Category Archives: 20th century

Miniatures-in-Miniature: Early Experimental Kamishibai in the Cotsen Children’s Library Collection

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By Tara M. McGowan

Kamishibai (紙芝居), literally “paper theater,” is a form of street-performance art that was first invented in Japan in the late 1920s as a way to both entertain and sell treats to children. Hailed as a precursor of animé and manga, it has been receiving increasing attention worldwide, as artists, educators, and performers of all kinds, inspired by the candy peddlers of the 1930s, strap stages to bicycles or otherwise transport them to schools, streets, museums and parks to entertain audiences of all ages. There are now international kamishibai festivals from Mexico to Slovenia and kamishibai workshops and symposia being offered from Australia to France. A French organization D’Une Langue A L’Autre (DULALA) will be initiating an international Plurilingual Kamishibai competition this year to promote multilingualism through kamishibai. In the city of Numazu (Shizuoka, Japan), the 7th Annual Street-Performance Kamishibai Competition will be held this July, and contestants will be traveling from Brazil, Germany, and Mexico.

Figure 1. Seventh Annual Street-Performance Kamishibai Contest in Numazu Promotional Poster

With so much global interest, it goes without saying that the history of kamishibai and how it developed, as a miniaturized version of the “big screen,” has become familiar to many (McGowan, 2010; 2015). When silent film first entered Japan, it was never really silent because movie narrators, known as benshi 弁士, or katsudō benshi 活動弁士, were almost invariably standing alongside, explaining the (often foreign) films to avid fans (Dym, 2003). In some cases, the movie narrators were more popular than the movie stars!  Street-performance kamishibai cards were designed so that the images could be animated through dramatic transitions from one card to the next, as the performer pulled the cards out of the stage while narrating the soundtrack alongside. When talkies came to Japan in the 1920s, it is said that many of these film narrators took to performing kamishibai in the streets to make a living (Orbaugh, 2015).

Figure 2. Kamishibai Man by Allen Say. Houghton Mifflin, 2005. (Cotsen 151969)

The typical image of a kamishibai street performer (Fig. 2), popularized by illustrator and author Allen Say in his picture book Kamishibai Man (2005), is of a man selling candy to children off the back of his bicycle and then telling stories to a captivated crowd. Figure 3. “Kamishibai,” poem by Saijo Yaso, illustrated by Hatsuyama Shigeru. In Kodomo no kuni, Vol. 11, No. 14 (December, 1932). (Cotsen 30591)

Another depiction (Fig. 3), which was published in 1932 in the popular Japanese children’s magazine Kodomo no kuni (Country of children), however, paints a rather different picture and suggests a diversity of performance styles in this early phase of kamishibai’s development. In illustrator Hatsuyama Shigeru’s (1897-1973) distinctive geometrical style, this kamishibai man is depicted with the stage strapped to his chest and a box of candy (あめ), hanging from his hip decorated with a Japanese flag. He beats his hyōshigi 拍子木 (wooden clappers) to gather the children about him, while, on the left-hand side, a mother reaches into her purse to find some change for her impatient child. Other children, already sucking their sweets, watch him performing the Chinese classic of The Monkey King (or Journey to the West).

The poem translates as follows:

Chakkin, chakkin, he beats the hyōshigi, gathering the children “Now Kamishibai is about to begin!”  Ha, chakkin, chakkin, chakkin na.

The candy peddler’s “Lloyd glasses” shine in the evening light; He coughs a big, big cough. Ha, chakkin, chakkin, chakkin na.

And now they appear: the Monkey King, Pigsy, and Tripitaka the monk, coming along, coming along, and coming along on their journey together, but then, here comes a monster! Ha, chakkin, chakkin, chakkin na.

Come here, little boys! Big boys, step back a little. Everyone must get along as you line up, line up, and line up kamishibai. Ha, chakkin, chakkin, chakkin na.

