Author Archives: Andrea Immel

Baby Memory Books from around the World

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They go by many names…  Baby books, baby journals,  baby milestone books, and domestic baby diaries are a few of them.  To facilitate the tracking of information, memories, and storage of precious photos, designers experiment with the format and layout.  Does the new mother want prompts or lots of white space to fill up with thoughts and observations?   Should she start recording her experiences  as soon as she knows she is pregnant, the beginning of the journey to motherhood, or wait until the baby arrives?   Is a choice of bindings in a rainbow of colors important so the book will fit in with the décor of the nursery or master bedroom?  Or would a completely customizable product, such as InScribe Publishing’s babEbook make the process more fun, more personal, and much easier, whatever the mother’s circumstances?

As showcases of illustration and repositories of data about individuals, these highly ephemeral books have been collectible for some time.   The Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library at UCLA has been accumulating titles from the late Victorian era to the present day and now has six hundred examples spanning 125 years.   Some of Cotsen’s baby books, along with the first edition of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s  Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946) and other treasures, were brought out for members of Princeton’s BabyLab when they visited Special Collections in October.

Because the milestones of an infant’s first twelve months are more or less agreed upon, a baby book’s contents are relatively predictable.  After recording birth weight and length comes a series of firsts: first tooth, shoe, word, etc.  It’s the illustrator’s challenge to capture the excitement of the moment in a way that will evoke pleasant memories later.  Ella Pipping’s Jag [Me], a Swedish baby book first published in 1937, was undoubtedly reprinted many times on the strength of its headpieces by the mother-daughter team of Signe Hammarsten-Jansson and Tove Jansson, the creator of the Moomins.   No Swedish is necessary to figure out where to enter most of the different statistics, but no information about a baby was ever entered on this copy’s pristine pages.

Sugiura Hisiu’s Kodakara [Baby Book] (Tokyo: Misukoshi Department Store, 1909) is also perfectly preserved.  I wonder if many recipients of such beautiful books felt they were too pretty to write in them, even though the more likely explanation is that the new mother was simply too tired and busy to begin, much less keep up.  Many of the full-page illustrations are charming depictions of little children, full of surprising details about the coexistence of Eastern and Western fashions in Japan.The earliest of the three baby books shown to BabyLab was Baby’s Record (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, c.1898) illustrated by Maud Humphrey, beloved creator of sticky-sweet pictures of little children.  It’s a well-established urban legend that the mother of Humphrey Bogart was responsible for the famous Gerber logo baby.  She wasn’t.   The  Cotsen copy of the Record was given to “Baby,” by Mrs. Leo Fleishman (presumably a family friend or relative) and “Baby” was Edward Jacques Ruff, the son born to Joseph Ruff and Rosa Rosenthal Ruff November 22, 1910 in Mexico City. His first shoe is shown to the right.  The Ruffs appear to have been devout Jews and recorded little Edward’s first prayer in transliterated Hebrew  and descrubed his first visit to temple with his grandfather at age three.  The handwritten memorandum reveals that Edward “was very good.  Said Amen about a minute after the rest of the congregation which very much embarrassed his grandfather.”

The three books could not be more different in appearance, but they do have one thing in common: baby’s vaccination for small pox is among the milestones of the first year.  In Sweden, it looks as if the doctor came to the house.  Edward was just four months and three days when he was inoculated.   Look carefully at the little Japanese baby and you’ll see he’s crying and picking at the red spots on his arm.Very little has been written about the history of the baby book before the 1870s, when the first ones were published.  The only scholarly article I could find, “The Observing Eye;: A Century of Baby Diaries” by Doris Wallace in a 1994 issue of Human Development suggests that German psychologists who were leaders in their profession agreed agreement that the systematic observation of very young children complemented experimental and testing methodologies.

Wallace seems not to have been familiar with parent diarists in England before Charles Darwin.  Novelist Mrs. Gaskell managed to cover the first six months of her daughter Marianne’s life, the very thoughtful, insightful, and loving notes making it a fascinating document to read.  She was almost certainly following in the footsteps of Maria and Richard Edgeworth, who showed parents in their highly influential Practical Education (1798), the scientific value of detailed anecdotes about child behavior for the way they revealed the child’s thought processes as they matured.  The compilation of such a diary, the Edgeworths argued, was the way to realize Thomas Reid’s wish to “obtain a distinct and full history of all that hath passed in the mind of a child from the beginning of life and sensation till it grows up to the use of reason.”   Easier said than done, but it remains a noble goal for recording the mundane details of babyhood, when what mother really needs is a good night’s sleep.

