Advertising and product placement | Cotsen Children’s Library

Potty és Pötty Kalandos Utazása. Budapest: “Ifjuság” Kiadása, [ca. 1920]. (Cotsen 12617)

Say “visual storytelling” and the names of David Wiesnieski, Shaun Tan, Raymond Briggs, and Peter Spier are more likely to pop in the mind than the Hungarian artist Sándor Bortnyik, creator of a single wordless picture book in 1926: Potty és Pötty, kalandos utazása. While it is not well known outside connoisseurs of the modernist picture book, other such books were published during the 1920s, such as Otto Geismar’s Old Testament stories acted out by stick figures or Edward Baumer’s Kinderparadies.

The story is familiar: a boy and girl are flying kites in the park when a great puff of wind pulls them up into the sky. When they come down to earth, they find themselves in a strange land where balls grow magically.

Two of the balls carry them down the river to a castle, where they are welcomed by the king and his subjects, which include stereotypical renderings of a Black boy, a Chinese man, etc. in the crowd.. After a sumptuous tea, they enjoy a performance of the circus, fairground rides, a drive in a touring car through the countryside, and the front row seats at the opera. They bid the king farewell and travel back home in an airplane before transferring to the backs of stars.The style of the illustrations in Potty és Pötty with its palette of flat bright colors and two-dimensional geometric figures bear comparison to Bortnyik’s famous contemporaneous advertising graphics, the best known being for Modiano cigarettes. The major difference was that he was under no obligation to promote a commercial brand, which gave him leeway to experiment with a visual narrative in the style of Gebrauchtskunst, the early twentieth century design movement which redefined style and purpose of applied art.

If he was trying to break down the distinction between commercial art and book illustration as a minor form of fine art, the story of two bourgeois children consuming a variety of elite pleasures while guests of royalty, was vendible if retrograde to a socialist who had spent time at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Probably Bortnyik was pragmatic enough to realize that adapting Bauhaus ideas to trade children’s book illustration was a dead end. Perhaps having proved to himself that a story could be told as a series of wordless posters, he had no desire to continue it, which might explain why he said nothing about book over his lifetime–unless he relented and included it in one of the many exhibition catalogues and retrospectives of his work in Hungary.

The book’s history is a curious and complicated one and all known editions are quite rare. To date, the only scholarly article in English is by Samuel Albert at Fashion Institute of Technology in the 2015 collection Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde.

(Cotsen 12617)

Cotsen owns an edition issued by Ifjuság in Budapest with Bortnyik’s name on the cover title label, title and last illustration. The color illustrations unaccompanied by text are mounted on leaves of thin card hinged with dark blue cloth in blue publisher’s cloth case; it seems unlikely that an artist’s copy (as the Cotsen copy has been described) would be in an edition binding. Laid in is a typescript of 22 rhymed stanzas credited to Ernö Szep. It has not been established if this is the Hungarian text published in a later edition.

Die Wunderfahrt. Leipzig: Alfred Hahns: Dietrich & Sell, [1929]. (Cotsen 1985)

In 1929 Alfred Hahns Verlag and Dietrich Sell copublished the illustrations with a verse narrative by Albert Sixtus, new endpapers conceivably by Bortnyik, and an illustrated dust jacket by another hand (the Cotsen copy, like most surviving ones, doesn’t have the dust jacket). Except for the copies designated as the 1.-4. Auflage of 16,000 copies, I have not been able to establish the date of the other copies in WorldCat. In Germany, the book enjoys a sufficiently high reputation to have been reissued as a facsimile in 2008.

An English-language text for Bortnyik’s illustrations called Tatters and Scraps: Two Paper Dolls in Toyland was brought out in 1933 by Chicago publisher Albert Whitman. It’s almost as rare as the Hungarian edition! During the 1930s the firm also issued translations of a few modernist German picture books by Tom Seidmann-Freud and Franz Ostini, which were quite different from the rest of the backlist. Bortnyik—but not the author of Tatters—receives credit on the title page. Although the children have been turned into paper dolls, the original illustrations are unchanged.If there is a moral to this peculiar publishing history, it might go like this: pictures need their thousand words, whether or not the artist judged them easy to grasp!