Chakkin, chakkin, the ginkgo leaves fall at the street crossing. Sweet-tooth, eat your candy, eat, eat and eat kamishibai. Ha, chakkin, chakkin, chakkin na.

The sound of the wooden clappers reverberates throughout the poem, punctuating the kamishibai man’s narration and grabbing the children’s attention on the busy street corner. The poem captures the multisensory experience of street kamishibai, where the audio-visual performance was combined with the sweet taste of candy and the cramped space shared with others!

Although not actually shown in the illustration, the reference to the kamishibai man’s “Lloyd glasses,” named for the silent film actor Harold Lloyd (1893-1971), connects the kamishibai man to the big screen and also dates the poem to the 1930s when these glasses became all the rage. What is unclear from this depiction is how the performer actually pulled the cards out of the stage while holding and beating the hyōshigi clappers with both hands. His stage is a simple frame with what appear to be actual cloth curtains blowing in the wind.  Standard kamishibai stages today open on the left side (from the audience’s point-of-view, see Fig. 2), and the movement of the cards is from right to left, as they are pulled out of the stage. In the early 1930s, however, this does not appear to have been fixed. There are photographs of early stages where the cards were pulled out of either side of the stage or even up through the top, as is depicted here on a small promotional fan, produced by the Sasaya bookstore.

Figure 4. Promotional fan, front and verso (5 inches in diameter), Sasaya Honten, circa 1940. (Cotsen 71689374)

In this instance, the kamishibai man is wearing the Lloyd glasses referenced in the poem and, just like in the earlier example, he holds clappers, one in each hand, suggesting that clappers played an active role in telling the story, as they do in the poem above. In this case, however, his stage is on the back of a bicycle with no candy in sight, and he appears to be telling a war propaganda kamishibai story. As will be described in greater detail later, kamishibai was used extensively for purposes of propaganda during Japan’s fifteen-year war, the period between 1931 and 1945 (Orbaugh, 2015), and in this image, we see a bomb going off in the foreground nearly missing the battle ship to the right, as fighter planes and Zeppelin circle in the skies overhead. The children practically have their noses up against the stage, which is consistent with photographs of performances from the time. In this instance, however, it seems clear that the cards are being pulled up through the top of the stage and not from the side, as has become common practice today.

What is not visible in the romanticized (some might even say sanitized) images of the kamishibai men above, is any evidence of the heated controversy, which surrounded street-performance kamishibai almost immediately; namely, kamishibai’s potentially corrupting influence on children. By 1937, kamishibai was so widespread that one survey claimed there were two thousand storytellers in the city of Tokyo alone and that around 800,000 children were watching these performances on a daily basis (Uchiyama & Nomura, 1937). Complaints from educators and parents about the salacious content of the stories, the lurid colors used by the artists, and the unhygienic practices of the candy peddlers started to reach the ears of authorities, and by 1938, the plot of the stories had to be marked on the back of the cards so that content could be monitored.

Some educators and religious leaders, however, recognized that the mesmerizing power of kamishibai and its evident popularity with child audiences could be channeled for more elevated purposes. It is hardly surprising that purveyors of children’s culture—advertisers, children’s magazines, bookstores and toy companies—would also want to cash in on this mania. From the 1930s to 40s, toy versions of the format proliferated so that children could entertain themselves or family and friends at home. The Cotsen Children’s Library has several fascinating examples of these miniatures-in-miniature that encapsulate forgotten moments of kamishibai’s history and shed important light on kamishibai’s evolving place in Japanese popular imagination.

Figure 5. Kamishibai ehon by Miyashita Fumio, front and inside cover. [Japan] : Kokkadō, between 1930 and 1940. (Cotsen 100694)

The first example is titled “Kamishibai ehon” (Paper theater picture book) (Fig. 5, left). It presents itself as a picture book, when, in fact, the cover doubles as a miniature kamishibai stage. A rectangle for the stage opening is punched out of the back cover and then folded to create a pocket to hold the cards (Fig. 5, right).

