Category Archives: 20th century

Artists At Work: Maud and Miska Petersham Reinvent Hary Janos

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An old friend reminded me that when we were little, we loved to noisily act out stories from Margery Clark’s The Poppy Seed  Cakes.  We loved the colorful illustrations inspired by traditional Hungarian designs by Maud and Miska Petershams, a husband and wife team of author-illustrators.  Years later, I was reintroduced to the Petershams, when I accessioned the archive for their The Ark of Father Noah and Mother Noah (1930), a document of the creative process, from the pencil roughs to the finished artwork. Eventually fortune in the form of Helen Younger (Aleph-Bet Books) threw a second, even more splendid Petersham maquette Cotsen’s way: Get-a-Way and Hary Janos (1933).  The title characters are a worn-out stuffed horse and his friend, a wooden soldier doll “faded and one armed…but still proud and boastful” as befits a Hungarian hussar down on his luck. Set in  “a far-off land where old toys become new and gay,” the dream-like narrative owes a little something to the more famous Velveteen Rabbit.  The inspiration for the soldier, however,  is the comic epic poem Az obsitos by Garay Janos, in which old veteran spins out a series of tall tales about his service under the Austrians.

Pairing the art in the maquette with the illustration in the published book is a delightful exercise in observing the artists at work.   Here are our heroes, making their weary way to the entrance to the promised land for toys who have outlived their owners’ love somewhat worse for the wear.  If you look closely at the drawing, you can see that the pencil design for the decorative capital S is supposed to fit in the box to the left of “eady boy!”  Notice how much more saturated the blues are in the illustration–tribute to the skill of the William Edwin Rudge firm that printed it.

The art and the printed version for this image shows how the Petershams fleshed out their idea for the gate to the promised land.  The architectural elements seem to be fully formed at this stage, but many of the little figures filling out the composition have yet to be worked out.

Here are Get-a-Way and Hary Janos telling their sad stories to the sympathetic governor.   The drawing is shown here with the printed version tweaked for the cover design.  At the bottom of the drawing, you can make out the note “same as the cover except blue.”  That’s not strictly true because the sun in the upper left hand corner had to go to make room for the hand lettered title.  And expression on Hary’s face is less perplexed.

Fundamental changes were made in certain pictures.  Here is the drawing of Hary Janos, chest puffed out, stepping out with a lady on either arm.  The adoring matryoshka doll in the drawing was changed out for a rather sly-looking woman wearing a pink apron with a zigzagged border over purple dress.  Notice how much the posture of Get-a-way in the upper left hand corner has been altered.  And he’s crying as well. 

A number of full-color illustrations, like this one of Hary Janos taking the lovely brunette in yellow for a spin, had to be sacrificed on the altar of the budget.  “Now only black & white” reads the note at the bottom.   The silhouette of the car became more streamlined in the printed version as well.

And last but not least, here is a series of drawings showing how the initial idea changed as the Petershams worked through the preliminary pencil sketch to a full-color drawing to the final version in the book.  It’s Hary Janos telling tales again…  I love the way the  clothes,  the postures, and expressions of the three figures change.

This post is lovingly dedicated to the memory of Helen B Younger, co-proprietor with her husband Marc, of Aleph-Bet Books.  Thanks to Helen, this glorious maquette and many, many other wonderful things are part of the collection of the Cotsen Children’s Library.   She succumbed last week to FSH, which she valiantly battled all her life and yet refused to let define or slow her down.  One of  her generation’s great dealers in children’s books, Aleph-Bet always had one of the grand double booths at the entrance to the New York Antiquarian Bookfair.  It will be sad indeed to pass through the doors into the bustle and not stop to see Helen and Marc first…

Interactive Advent Calendars

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My childhood Advent calendar came from Joe’s Candy Cottage on the hill that sloped down to the Manhattan Beach pier.  A tiny shop that smelled deliciously of melting chocolate twelve months a year, Joe’s was even more irresistible to local kids in December, when they dropped by to admire the stocking stuffers imported from Europe in the glass vitrines and a menagerie of Steiff toys on the high shelves.

That calendar from Joe’s was discarded long ago, but it is still  my idea of  the perfect one –a snowy landscape with toys, woodland animals, stars, sweets and cunningly concealed flaps numbered from one to twenty-four,the whole surface lightly dusted with a veil of silver glitter.

That paper artifact is now another commodity that blows into the Christmas marketplace every year in a flurry of sizes, shapes, and materials incorporating different combinations of holiday motifs.  Some designs forgo the little flaps that open to reveal pictures of treats  for wooden drawers, which Mom and Dad have to fill with goodies.  Instant gratification trumps the cultivation of patience yet again.

The Cotsen collection’s cache of  what I assumed would be a selection of “traditional” European Advent calendars had more to offer than naked pink cherubs turning out sugary treats in a celestial bakery.  Instead of rolling out variations on the same old theme, some graphic designers and illustrators were more than happy to experiment with the format.

The publisher’s envelope for the Advent calendar, Das Christkind im Walde, ca. 1930. Cotsen 36764.

The envelope of Das Christkind im Walde illustrated in frosty blues promises the pleasure of creating a charming tableau between December 6th and the 24th.  The backdrop is a section of wintry forest with squirrels, rabbits and crows.  There are no flaps on the calendar, just numbers.  Each number has a corresponding tab on the back.

The numbered tabs on the back of the calendar. There is also a mostly illegible property stamp for a school in Prague.

As more tabs are turned during the passage of December, the scene fills up with angels carrying stars and lanterns.  On the twenty-third, St. Nicolas pops up in the lower right hand corner and the Christ child takes the center stage on Christmas Eve. Josef Mauder (1884-1969), the famous Bavarian illustrator of Jugendstil children’s books, designed an Advent calendar that required the child to do quite a bit more than find the flap with the day’s date on it, open it, and long for the thing pictured in the window.

The well-worn cover of the third printing of Josef Mauder’s Muenchener Weihnachts-Kalendar, which probably dates around 1925. Cotsen 23215.

Each day, the child had to select the correct illustrated sticker and paste it in its proper space on the right page.  The Cotsen copy has been completed, so I am guessing there was an envelope containing the set of stickers, now discarded.  Each sticker tells the story of one stage of Peter and Liesel’s search for the Christ Child between December first and the twenty-fourth.  On the third day of the month, for example, they meet the Heinzelmann and ask for directions.  They see St. Nicholas on the fourth of December while trying to find the fifth tree in the sixth row the Heinzelmann told them to look for.

Last but not least, an audio-Advent calendar that predates the ones on the Internet by several decades.   Glade Jul, Dejlige Jul is one of those completely mad hybrids that designers create for children. The twenty-four flaps of the Advent calendar have been arranged around the circumference of a 45 r.p.m. record on laminated cardboard (ours is missing seven flaps).

Glade Jul, dejlige Jul = Santa Notte = Voici Noel = Silent Night, holy Night = Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht. [Copenhagen?]: L. Levinson Jr. Ltd., copyright [1965?] Cotsen 6488.

One way of playing with this object might be for the child to open the flaps and look at the loot in the windows, then to play the sound recording.  As the record spins, the children on the flaps appear to dance around the Christmas tree in the center, making Glade Jul is a relative of a phenatistoscope, or precursor of a GIF animation of a short continuous loop.   This novelty, with its parallel titles in five languages was probably intended for distribution in America, England and the Continent.

So don’t let the snow melt under your feet in the forest!  There are still nineteen flaps to open on the Advent calendar!