Animals | Cotsen Children’s Library

Spoiler alert: this post is not about an obscure form of biblioclasty–or something even more unimaginable.

Cotsen has its fair share of picture book introductions to the ballet, many of them in the Diana R. Tillson collection. Of course there’s a copy of Noel Streatfeild’s The First Book of the Ballet (1956), complete with an inspirational story about a young girl who wants to be a ballerina, a glossary of steps, history of the ballet, and plot synopses of famous ballets (Streatfeild was also the author of the beloved 1936 Ballet Shoes).

Pages 29 and 87, Cotsen 85248. The image on the right reproduces notations for a ballet choreographed by George Balanchine.

For a quirkier approach by a certifiable balletomane, there’s Edward Gorey’s The Lavender Leotard: or Going a Lot to the New York City Ballet (1973). The page on the right includes a self-portrait of the author-illustrator in raccoon coat and tennis shoes. It was impossible to miss him on the nights he came to City Ballet.

Front board and page [1], Cotsen 152312

For those who prefer to see supple animals instead of trained classical dancers demonstrate an arabesque, entrechat or a pas de deux, there’s always author-illustrator Janis Mitchell’s The Hamster Ballet Company (1986) or Donald Elliott’s Frogs and Ballet (1979) illustrated by Clinton Arrowood.

Pages [4] and [12], Cotsen 86267

Pages 21 and 29, Cotsen 85247.

Then there is Dennis Knight’s Ballet, Patterson Blick Instant Picture Book number 5. It may be the only introduction to the ballet in the collection that is also an activity book. It comes with two leaves of “rub down instant pictures,” or forty-six Letraset transfers. For those of you with enquiring minds hungry for more information about this form of image-transfer technology, check out the webpage for SPLAT, the Society for the Preservation of Letraset Action Transfers.

In the Patterson Blick Instant Picture Book on the ballet, the sheets of Letraset transfers are divided into five sections, A-E, and each has been designed to complete a particular illustration in the text. B and D require about as much skill as filling in an outline drawing in a coloring book, while A, C, and E ask rather more of the reader. Each set of figures has to be arranged on the set of the correct ballet without any synopsis or photographs of an actual production to help visualize the scene. Perhaps this exercise was intended to engage young artists, who might yearn to design costumes or sets, rather than young dancers.

Luckily, Cotsen has two editions of Instant Picture Book number 5 and the 7th impression has all the transfers untouched on the inserted plates.

Unused plates of Letraset transfers, Cotsen 87411.

The illustrated directions for transferring the figures are printed on the rear wrapper. The earlier set of directions was illustrated with five pictures, but by the time the 7th impression was printed, the second and fourth illustrations were dropped and a cheery logo featuring a bee added in the upper left hand corner. A second good reason for keeping both copies in the collection!

Rear wrapper of Cotsen 16093 with fully illustrated instructions for transferring the designs.

Rear wrapper of the 7th impression with abbreviated instructions and logo, Cotsen 87411

Whoever filled in the scenes from the featured ballets in Cotsen’s “used” copy of Instant Picture Book Number 5 seems to have known something about classical dance. Notice the simpering White Cat (sans Puss in Boots) has been placed near the wings in the background of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. It could be the finale, where all the characters return for one last turn on the stage.

Page 10, Cotsen 16093

In the scene from Adolphe Adam’s Giselle, the reclining figure of Albrecht has been rotated so that he is balancing en pointe. Maybe it was an honest mistake, but I’m not so sure. It does make the romantic hero look a bit like Gene Kelly executing a jazzy move, so maybe it was done on purpose to juice things up.

Page 8, Cotsen 16093

And for the third ballet? I was expecting Stravinsky’s Petroushka. Instead it is Arthur Bliss’s Checkmate (1937), which was choreographed by Ninon de Valois, founder of the Birmingham and Royal Ballet, a work now considered a cornerstone of the modern British ballet repertory.