Figure 6. Kamishibai ehon by Miyashita Fumio, back cover, constructed as a stage with dimensions 7.5 x 10.5 inches and with an opening of 4 x 6 inches. (Cotsen 100694)

In this case, the user has followed the instructions which are visible on the back of the stage pocket (Fig. 6). There are no openings on the sides of the pocket, so the cards would have been pulled up out of the stage, one at a time, just like in the image on the fan above. The red string, which was originally meant to hold the stage open, has since been re-attached, most likely because of the torn left corner.

In spite of rough treatment, the stage exudes elegance with its red frilly curtains and, at bottom, a gold and red sign, which reads “Children’s Theater” (子供座). The ornate style is well suited to the accompanying cards, which are an adaptation of the Victorian children’s classic Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett, first serialized in Japanese translation in a popular girls’ magazine between 1890 and 1892 by Wakamatsu Shizuko. The style of the illustrations, however, suggest that this kamishibai version may have been more closely based on the hugely popular 1921 silent film version of the story, starring Mary Pickford, or the 1936 sound version, starring Dolores Costello.

Figure 7. Card 1, front and verso, of Kanashiki shōkōshi (Sad little Lord Fauntleroy) by Miyashita Fumio. (Cotsen 100694)

The kamishibai follows much the same story as the films, beginning when the main character Cedric Errol (Cedie), the only son of a New York widow, suddenly finds out that he is the Earl of Dorincourt’s sole heir. Cedie leaves his mother in New York City to take up residence with his grandfather, the Earl, who plans to turn him into an aristocrat. An incident with a fortune-hunting impostor, who tries to push her own son into Cedie’s place, makes the grandfather realize the virtues of Cedie’s real mother, and son and mother are reunited in the end.

Figure 8. Card 12 of Kanashiki shōkōshi (Sad little Lord Fauntleroy) by Miyashita Fumio. (Cotsen 100694)

The adaptation of this worldwide classic to the kamishibai format, and even the presentation of it as a “picture book,” reveals the publisher’s evident desire to elevate the medium in the eyes of prospective consumers — middle-class parents, who might otherwise associate kamishibai with unclean street-entertainment for children of the lower socioeconomic orders.

Another example of adapting the classics to miniature kamishibai format for middle-class children is this extremely rare “Invisible Ink Fairytale Paper Theater” (Aburidashi otogi kamishibai) set. The box the cards come in doubles as the stage with the opening again at the top. The image on the back of the box illustrates both how the invisible ink would have been made to appear through a process of exposing it to heat and how a kamishibai man might perform the cards in a similar (but much larger) stage for an audience of children.

Figure 9. Aburidashi otogi kamishibai. Dimensions 4 X 6 inches. (cards 3.5 x 5.5 inches) (Cotsen)

Here, the performer could easily be a school teacher, rather than a street-performer, because the performance appears to be occurring in an interior space with the stage perched on a table, and the children, who are neatly dressed Western-style clothing, are watching in orderly rows. The kamishibai man’s stage is designed exactly like the box with its flap up, suggesting that, like the toy, these cards would have been pulled up through the top in performance.

Figure 10. Aburidashi otogi kamishibai. Front of stage with curtain card displayed. (Cotsen)

The stage is complete with a curtain card, depicting faces of the main characters from all the stories, and the words, otogi kamishibai (fairy-tale paper theater) at the bottom. The set contains five Japanese classic fairy (or folk) tales of six cards each, including Momotaro (The Peach Boy), Issunboshi (The One Inch Boy), Kachi kachi yama (The Burning Mountain), Hanasaka jiji (The Old Man who made the flowers bloom), and Saru kani kassen (The battle between monkey and crab).

