Gingerbread Alphabets and Books: “Useful Knowledge by the Pound”

walnutbinding

The front board of Neues Pfefferkuchen-ABC fuer artige Kinder. Stuttgart: Lowes Verlag Ferdinand Carl, ca. 1907. (Cotsen 72959)

After a really aggravating day, there probably isn’t a teacher alive who hasn’t wished that the human mind absorbed knowledge like a sponge soaks up water.  Crafty teachers devise strategies that just might make learning this or that easy.  Supportive publishers have been known to design children’s books that look like rewards for cooperating.  One of my favorites is shown above, with its binding that looks like a tasty big cookie topped with split almond halves.  Its title?  Die neue Pfefferkuchen-ABC, which can be loosely translated as The New Gingerbread ABC (“pfefferkuchen” being another name for “lebkuchen,” the German spiced honeycakes topped with chocolate icing traditional at Christmas time).

pearsandbears

The plate for the letter B in Neues Pfefferkuchen-ABC. (Cotsen 72959)

Many cultures try to associate the sweet with mastery of the letters of the alphabet.  For example, Alberto Manguel describes a medieval Jewish initiation rite in which the teacher wrote a passage from the Bible on a slate and read it aloud to his pupil. The boy repeated them and if he did it correctly, was allowed to eat the holy words once the slate was spread with honey as a reward (thanks to Lissa Paul for this anecdote).

gaffer

The frontispiece to The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread: A Little Boy Who Lived Upon Learning. London: Printed for T. Carnan, 1782. (Cotsen 6721)

A time-honored way of encouraging literacy in early modern England was to offer letters or hornbooks made of gingerbread as an inducement to learn their ABCs more quickly.   Above Gaffer Gingerbread invites children to spend their pocket money wisely on cakes that will “feed the Little Folks, who are good,/ At once with Learning and with Food.”

abcmolds

A mold for a cookie hornbook and a cast from it. The letters could easily be cut apart into little tiles for spelling practice. The letterforms suggest that the mold is probably not more than one hundred years old.

At home, the conscientious  gaffer took charge of inspiring his own little reluctant learner Giles, which was not all that difficult.   By profession a gingerbread baker, the gaffer made his son a special gilt-covered, spicy “book.”

giles-gingerbread-bookWhile the gaffer’s presentation of a table of two-letter syllables was novel, the truth is that any primer then contained such a chart, which helped children take a critical first step in learning to recognize and sound out combinations of letters.  The eighteenth-century references to gingerbread letters, alphabets and books I’ve found don’t offer any evidence that such a thing was actually available.

The “book” as pictured would have been quite unwieldly.  It probably would have broken apart with normal handling–like nibbling a corner as a reward for learning a little bit.  Size may not have been as much as a problem as we think, because the gingerbread kings and queens sold at fairs could be quite large and detailed, if the surviving molds are any indication.  The real test was carving the letters deep enough in the mold so that they would emerge from the oven sharp and legible.  Using a very stiff dough with no eggs or butter would have helped.

giles-with-book

This is Giles holding a gingerbread hornbook that is not anywhere as large as the one his father made for him. Page [31] in Cotsen 6721.

 Another curious discovery I made researching this post was that neither Cotsen’s 1779 nor 1782 edition of Giles Gingerbread has the diagram of the gingerbread syllabary.  Both pamphlets are complete.  Missing pages wouldn’t be all that surprising for one of the most famous Newberys: it was first published around 1765 by John Newbery, the stepfather of Carnan, the publisher of the Cotsen copy.

The syllabary is present in the earliest known edition of Giles Gingerbread circa 1766 in the British Library, which can be accessed via Eighteenth-Century Collections On-line.  I’m guessing the copy in Norwich, which is dated to 1764, also does.   Very few copies of any British edition of Giles Gingerbread survive, having been read (not eaten) to pieces, so it is difficult to determine when and why the syllabary was dropped.  Digital copies of the American piracies from the 1760s and 1770s don’t have it either.