The ballet’s premise is that chess pieces come to life and act out human emotions (chiefly lust and blood lust) on stage. Whoever completed the scene arranged the figures so that one of the Red Knights is poised to stab a black pawn, while the Black Knight menaces his twin. The Black Queen, the femme fatale of the piece, looms ominously in the rear.

Page 13, Cotsen 16093

I wonder if Checkmate was chosen at the suggestion of the publication’s technical advisor, the great English danseur noble Michael Somes, who created the role of the Black Knight in the original production.

Publicity shot of the great British dancer, Michael Somes, the technical advisor for Instant Picture Book number 5.

Who transferred all the Letraset figures in Cotsen 16093? An older child studying ballet or an adult who was familiar with the repertory? Whoever it was, he or she seems to have taken the task fairly seriously, whether or not the scenes were composed from memories of choreography from actual productions. It’s evidence of a different kind of engagement with the book…

Olivia Bell as the Black Queen in the Australian Ballet’s production of Checkmate.

In the 1680s antiquarian John Aubrey was the first Englishman to mention the observance of April Fool’s Day. He stated that it was celebrated all over Germany, but folklorists assume that the holiday was imported from France, where seems to have been well-established by the 1650s. They also speculate that this mock-holiday arose to fill the gap as the tradition of sanctioning all kinds of misrule during the Christmas holiday season waned (think the cruel jokes perpetrated on Shakespeare’s Malvolio during Twelfth Night). In comparison, April Fool’s was a more civilized occasion for mischief-making, being confined to one day and the only kind of horseplay authorized was to trick others into making public spectacles of themselves.

In the eighteenth-century England, perpetrating hoaxes upon the unwary was ubiquitous on April 1, if we can believe contemporary writers. Age and class came into play because children were allowed to try and deceive adults and members of a higher class could impose on those of a lower class. Making an April fool of someone was not below the likes of Jonathan Swift, who in 1713 sat up late with some friends cooking up a prank. A favorite ploy was to convince someone to go on a “sleeveless errand” (aka a wild goose chase) for things that didn’t exist, like pigeon’s milk or the biography of Eve’s mother. .

The first description of an April Fool’s sleeveless errand was described in a notice in the April 2^nd 1698 issue of Dawk’s News-Letter: “Several persons were sent to the Tower Ditch [ the moat around the Tower] to see the Lions washed.” One of the city’s great tourist destinations, visitors since the reign of Elizabeth I went the royal menagerie to gawk at caged lions, tigers, bears, elephants, etc. The lions were kept in the barbican called the Bulwark, which eventually was renamed the Lion Tower. The fast-talking trickster would try to persuade a gullible victim that every year on April 1 the lions were taken down to the moat for a bath. All someone had to do to enjoy the spectacle was enter by the White Gate. Of course, there was no such gate or any wet lions… In the nineteenth century, the merry sometimes distributed fake admission tickets and one is shown above.

In honor of the day, here are two accounts of washing the lions from two eighteenth-century children’s books, which may be unknown in the literature on the holiday. Cotsen has copies of both, but to give readers an idea of the look-and-feel of children’s books during the period, the facsimiles are reproduced from the British Library copies on Eighteenth-Century Collections On-Line. The first account comes from the last chapter of Travels of Tom Thumb Over England and Wales (1746), where the intrepid little narrator confesses to being taken in by the story about the lions’ annual grooming ritual. He also mentions that the most common visitors to the Tower lions are pregnant women, who wanted to know the sex of their babies!

The second, longer description of washing the Tower lions comes from chapter 8 of Richard Johnson’s The Picture Exhibition (1783). The narrator is a school boy, describing a picture he drew of an April Fool’s prank in progress. He clearly disapproves of the incident and there is something unpleasant about the watermen’s gratuitous cruelty towards the poor country bumpkin. While the tone of the narrator’s lecture about appropriate behaviour is too prosy for modern tastes, he was expressing quite enlightened views at a time when blood sports were tolerated and jokes based on highly offensive gender and class stereotypes perfectly acceptable.