Figure 11. Aburidashi otogi kamishibai. Cards of “Momotaro.” (Cotsen)

It is unlikely, however, that these cards were ever performed. There is no text on the backs, and the process of making the invisible ink appear by holding the cards over the brazier has left them brittle and even burned in places. The pleasure of the toy may have been in seeing the images emerge and recognizing the familiar scenes depicted. It is truly remarkable that these ephemeral objects still exist as an almost complete set!

The smallest of the mini-kamishibai stages in the Cotsen Collection (2 x 2.5 inches, when constructed) is part of a promotional gift package distributed by Takeda Chōbee Shōten in 1940. The package was designed as an advertisement for medicine and other health products, as well as a celebration of the 2600th year (1940) since the founding of the Japanese empire by the legendary Emperor Jimmu. The decorative banner is made to look like a string of lanterns, on one side of which is written the characters for the celebration of 2600th year, as well as the slogan, “Let’s become strong children and give our best for our country.” On the other side, the lanterns are decorated with the Japanese flag and several different medications and supplements manufactured by the Takeda company.

Figure 12. Omiyage (Gift). Takeda Chōbee Shōten, 1940. (Cotsen 71687659)

The gifts also include a matchbox-sized wooden interlocking block set, a balloon, a card with a moveable image of a fisherman, a set of origami papers, a coloring book, and two cards depicting a miniature kamishibai with stage to be cut and assembled. The twelve miniature kamishibai story cards depict the series of victorious battles and events, starting with the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge Incident at the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and ending with the founding of the puppet regime, the so-called Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China (1940-1945). The promotional pamphlets educate customers about the importance of vitamin B1, the availability of hormones for women, and how to maintain health from autumn into winter. All the gifts contain advertisements for Takeda products.

Figure 13, “Heitaisan yo, arigatau” (Thank you to our troops) in Omiyage, 1940. (Cotsen 71687659)

Oddly, the words for each card are printed in tiny blue characters on the right-hand side of each card, making it impossible for the performer to read them until they are removed from the stage. The dominant use of Chinese characters and difficult historical details suggests that this mini-stage may not have been designed for a child audience, and it may also explain why it remains uncut after all these years. The stage (Fig. 14) is decorated with a Japanese flag and military trumpet and the words, “Thank you to our troops” (Heitai san yo arigatau). As the instructions indicate at the bottom left, this is the only miniature stage of those in the Cotsen collection that is designed with an opening on the right-hand side (standardized stages today open on the left).

Figure 14. “Heitaisan yo, arigatau” (Thank you to our troops). Illustration of stage, when constructed. (Cotsen 71687659)

All of the above examples indicate that kamishibai as a medium was still in a fluid form during the 1930s and 40s that allowed for all manner of experiments with the format. During the war years when kamishibai was used as a mass media for propaganda purposes, experimentation with hybrid formats seemed even more popular. One of the most intriguing examples is this pop-up “kamishibai talkie,” which would have come with a record of the performer’s voice (now missing).

Figure 15. Kodomo chokin butai (Children’s savings corps), Kōa Bunka Rokuon Kabushiki Kaisha, between 1942 and 1945. An updated edition with narrative text. (Cotsen 102950)

Unlike a typical kamishibai set, these cards were performed without a stage and are actually bound together with tape at the bottom (missing in Fig. 15). The audience would place the cards on a surface and pull them up, one at a time, to reveal the pop-up (tobidashi, literally “pop-out”) character connected to the next scene. On the original version from 1942, there is no text, so the audience would have relied on the accompanying record for the story.

