Category Archives: Annotations in books and manuscripts

Marks in Books 8: A Family Portrait in Aunt Mary’s Stories for Children

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Aunt Mary’s Stories for Children. London: William Darton and Son, between 1830 and 1835. (Cotsen 44687)

The illustrated inscription in this little volume of stories will make you laugh out loud.   Miss Cha (short for Charlotte) Osborn gave it as a gift to Helen McDonnell in 1842.  It looks as if someone who was not Cha drew in pencil a kite with its string fastened to the number 2 in 1842.  That same person may have drawn the balloon below (if that’s what it is).

That’s just a lagniappe before the main course, the group portrait of Cha and her three siblings.  Big sister Cha seems to be presenting a book (possibly this copy of Aunt Mary’s Stories) to someone.   Next comes little sister Laura in a matching dress, holding a doll in one hand.  Then comes Osborn number three, brother Harry in skirts and waving a whip.  Last and very definitely least is the tightly swaddled baby Frank lying on the ground with a  “V” growing out of his chest.  I haven’t figured out yet what Cha intended the “V” to represent.

I’m sure the four children were always as good as they were in Cha’s picture!

Curator’s Choice: Pen Flourish Figures in a Dutch Boy’s Copybook ca. 1733

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This week when I was paging some manuscripts, I got distracted and made a discovery.   I didn’t remember ever having looked at the materials on the shelf where the one manuscript to lives and stopped to peek into a few of the archive boxes on either side of it..

One of them was a eighteenth-century copybook that had been filled in between January and August 1733 by Jan Haverman, who lived in Amersfoort, a Dutch city on the river Een in Utrecht.

Jan Haverman’s signature on the leaf pasted down on the front marbled paper cover. [Copybook]. Amersfoort (Netherlands), 1733. (Cotsen 91631)

Cotsen has quite a few American and British copybooks, but I didn’t know there were  Dutch ones as well.  Opening the marbled paper wrappers, I noticed that the pages were not ruled with carefully spaced lines that are supposed to make it easy for the student to write the practice text across the page.  The odd-numbered pages, I discovered, had margins decorated with highly stylized decorations composed of swirling lines.  Whoever calligraphed these beautiful figures was something of  an artist.

The woman with a cap and curls down her back on leaf 1. (Cotsen 91631)

Jan Haverman signed the bottom of every page he copied out, but did he have the control of the pen to have drawn the figures in the margins as well?

The man in the feathered hat on page 3. (Cotsen 91631)

The hissing snake on page 5. (Cotsen 91631)

The dancing dog on page 19. (Cotsen 91631)

The sly fox on page 21. (Cotsen 91631)

The clever ape on page 67. (Cotsen 91631)

The bird eating cherries on page 35. (Cotsen 91631)

Could Jan’s writing master been the creator of the fantastic people and creatures?  Scholars who study the history of writing instruction often distinguish the parts in an exercise executed by the student and those the instructor corrected.  But why would the master have done the drawings in the margins?  Or is the hand that drew the illustrations that of Jan?

A sprig of flowers on page 27. (Cotsen 91631)

There ARE some blots, misformed letters, and wobbly lines on this page, so perhaps the figure in the margin here was intended as an incentive to do better next time!