….  1921.   I should have checked to see if there were other limericks that began with that line.  There were several.

Is there other evidence that might establish how old Vivien was when she edited and illustrated the Magazette?   The picture of “The Little Patriot” showing a blonde girl draped in the Union Jack suggests that she could not have start her first publication project until Great Britain had entered World War I in August 1914.  That would have made her eleven  Without any dates in the Magazette, it is impossible to know exactly when she was inspired to begin the project, but it seems safe to guess between 1914 and 1917.

This just goes to show how easy it is to give into the temptation to invent an origin story for child-made works on the few “facts” the text seems to contain. Revising the first post is a small price to pay for the discovery that Vivien didn’t abandon her project after one number, and if any thing, she seems to have become more interested in clothes and boys.  Who knows, maybe she did more than these three issues and those may surface on the antiquarian market one day.  What I’d like to know is, did the future Mrs. Philip W. Hume continue to draw after her marriage?  She lived to the ripe old age of 82, passing away in 1985.  Vivie, take a bow