The diagram was probably just a bit of complicated typesetting that could be cut.  It slowed down the story, to tell the truth.  But it is amusing to imagine that children who had read Giles Gingerbread pestered their parents for a hornbook just like it and the beleaguered publisher removed the offending passage to keep peace with gingerbread and pastry bakers all over Great Britain!  Don’t quote me on that–it’s pure fantasy.

hornbookabc

An antique mold for a gingerbread hornbook that looks something like the one Giles is holding.

 

A is for Azbuka: Two Copies of a Russian Primer from the Reign of Mikhail I

9539c2front

Classic pedagogical technique in 1637. Frontispiece. [Bukvar lazyka Slavenska…]. Moscow: Vasilii Fedorovich, [1637]. (Cotsen 9539 copy 2)

Cotsen’s Soviet-era children’s book collection is well known, extensive, and portions even digitally available. Less well known is that our Russian-language material covers an even wider historical range from the 17th century to the present day. We have over 250 titles printed in Russia before the Revolution, and around 60 titles printed in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

To illustrate this point, I thought I would showcase our earliest Russian book: Bukvarʹ i︠a︡zyka slavenska ([Moscow]: Vasiliĭ Fedorovich Burt︠s︡ov, [1637]).

Titlepage (9539 c.2)

Title page (Cotsen 9539 copy 2)

From the title page, the discerning reading might (or might not) notice that this bukvar (a shared Eastern European word for a grammatical primer) is not actually in Russian. This book is in Church Slavonic, the liturgical language of the the Orthodox Church. Unfortunately, my Church Slavonic is a little too rusty for me to discuss the contents of the book other than the obvious matter of it’s being an introduction to the Slavonic alphabet, basic words, and grammatical training. Lucky for us, however, Cotsen has two splendidly different copies of this affectionately known: Azbuka (alphabet book):

Contemporary calf, elaborate stamped decorations and tooled boarder, clasps complete.

Contemporary calf, elaborate stamped decorations and tooled boarder, clasps complete (Cotsen 9539 copy 2)

Contemporary polished calf, elaborate rolled & stamped decorations, remnants of clasps

Contemporary polished calf, elaborate rolled & stamped decorations, remnants of clasps (Cotsen 9539 copy 1)

Copy 2 is the more complete of the two editions (for reasons explained more below). Though the binding is in arguably rougher shape (except for the the extant clasps), the paper quality is much higher, a hand colored frontispiece is included (pictured above), and the colophon information is more extensive. In fact, the date for this item was obtained from the colophon (Printer’s information typically found at the back of books printed before the end of the 17th Century). The colophon states that the book was printed in twenty fourth year of reign of the first Romanov Czar, Mikhail Fedorovich (elected 1613). As seen in the title page above, this edition is printed in black and red, with red used for initials and important words:

Unnumbered spread (9539 copy 2)

Unnumbered spread (Cotsen 9539 copy 2)

Unnumbered page (9539 copy 2)

Unnumbered page (Cotsen 9539 copy 2)

Speculatively, I would venture to say that copy 1 might be a later edition (alas, if only my Church Slavonic was better). Though it is worse for ware, the paper quality is lower, and it does not feature red ink at all. This relative lack of quality might indicate that the publisher endured less cost while producing a later edition for a book that was already in circulation (though, sometimes it proves to be the exact opposite since the popularity of earlier editions can lead to a less capital conscience publisher). It is, however, typographically unique and very different from copy 2 pictured above:

Unnumbered spread with initials (9539 copy 1)

Unnumbered spread with initials (Cotsen 9539 copy 1)

Copy 1’s most unique features, however, are one of a kind. Not only is this copy extensively annotated:

Unnumbered spread with annotations (9539 copy 1)

Unnumbered spread with annotations (Cotsen 9539 copy 1)

But it lacks around a dozen pages from the original printing. Lucky for us, a contemporary owner (probably the binder who did such a superb job) was kind enough to diligently copy out these missing pages in manuscript:

Manuscript title page (9539 copy 1)

Manuscript title page (Cotsen 9539 copy 1)

Not only that, but copy 1 has a very special hidden bonus. The waste paper used to line the inside front board of the binding is a manuscript leaf (complete with red ink!):

9539c1wastepaper

Waste paper on inside front board (Cotsen 9539 copy 1)