Figure 16. Kodomo chokin butai (Children’s savings corps). Card 1 with pop-up character, conducting the troop. The slogan 一億一心 (Ichioku isshin) is on his backpack. Note that the pop-up in the foreground is connected to both the front of Card 1 and the back of the next card so the cards cannot be separated. Kōa Bunka Rokuon Kabushiki Kaisha, 1942. (Cotsen 68469)

At the center of the story is a group of children, who are working together to save money for the Japanese armed forces, inspired by the nationally unifying slogan–ichioku isshin (literally, “one billion, one spirit”). A wealthy boy in town refuses to join their group, selfishly spending money on toys. When he falls ill, the children’s savings corps visits his sick bed and offers him money for a speedy recovery. He is so moved by their generous spirit that he joins with them. The 1942 edition is labeled Shinan tokkyo: Kamishibai tōkī, meaning “A new initiative with special permission: Paper-theater talkie,” indicating that it is most likely the first of its kind to be sanctioned by the Japanese government. By 1942, the military government tightly controlled and censored publication in any medium, and it actively produced kamishibai cards to educate the civilian population about the divinity of the Imperial lineage and other aspects of the war effort, such as how to construct bomb shelters and how best to support the troops. This “new initiative” kamishibai talkie must have been deemed a success because Cotsen also has a later edition, which has been labeled with the words “Endorsed by the Ministry of Finance, Citizen Savings Division” (Fig. 15 and 17)

Figure 17. Later edition of Kodomo chokin butai published between 1942 and 1945 with narrative text, Card 8. (Cotsen 102950) As the credits on the final card (lower left) indicate, by this time, there was a whole series of stories created in this format.

The innovative formats and variety of performance styles illustrated by these few examples of early toy kamishibai from the Cotsen Children’s Library collection are of interest today, as kamishibai experiences a renaissance around the globe and questions about what “traditional” kamishibai should look like come to the fore. There are many published explanations available for how kamishibai should be created or performed, but the question arises: who gets to decide what is traditional? Even this small selection of objects complicates the notion of a single “tradition,” in a period when so many different groups in Japan—storytellers, educators, advertisers, government officials, and publishers—were all actively appropriating kamishibai for different purposes. Whether it was for profit, pedagogy, propaganda, or even just for fun, artists and illustrators were experimenting with the format from the very beginning and continue to do so today. Rather than searching for one right or wrong way to perform kamishibai, these intriguing glimpses into the range of early experiments with kamishibai invite and challenge kamishibai performers and artists around the world today to look for ever more interesting and engaging ways to bring this interactive and dramatic format to new audiences.

Further reading about kamishibai (in English):

Dym, J. (2003) Benshi, Japanese Silent Film Narrators, and Their Forgotten Narrative Art of Setsumei: A History of Japanese Silent Film Narration (Edwin Mellen Pr)

Friends of Silent Film Association (2001) The Benshi—Japanese Silent Film Narrators (Matsuda Film Productions)

McGowan, T. (2010) The Kamishibai Classroom: Engaging Multiple Literacies through the Art of ‘Paper Theater.’ (ABC-CLIO)

McGowan, T. (2015) Performing Kamishibai: An Emerging New Literacy for a Global Audience (Routledge)

Nash, E. (2009) Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater (Abrams Press)

Orbaugh, S. (2015) Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan’s Fifteen-Year War (Brill)

Say, A. (2005) Kamishibai Man [picture book] (Houghton Mifflin).

Tara M. McGowan catalogs the Japanese collection at the Cotsen Children’s Library.

Cotsen Research Report: Feodor Rojankovsky’s Alphabet Books Part II

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This winter Research Grant winner JoAnn Conrad spent a month in Rare Books and Special Collections reading room poring over dozens and dozens of early twentieth-century books in Cotsen and in Graphic Arts.  Her project, “Women’s Work: Magazines, Advertising and Children’s Books in the ‘Golden Age’ of Illustration in the United States,” is one piece of a more ambitious one about the role of early twentieth-century artists who worked across media in graphic design, advertising, and children’s book illustration played in disseminating the visual language of modernism.  Joann’s survey of Feodor Rojankovsky’s  ABCs will be in two parts: today’s second post discusses work he created in the United States.