Black Shuck the Spectral Dog, Agent of Good?

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The charming title of The Prettiest Book for Children, Being the History of the Enchanted Castle…Governed by the Giant Instruction (1770),  must have sent mixed messages to its readers, wrote Ida S. Simonson in a 1924 issue of Library Journal.  The narrator Don Stephano Bunyano, a “strange, outlandish fellow in a flowered gown and hairy cap, with a long blue beard and white wand,” might have fascinated children if he had not made this “irritating, mean confession: “As soon as I rise in the morning I wash my hands and face and comb my hair and my long blue beard.”

What didn’t catch Simonson’s attention was the aggressive behavior the big black dog Shocky, Bunyano’s faithful companion.  When he sniffs out a naughty boy, said Bunyano, “he seizes them fast either by the lappet of their coats or the tail of their gowns, growling and snarling all the while, as if he would tear them to pieces in an instant.  And so perhaps he would: but…I always make the best of my way to prevent any mischief.  If my little prisoner is then willing to own  his fault, and promise amendment, I give Shocky a gentle slap with my wand, and he quits his hold immediately: but if the boy or girl should prove so obstinate as to refuse to do either, or perhaps turn impudent or sulky, and give me ill language, then he will be sure to shake them to some purpose: nor can I make him let them go, before he hath heartily frightened them and punished them to his own liking, even though I should beat him to pieces.”

Bunyano admits that he cannot control the dog in all situations, the worst being when the animal gets it in his head to terrify recalcitrant children to punish them for bad acting    I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Shocky acts like a lot like a bugbear, which the OED defines as “an imaginary evil spirit or creature said to devour naughty children” invoked by adults trying to terrify small children into good behavior. A bugbear can also be a historical figure like the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell or Napoleon.

It can’t be a coincidence that the name of Bunyano’s dog is  “Shocky,” which summons up the spectral dogs of English folklore which were known as Shuck, Black Shuck, Old Shuck, or old Shock and were believed to have roamed Norfolk, Suffolk, the Cambridgeshire fens, and Essex for centuries.  “Shock” was the name given to the Maltese breed of small dogs with shaggy coats, while “Shuck” comes from the Old English “scucca,” meaning “devil” or “fiend” according to the OED.  Don Bunyano’s dog looks less like a Maltese and more like his ghostly relatives.  Black Shuck is reputed to be a large (even huge) black dog with a shaggy coat, sometimes with the fiery red eyes of a supernatural creature, or only one in the middle of the forehead like a Cyclops.  The earliest known description of a devil dog was Abraham Fleming’s 1577 illustrated account of an appearance in Bungay.  The next known description appeared for another 180 years in Notes & Queries, the Victorian journal beloved of antiquarians, collectors, and folklorists eager to report any fascinating bits and pieces they had discovered.  Others were turn up compilations on the byways of regions with which these phantom dogs were long associated.  They supposedly to haunted deserted places like lanes or fields in the dead of night, their howls presaging the deaths of anyone unfortunate enough to meet them.

This eighteenth-century appearance of a sanitized Black Shuck in The Prettiest Book looks as if it is unknown to academic and amateur folklorists.  If Bunyano’s Shocky has been overlooked, one reason could be the author succeeded in removing him from his origins in credulity and superstition.  Reforming a well-known figure from popular culture for a more polite child readership was something of a hallmark of the Newbery brand.  Two other such characters are associated with Newbery children’s books: Woglog the great giant, who after being defeated by Tom Trip and his dog Jowler, terrified gamblers and drunkards into changing their ways; and Tom Thumb won the hand of a giant princess and taught her illiterate father the king how to read.

The British traditional lore about spectral dogs has not withered away, but stayed surprisingly robust.  Sightings of the devil dog are reported more often than you might suppose and in 2014 its skeletal remains were supposedly discovered.   Writers, musicians, artists, and videogame designers used the beast in their work.  Perhaps the first to do so was  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in The Hound of the Baskervilles.   The Norfolk hell hound is clearly the model for  J. K. Rowling’s  Padfoot, the frightening, huge black dog,  into which antimage Sirius Black transforms when he must take cover.  Black Shuck has also been mentioned in songs by British rock bands The Darkness and Down I go, been the subject of Mark Allard-Wills’ graphic novel The Burning Black illustrated by Ryan Howe, and made a character in the 2020 video game Assassin Creed: Valhalla.  I strongly suspect that the author of The Prettiest Book would not have approved of all this nonsense at all…