All-Sports Library. New York, N.Y.: Winner Library Co., 1905-1906. (Cotsen RCPXC-9721333)

The dime novel, like all subgenres of cheap or pulp fiction, enjoys a reputation comparable to the chapbook in the history of young people’s reading. The story goes that no good can come of consuming them, but they will be devoured. There is at least one shining light in the mounds of trash: All-Sports Library (February 11, 1905- March 3, 1906), with its “best tales of athletic sports” supposed to “teach the American boy to become an athlete and lay the foundation of a constitution greater than that of the United States….This love for the ‘life strenuous’ is making itself manifest… Recognizing the ‘handwriting on the wall,’ we have concluded that the time has arrived to give this vast army of young enthusiasts a publication devoted exclusively to invigorating out-door life.”This nickel weekly with its big color cover ($2.50 per year) was published by Street & Smith on 7^th Avenue in Manhattan, which poured out cheap paperbacks, weekly magazines, and comic books from 1888 until 1959, when it was bought by Condé Nast (Shown above, volume 1, no. 1. Cotsen RCPXC-9721333 Story papers). All but two of the 30,000-word stories in its 56 issues were written by John H. Whitson under the name of Maurice Stevens. He was probably paid by the word.

The hero of All-Sports Library was a boy from a small town in New England: JACK LIGHTFOOT, the best all-round athlete in Cranford or vicinity, keen of eye, clean of speech, and, after he had conquered a few of his faults, possessed of a faculty for doing things while others were talking, by degrees caused him to be looked upon as the natural leader in all the sports Young American delights in—a boy who in learning to conquer himself put the power into his hands to wrest victory from others.

The list of Jack’s adventures in All-Sports Library from number 16 to 50.

At the beginning of the run, Jack and his band of steadfast friends could be found playing the national sports of baseball and football, branching out into lesser diversions such as hockey and trapshooting. Occasionally Jack’s leadership abilities were engaged by a mutiny by his team in the gym or foul play by the opposing team. As the year 1905 progressed, Whitson, aka “Maurice Stevens” was obliged to go farther afield to keep his readers’ interest alive. On a winter hunting trip, the intrepid Jack brought down multiple bull moose with his favorite firearm. The story was supplemented with a timely column by “An Old Athlete,” who was responsible for the feature “How to Do Things:” instructions and pointers on the construction of snowshoes at home. Did All-Sports Library scrupulously exclude the ladies from its clubhouse? Not entirely–their enthusiastic presence during games, cheering on the sidelines kept morale high. Pretty sisters in distress provided the manly and virtuous Jack the opportunity to come to their rescue. Kate, of the thick tresses and flashing eyes, accidentally encountered on her way home a young man under the influence of alcohom, who tried to obtain a nonconsenual kiss. This unhappy incident has been abridged to omit the passage where Jack disarms Buck of a wickedly sharp knife before it can be used on him. But not without a struggle to master his rage when he wants to turn the knife on Kate’s assailant.
Contrary to the conclusions that could be drawn from the scene above, Kate was no wilting flower. She was a plucky girl, more than capable of coming to Jack’s rescue when he found himself at a disadvantage in some encounter. Every issue a number of young subscribers wrote in to the editor. “Jack Lightfoot the Second” in Elizabeth, New Jersey wrote about his sister Beth, who was his best friend and preferred playmate. Among the things they did together was retreat to his den and read the weekly. “Maurice Stevens” was praised to the skies, naturally. Considerable anxiety was expressed over height and weight: subscribers were always submitting their vital statistics to the editor in order to find out if they were too thin, too fat, or too short for their ages. Others cheerfully confessed that they were real bookworms and testified that All-Sports Library was their all-time favorite (their dads read every issue cover to cover). True fans kept all their issues of All-Sports Library in a binder. To the right is a specimen of a rousing cheer for the magazine. The uniform tone and style of the letters is somewhat suspicious: either they were rewritten into conformity or some member of the editorial staff created them out of whole cloth. Is it a coincidence that this letter suggesting that readers would really like to hear about Jack’s experiences at boarding school appeared before the scene shifted to his new school, where the older boys subjected him to hazing, going so far as to tie him to a railroad track (he was able to loosen his bonds and escape before the train came down the tracks).In March 1906, subscribers were notified that their favorite weekly was going to be suspended and consolidated with Tip Top Weekly, where they would be treated to the farther adventures of the peerless Frank Merriwell and his friends. But this was not the end of Jack Lightfoot and his jolly bunch. Waste not, want not, must have been a byword at Smith and Streeter, because the content of All-Sports Library was recycled in three additional publications: the New Medal Library, Sports Stories, and Round the World Library.