The A Б Cs of Feodor Rojankovsky

By JoAnn Conrad

In 1925, Vassar graduate Esther Averill moved to Paris, where many young, college-educated American women were seeking to understand their place as writers, artists and as women in a more socially liberating scene. In 1930 Averill and business partner Lila Stanley had a new venture with an American client looking to modernize his line of stationary. Averill turned to Rojan whose drawings enchanted them: “They had color, gaiety and humor, and revealed how thoroughly he understood the graphic possibility of the medium.”[1] The stationary endeavor fell through, but Rojankovksy, eager to enter into the new market in children’s picturebooks proposed they collaborate. The result was the 1931 Daniel Boone,[2] a fauvist-inspired series of brightly colored lithographs celebrating the American hero as he fought Indians and settled the wilderness — a fantasy of the American West shaped, in part, on Rojankovksy’s own childhood fascination with the works of Fenimore Cooper. But Rojankovsky’s experience in modern advertising layout and illustration was also major influence on the book, especially his use of brightly colored graphics to create a feeling of a fantastic West above and beyond the text. The plates were visually stunning but prohibitive to print, and Averill could find no American publisher willing to take it on. She and Stanley therefore established their own Domino Press, which would “specialize in children’s picture books illustrated by gifted young artists and reproduced by means of the excellent color processes that were available in Paris,”[3] and published Daniel Boone themselves. Rojankovsky would go on to illustrate four more Domino books, published in French and English versions and distributed in France and the U.S.,  preceding Rojankovsky’s own immigration by almost a decade.

Illustration from Daniel Boone. (Paris: Domino Press, 1931) Cotsen 16819,

In 1933, on the basis of this impressive start in children’s book illustration and advertising work, Rojan was hired by visionary French children’s book innovator Paul Faucher, creator of Les Albums du Père Castor. Faucher’s radical pedagogy was based on the concept of “hands on,” participatory learning that sought to elicit children’s creative responses to the real world. Faucher’s first team of illustrators consisted primarily of Russian expatriate artists — Nathalie Parain, Alexandra Exter, Hélène Guertik, and Rojankovsky, all of whom had adopted the forms and techniques of the avant-garde, constructivism, and Cubo-Futurism which had been their common experience in the Russian art milieu in the early 1900s. Using elemental shapes, and primary colors to evoke a synesthetic, multi-sensory experience, and deploying non-representational and minimalist images, they sought to establish an unmediated, visceral, and emotional engagement with the viewer. In Paris in the 1930s, they redirected this towards Faucher’s new vision for a modern, interactive picturebook. Decoupled from any Socialist message, these artists, in various ways, extended the modernist experiment into his new pedagogical and commercial enterprise; their attempts at viewer engagement aligned with Faucher’s participatory pedagogy.

Rojankovsky often illustrated for Faucher’s wife, the author Lida who shared her husband’s philosophy, and with her he produced a series of books with naturalistic images of animals in their habitats. But in 1936 Rojankovsky collaborated with Faucher himself on an ABC book/game,[4] the cover of which harkens back to the frontispiece of Zhivaia Azbuka, with animals spilling out from their containment. But whereas in the 1936 book the animals featured inside are consistent with those on the cover, in Zhivaia Azbuka the cover and frontispiece feature wild, exotic animals in contrast to the more ordinary and familiar animals accompanying Chernyi’s verse. Faucher’s ABC is also a game, in this case several bingo-type games of increasing difficulty. Thus, while the ideological thrust of Zhivaia Azbuka had been conservative and preservationist, Faucher’s is clearly pedagogical. Zhivaia Azbuka’s intended audience was Russian émigré children, who most likely spoke Russian at home and in the community, but whose language of instruction in their new home was French. That is, the goal of the book was to expose children who likely knew how to read in French, but who also spoke Russian, to the Cyrillic alphabet and thereby to written Russian; a context which better explains Chernyi’s complex couplets. This is not a beginning reader, or a “Baby’s first ABCs.” In contrast, Faucher’s ABC specifically links letters to sounds, and illustrates these sounds through the initial phonemes of individual illustrations of animals. There are no vignettes, either visual or verbal. Faucher’s is a classic ABC book, with one large, capital letter, its corresponding lower-case cursive letter, and a representative animal on a blank background. The presumptive learning process necessitates a prior knowledge of the represented animal from which the relationship between the initial sound and the letter can be suggested. This process breaks down when the animals are exotic and perhaps unknown to the child.

