18th century | Cotsen Children’s Library

The Toy-Shop. London: E. Newbery, [ca. 1791]. (Cotsen 5610, copy 2)

This copy of The Toy-Shop is a good example of a book that has almost been read to death. Who was responsible? It’s natural to pin the blame for the book’s poor condition on the owners who wrote their names in it. But H. and John Beague were probably just two in a succession of owners. It’s possible that the damage was done by one of the owners who didn’t identify him or herself or whoever scribbled in pencil throughout the book–possibly as late as the nineteenth century. Maybe it was more than one bad actor.

The binding of the The Toy Shop should be a wreck, but the Dutch gilt paper over boards is in better shape than the text. Really well read copies of eighteenth-century juveniles bound this way often have naked spines, exposing the stitched signatures below. Where the paper covering the spine is torn away, you can see how thin it is..

Front board and oversewn spine. Mother Bunch’s Fairy Tales. London: E. Newbery, 1790. (Cotsen 5505)

Some young readers actually cared enough about their books to reinforce the bindings, but there’s no way of knowing whether it was the owner or a kind sister or mother who stopped what they were doing and repaired the book. This binding is so worn that it’s impossible to tell what the original color of the paper covering the boards was. The spine is completely gone, although some of the original stitching holding the two boards together is still intact. Someone did a rough-and-ready job of securing them so they wouldn’t fall off. The repair is not neat or precise, but the collection of then popular fairy tales by Mme. D’Aulnoy and others can still be opened and read.

The book is a 1790 reprint of a title issued nearly twenty years before. The engraver’s signature is long gone and the images are so worn that they have been touched up in places. On the inside there have been additional repairs to keep the pages from falling out.

(Cotsen 5505)

The first owners of Cotsen 5505 that can be traced lived in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1854 this copy of Mother Bunch’s Tales was signed by G. M. Richmond (George Martin Richmond, a businessman in Providence, Rhode Island) and he gave it to his adult daughter Ellen in 1857. Nearly twenty years later Ellen presented it to her married daughter Alice. Did one of them sew the boards back on or had that been done long before it came into the family? There must be a story about this book, but it is impossible to tell from the information Jill Shefrin discovered in the course of researching the people who owned Cotsen’s collection of Newbery juveniles.The third example below must have been read until the boards had fallen off, but someone cared enough about it to oversew the binding with stout thread with an interlocking stitch. Other eighteenth-century children’s books in the collection have been repaired the same way, although I don’t have a list of them.

Front board and spine. Histories, or, Tales of Past Times Told by Mother Goose. 5th ed. Salisbury: B. Collins, 1769. (Cotsen 25150)

.You can get a glimpse of the stitching on the inside as well.

(Cotsen 25150)

This Mother Goose’s Tales belonged at one time to a Mary Barrett and we know from the number of books surviving with her signature that she must have had a pretty large nursery library. You can see that the pages are in danger of coming detached from the text block and that someone has neatly pinned them together near the gutter. Other groups of pages have been treated the same way. Pinning pages is another homemade repair I’ve seen more than once, but I have no idea how to date or localize the pins. I assume they are too short to have been the kind of pins women used to attach pieces of their clothing together. If only I could find a passage in some eighteenth-century children’s book that describes an eager little reader using her needle to fix up an old favorite…

Balderdash! John Newbery and the Boisterous Birth of Children’s Books (2017) is an explanation of where children’s books came from for preschoolers. This is the first collaboration of author Michelle Markel and illustrator Nancy Carpenter, but they are both veteran creators of picture book biographies. Working with other people, they have introduced young readers to modern artists Marc Chagall and Henri Rousseau to powerful women Queen Victoria and Hillary Clinton. They have also tackled more obscure but worthy women subjects, such as Fannie Farmer, founder of the Boston Cooking School and the young Jewish girl who played an important role in the Shirtwaist Strike of 1909 on the East Side. .

Markel and Carpenter are not the first to write a juvenile biography of John Newbery (1713-1767), the London bookseller widely believed to have “invented” the children’s book as we know it (I discussed their predecessors in a previous post). For that achievement, Newbery was selected in 1922 as the namesake of the American Library Association’s annual award for the most distinguished contribution to American children’s literature.Can the life of John Newbery be made relevant to a twenty-first century child? And how many will actually find it interesting when so few vivid facts or anecdotes that would make him come alive survive?. The heated controversy about whether he treated his writers like indentured servants obviously won’t do and neither will George Colman’s nasty but hilarious send-up of the proud social climbing papa visiting his son at Oxford. Tidbits like those would detract from the legend of the philanthropic bookseller who was the friend of the rising generation. There are no portraits of him, so the imaginary one by Stephen Markel on the cover of Shirley Granaham’s 2014 biography, is all over the Internet for lack of anything else. How many people assume it was taken from some eighteenth-century original in a museum?

Perhaps the fewer the facts, the better, given the age of the intended audience for Balderbash. Markel and Carpenter have succeeded in constructing an amusing and uplifting account that only a pedant might take issue with. Carpenter takes the liberty of presenting mid-eighteenth-century society as more literate and diverse than it actually was. If we can believe illustrations depicting Newbery’s bookshop, the little books were stored not on low ranges of shelves like a modern children’s room, but in drawers. But why snark at such good-humored illustrations?. John Newbery would have approved of the way Carpenter incorporated Jack the Giant-Killer and Tom Thumb into the scene above.. I also think the shameless old promoter would have liked even more the scene where Newbery peeks out of his shop, watching his satisfied little customers begin reading their loot before they are barely out of the door. Actually the real John Newbery’s usual tactic was to model the desired behavior by showing the grown-ups presenting good children with rewards of his little books. The goal never deviated from suggesting his books should be gobbled up like plum cakes!Markel’s opening is inspired: “Lucky, lucky reader. Be glad it’s not 1726.” She goes on to explain that all the wonderful books like Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe were for adults and children had nothing of their own except “preachy poems and fables, religious texts that made them fear that death was near, and manuals that told them where to stand, how to sit, not to laugh and scores of other other rules.” That has more than a grain of truth, as these two illustrations from children’s books published before 1744 show.What a difference between those two horrifying images and these two from A Set of Squares, one of Newbery’s earliest works for young people for teaching reading along the principles of John Locke. It’s not mentioned in Balderdash! (the only surviving copy is in the Cotsen Children’s Library) and in fact there are no facsimile illustrations from actual Newberys (which would have spoiled the concept).Was it all a lark creating those pioneering children’s books? I doubt that Newbery dreamed up the concept for the first periodical for children, The Lilliputian Magazine (1751), in the print shop, sitting under drying racks filled with sheets of A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. Perhaps he should have, but we will probably never know. It was obviously far beyond the scope of a picture book biography to retell in greater detail the story of Newbery’s career as a children’s book publisher. But there is a certain irony that Markel and Carpenter have given the legend of John Newbery (for which he was partly responsible) a charming new form, which will probably guarantee its continued circulation.for another generation.