20th century | Cotsen Children’s Library

Mr. Cotsen could never pass by a really good example of an Art Nouveau picture book. At their best, the illustrations, decorations, bindings, and endpapers come together as a whole and I have always thought that appealed to him as a master packager (the original concept for Neutrogena products was all his). Here are four examples of German, Swiss, and Viennese picture books with especially striking endpaper designs.

Below is volume 3 of Jugendland (1903), a periodical for boys and girls edited by Heinrich Moser and Ulrich Kohlbrunner that was published by the Swiss firm Künzli. Its binding design, the endpapers, and title page are all executed by illustrator and caricaturist Arpad Schmidhammer (1857-1921). He got his start contributing to annuals like Jugendland and Knecht Ruprecht, but is perhaps better known for his propagandistic picture books like Lieb Vaterland magst ruhig sein.

Front cover
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Endpapers
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Title page
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The illustrations for the binding, endpapers and title page of Gartenlaube-Bilderbuch der deutscher Jugend (1902), on the other hand, are more uniform in style and subject than those for Jugendland. The picture on the front board is by Hermann Kaulbach (1846-1909), a well-known painter famous for idealized pictures of children. No credits are given for the endpapers or title vignette, but someone made sure that the theme of books and reading was repeated on the title page.

Front cover
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Endpapers
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Title page
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Except for the goblin’s eyes peeking out of the “O,” the cloth boards of O Hastromanvi [The Goblin] (Prague: B. Koči, 1903) by Jožena Schwaigerová are conventional compared with the patterned endpapers. Both the binding design and endpapers contrast sharply with the rather severe title page, with the bold type cutting deeply into the thick paper. Whoever drew the repeat of frogs and pearls is not identified, so perhaps it was also the work of the Bohemian illustrator Hanus Schwaiger (1854-1909) who did the delightfully creepy pictures for the story.

Front cover
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Endpapers
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Title page
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There’s a frog prince on the front board of Ernst Dannheiser’s Miaulina: Ein Märchenbuch für kleine Kinder (Cologne: Schaffstein, 1902), but he hasn’t got any pearls on his crown. Illustrator Julius Diez (1870-1953) let his imagination run wild in this collection of fairy tales. In the book, the tales are told to an industrious little girl by the cat Miaulina, who is shown with a satchel over one shoulder. There is the repeat of the pine tree men and red squirrels on the endpapers, an added illustrated title page where Miaulina eyes little mice watering the garden, and title page dominated by the figure of a fantastically dressed Moorish slave boy, who bears Miaulina on a pillow amidst a riot of exotic birds. And I left out the illustrated vignettes of the poor veteran mouse begging in the cold and the jaunty little fellow riding a rooster, not to mention the frame of mice, beetles and weird rootmen enclosing the table of contents!

Front cover
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Endpapers
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Decorative title page
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Title page
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These exuberant picture books may be over the top, but their packaging gives contemporary bindings of laminated boards, or sober cloth backstrip and boards covered in a contrasting color, a run for their money…

Some children are lucky enough to know an adult with the skills to make them special toys and games. Sometimes those objects survive against the odds are offered to lucky curators. This little set of Schwarzer Peter cards (a Continental variation on Old Maid) is just one such find. It has twenty-seven instead of the usual fifty-two cards, but it seems to be complete because it fits perfectly in the blue box. The lid has an illustrated title label in German that reads in English: “This game of Black Peter was painted for her dear friends Ernst and Anneliese Grossenbacher in St. Gall.” It is signed Gertrud Lendorff, who just might be the Swiss art historian from Basel (1900-1981).

The cards cannot be earlier than the 1930s: one of the pair with the Union Jack in the upper left hand corners shows “Margaret Rose aus England.” Margaret Rose, a little girl in a blue coat and hat with a green scarf, must be the late Princess Margaret (1930-2002), Queen Elizabeth II’s sister.

A famous character from children’s books also makes an appearance here: Beatrix Potter’s Hunca Munca from The Tale of Two Bad Mice, identified only as “nach einem Englischen Kinderbuch,” that is, “from an English children’s book.” It’s amusing that the illustrations of Hunca Munca were redrawn from ones where this bad little mouse was behaving well relatively well. My guess is that little Grossenbachers for whom Lendorff made the cards might have been reading The Tale of Two Bad Mice in German translation. But perhaps Lendorff was introducing them to a childhood favorite of her own. The cards don’t provide any clues about the circumstances in which they were made or how they were received, but they are testimony to Potter’s appeal outside her homeland.

Most of the cards illustrate toys made of porcelain, clay, celluloid, and wood, such as Hansli and the matryoshka doll Tatyiana and her five daughters below.

One thing we find unacceptable today is Lendorff’s inclusion of toys that perpetuate offensive stereotypes. The title label depicts a black baby doll and Lendorff’s model might have been a Heubach bisque character doll. She redrew the same doll on the card with the caption “Der Schwarze Peterli! Nicht der Schwarze Peter!” [The little Black Peter! Not the Black Peter!]. It is an opprobrious caricature with unnaturally bright red lips. But unlike some Heubach black baby dolls, it wears what looks like a knitted onesie instead of some spurious form of “native dress.”

The “Schwarzer Peter”—that is, “Black Peter”–mentioned on the title label is the name that the Old Maid card goes by in German, Danish, Swedish, Hungarian, and Finnish. The card with Black Peter is the hot potato that all the players try to get rid of as quickly as possible so it won’t be in their hands at the end of the game. In this particular set, the Black Peter is depicted offensively as a black rag doll (possibly inspired by Florence Upton’s famous character, the Golliwog) instead of the more usual chimney sweep.

The Black Peter card in the manuscript Schwarzer Peter deck. Dieses spiel vom schwarzen Peter malte für ihre lieben St. Galler Freunde Ernst u. Anneliese Grossenbacher. [Switzerland?, [not before 1930?] (Cotsen)

In spite of the unpleasant images, this card set is a fascinating addition to Cotsen’s collection of manuscripts made for children over the last three hundred years..

See more Beatrix Potter at the Cotsen virtual exhibitions page

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Category Archives: 20th century

Endpapers from Art Nouveau Picture Books

Made for Friends: A Manuscript Deck of Cards Featuring Potter’s Hunca Munca and Princess Margaret