Front cover of Paul Faucher’s ABC / jeux du Père Castor. ([Paris]: Flammarion, 1936). Cotsen 21253

Frontispiece to Zhivai︠a︡  Azbuka. (Paris: N. P. Karbasnikov, 1926) Cotsen 9209.

Tearable cards from ABC / jeux du Père Castor.  Cotsen 21253

back free endpaper game board from ABC / jeux du Père Castor.  Cotsen 21253

Word-Letter associations that work in Faucher’s ABC. Cotsen 21253

Word-Letter associations that don’t work in Faucher’s ABC. Cotsen 21253

ABC books such as Faucher’s, with their one-to-one correspondence of letters and sounds illustrated by images of single words were extremely popular in the late 1800s and early 1920s,[5] and reflect an early pedagogical approach to reading, one which would be displaced by phonics by mid-century. In 1936, the popularity of this type of ABC book was on the wane, but Rojankovsky, long after settling in the U.S. would return to this format one last time with his Animals in the Zoo, in 1962.[6] The page layout is reminiscent of Faucher’s book from over 25 years earlier, but what is even more notable is the cover, which features a giraffe in an old-fashioned zoo enclosure, whose ‘spots’ are made out of letters. Rojankovsky would again use this technique in his final ABC book in 1970.[7] Interestingly, this technique of constructing an animal’s body out of letters in an ABC book was used in a 1917 ABC book by Sybil Rebman, published by the Chicago-based P.F. Volland Company. But rather than just filling the animal’s outline with random letters, in Rebman’s book each animal associated with a letter in the alphabet is constructed out of letters which also spell out the word for that animal. Although neither Rebman nor Volland have the name recognition of Rojankovsky, in 1917 her illustrations and concept are artistically innovative (albeit pedagogically dubious), whereas in 1962 Rojankovksy’s repetitive wild-life images and simplistic format look dated. Nonetheless, Rebman’s use of letters is conventional in that they spell out a word, while Rojankovsky’s use of letters decouples them from any corresponding sound or meaning.

Animals in the Zoo (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1962).

Inside pages of Animals in the Zoo. 

ABC: An Alphabet of Many Things. (New York: Golden Press, 1970). Cotsen 152493

Sybil Rebman’s Animal Alphabet. (Chicago.: P.F. Volland Company, 1917). Cotsen 21871

In addition to the English editions of his books for Domino Press, by 1936 many of Rojankovsky’s books in Les Albums du Père Castor were translated into English and distributed in the U.S., brokered by the director of the Artists and Writers Guild, Georges Duplaix. Thus well in advance of his arrival in 1941, his work was well received. Duplaix would be a critical player in Rojankovsky’s life and work, facilitating safe passage out of southern France ahead of Hitler’s army in exchange for a long-term exclusive contract. When Duplaix launched his new commercial venture The Little Golden Books series in 1942, Rojankovsky joined a stable of other émigré artists, including Gustaf Tenggren and Tibor Gergely, to produce some of the most widely published children’s books of the 20th century. Of the over 35 books Rojanksovsky illustrated for the Golden Books from 1943 to 1970, there are none that fit the classic ABC book format. Instead, Rojankovsky’s work focuses mostly on animal stories. His second Golden Book – Animal Stories, written by Duplaix,[8] links animal stories to the alphabet in what seems to have been Rojankovsky’s main interest in ABCs all along– experiments in typography.  In the heart of the book, in between fanciful tales of animals and a display of Rojankovsky’s illustration styles, there are 6 pages of illustrated block letters, each accompanied by a small verse  (21-26). These were later issued as a set of nesting blocks.[9] Even more interestingly, these letters were used in a series of magazine advertisements for Puss n’ Boots cat food during the 1940s.[10]

Georges Duplaix and Feodor Rojankovsky. Animal Stories. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944). Cotsen 7370

Playschool Golden Book Nested Blocks. Golden Press, Inc. Licensed by Playschool, 1958.

Rojankovsky illustrated “Puss n’ Boots” cat food advertisement, Saturday Evening Post, [1949]

Golden Books had not abandoned the ABC-book concept or format, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s, this task had already been taken over by a new group of illustrators – Richard Scarry, Garth Williams, and Cornelius DeWitt. The format also changed: No longer single letters with a single representative figure on a white background, the emphasis had switched to filling the pages with as many representative images as possible. Rojankovsky replicated this in his final book, which fittingly was an ABC book — Alphabet of Many Things (1970), but the end papers again reveal his fascination with typography.

Page spread from ABC: An Alphabet of Many Things. Cotsen 152493

Endpapers from ABC: An Alphabet of Many Things. Cotsen 152493

Rojankovsky’s use of foliage to construct letters of the alphabet appears in many titles to many of his books, which are otherwise unrelated to Alphabet books: Animals on the Farm (Knopf, 1967), and Frog Went A-Courtin (1955), to cite two, and the 1950s-style ABC book format is replicated in the 1960 Animal Dictionary for the Little Golden Books,[11] but, with the exception of Frog Went A-Courtin these are rather joyless, perfunctory endeavors, displaying none of the wit and innovation of Rojankovsky’s other work. Rojankovsky was working under exploitative terms both for Paul Faucher and for Duplaix and the Golden Books. His compensation was low, and the demands of such large-scale publishing operations limited his artistic freedom. Much of his later work seems to be re-assemblages of previous pieces, and one might wonder whether his “recognizable style” is more a function of images he repurposed for his own self-preservation, particularly when his entire oeuvre is examined. A revisitation of his work through the lens of ABC-books reveals its range and variety even when working with the constraints of publishing houses, during political turmoil, and across continents.

Watson, Jane W, and Feodor Rojankovsky. Animal Dictionary. New York: Golden Press, 1960.

[1] Allen, Irving, Polly Allen, and Koly T. Rojankovsky. Feodor Rojankovsky: The Children’s Books and Other Illustration Art, 2014. Kindle edition, location 893.

[2] Averill, Esther Holden, Lila Stanley, and Feodor Rojankovsky. Daniel Boone: Historic Adventures of an American Hunter Among the Indians. Paris: Domino Press, 1931.

[3] Esther Averill Biography from the “Jenny Linsky and the Cat Club” page: http://www.93950.com/cat_club/bio.htm

[4] Faucher, Paul, and Feodor Rojankovsky. ABC / jeux du Père Castor ; dessins de F. Rojan.

[5] The Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton has a digital archive of historical ABC books with many examples https://etc.princeton.edu/abcbooks/. Two of the most prolific publishers during the turn of the century period were Raphael Tuck (London), and the McLoughlin Brothers (New York).

[6] Rojankovsky, Feodor. Animals in the Zoo. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1962.

[7] Rojankovsky, Feodor. ABC: An Alphabet of Many Things. Golden Press, 1970.

[8] Duplaix, Georges, and Feodor Rojankovsky. Animal Stories. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944.

[9] Playschool Golden Book Nested Blocks. Golden Press, Inc. Licensed by Playschool, 1958.

[10] Coast Fishing Company, Wilmington, Ca. The one-page ads with a featured animal, accompanied by a letter of the alphabet inscribed by Rojankovsky, ran in the Saturday Evening Post from 1947 to 1948. These were compiled into a promotional book in 1949.

[11] Watson, Jane W, and Feodor Rojankovsky. Animal Dictionary. Racine, Wis: Golden Press, 1960.