A 15th Anniversary Spectacle of Skeletons

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Andrea Immel

Fifteen years ago today Cotsen opened its gallery doors to the public. Perhaps we should have drawn people into the space with a seasonal spooktacular, but the previous day’s ribbon-cutting took all the wind out of our sails. So here to celebrate the occasion are some ghoulish pictures to chill the funny bone and to jolt the brain from Cotsen’s Skelt and Webb Toy Theater Collection.

These pictures of skeletons and their friendly poisonous reptiles come from prints that were part of a juvenile theatre play based on Blue Beard or Female Curiosity!, (1798) a “grand dramatic romance” with script by George Colman the younger and score by Michael Kelly. Colman and Kelly’s dramatic take on Perrault’s celebrated but grisly fairy tale was inspired by French composer Gretry’s opera Raoul Barbe Bleue (1789), but they turned it into an over-the-top “Oriental” fanasy inspired by A Thousand and One Nights. But why skeletons and not djinns?

Think of Shakespeare set during the American Civil War or the Roaring Twenties. It’s the concept, not historical accuracy, that counts. If Colman and Kelly could reconceive Bluebeard as Abomelique, the Turkish tyrant or three-tailed bashaw who was preceded by a standard of horse tails (oh yes, there were live horses on stage), then it’s not such a leap of imagination to have the wife-killing villain stabbed to death by a skeleton and escorted down to hell by a platoon of his vengeful friends. No wonder the critics hated Colman and Kelly’s alternative to the holiday pantomime and the audiences loved it.

And if this comes knocking at your door tonight, throw away the healthy treats!

Thanks to Mr. Cotsen for making this blog, and everything else Team Cotsen does possible!

Books & Their Owners…

Posted on October 4, 2013 by Jeff Barton

Kids are interesting — and sometimes funny – readers of books; but so are “grown-ups”… We all do things with our own books that make perfect sense to us, but somebody else looking at the same books later on might be hard-pressed, indeed, to figure out what we (i.e. the reader) had in mind.What do those notes mean? And how about those unrelated comments, scribblings, doodles, underlinings, or illegible marks? (Or the marks on the covers, or stains that look like evidence that the book was once used as a coaster? A sign of active use? Or of disdain for books?)

These are the kind of questions that rare book librarians and book historians routinely try to answer — well, at least some of the time! We look at books owned and used by someone else, often written in or marked up, and try to make sense of what a reader had in mind when using the book (usually in connection with the act of their reading, but sometimes clearly relating to other, decidedly non-textual, uses).

We then try to use this information — obtained in part by deciphering handwriting or marginalia, part by making educated deductions, and part by using the context provided by outside sources — to make sense of what the book readers / users might have had in mind and to reason out what this tells us about the history of reading or book use. Basically, trying to reconstruct past ideas, actions, and yes, intentions — or at least to recreate one plausible version of history that seems to make sense to us now — from the physical artifact and the evidence it contains.

A couple of books we’ve been working with in the last few days for Cotsen’s Newbery Catalog Project reminded me of these questions about physical evidence in books, yet again. (Readers of this blog may recall a certain fixation here with the whole subject of “marks in books…”)

Title page of “The New Pantheon” (5th ed.)

One of the engraved plates depicting “heathen” gods and goddesses

The first book is a copy of one of Newbery’s books for adults: The New Pantheon: or, Fabulous History of the Heathen Gods, Goddesses, Heroes, etc… (Salisbury: Newbery & Carnan [and others], 1777; fifth ed.). The book contains accounts of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian gods and mythology, with an appendix about the role of “augury,” “divination,” sacrifices, and ancient temples. The book is well-worn, so presumably (but not necessarily) it was well read, but there are no marks by readers anywhere in the text.

Close-up view of inscription

There are hand-written notes on both front and rear pastedowns, however; they have nothing to do with the text but provide potentially interesting evidence of use by book owners (or at least someone handling the books). On the front pastedown, someone was written in ink, “97 years old.” It’s not apparent what this means, but I think it’s probably a reference to the 1777 publication date, which would date this notation as 1874, seemingly in accord with the look of the ink and the writing style. Why somebody would write that — and in ink — is similarly not apparent, but it could have been done by a book owner admiring his/her book, or possibly even by a book dealer. (Personally, I think the placement of the writing and use of ink argues strongly against this latter use.)

Inscription on front pastedown (Note: the brown staining is from leather binding and the hinge tape from a prior owner’s repair)

Bookseller’s penciled notes on front endpaper (facing pastedown)

On the facing endpaper, we do see a more usual type of bookseller notation, in pencil: “Complete, 1777, £20.” This tells us that the book was offered for sale in England — which accords with the Cotsen Library’s provenance information on this book — as well as reminding us how much the prices of books has risen since then!

On the rear pastedown, we find more curious inked notation — and upside-down, to boot – suggesting a real disconnect between the handwriting and the book as a reading object. Perhaps the blank paper of the pastedown was just the handiest piece of writing matter someone had to hand?

Close-up view of inscription

Starting at the “top” of the inverted page, it reads:

Ribbons	—	2-0 ½
Socks	—	0-5
Lutestring	—	3-7
Hooks	—	0-6
		6-6 ½

Inscription on rear pastedown (reversed for legibility in this image)

Clearly, somebody is recording expenses. But to what end? Perhaps just to jot them down quickly as a memory aid? (We’ve all jotted notes on paper napkins!) The individual items are all related to sewing and the making of clothing, a general type of expense that also suggests to me that this writer was a woman. This was information that an eighteenth-century woman managing her household accounts would track. (“Lutestring,” in case you don’t know — I didn’t! — is a glossy fabric used for women’s dresses at the time.)

Well-worn spine and upper cover of “The New Pantheon”…
But was it well-read too?

Cotsen has other books with similar notations about prices or expenses, some of them also published by Newbery, including a 1795 publication of The Housekeeper’s Account-book, published specifically as a way of “keeping an exact account of every article made use of in a family throughout the year.” If I’m right, the writing about sewing supplies in The New Pantheontells us that this book was read, or at least handled, by a woman, and this further suggests that this title may have been generally read by women, as well as by men — not totally surprising, but an interesting piece of documentation of reading habits at the time.

The handwriting and type of ink could well be eighteenth-century, making them more or less contemporary with the book’s publication. (It’s a little hard to say for someone who’s not a handwriting specialist.) Comparison with existing price lists could enable more precise dating, as well as a comparison of prices at different times in the era.

Having read this far, you may wonder where’s the discussion (and/or photos) of the other book mentioned at the beginning. Well, having written this much about one book, I thought it best to wait until next week to write about that title, a children’s book: The History of Prince Lee Boo (London: Elizabeth Newbery, 1789). Cotsen’s copy of that book has quite a bit of writing in it, along with some pencil sketches of animals, a horse and a duck among them. Coming soon…

Cotsen Conference: Sept. 11-13, 2013

Posted on September 16, 2013 by Jeff Barton

“Putting the Figure on the Map
Imagining Sameness and Difference for Children”

Co-organized by Andrea Immel and Emer O’Sullivan
Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University Sept. 11-13, 2013

Teaching Geography: hand-colored wood engraving, “The Party,” from The Little Traveller (Dean & Monday, [ca. 1830])

The world seemed to shrink during the nineteenth century, thanks to improved communications and transportation that facilitated travel, whether for commerce, conquest or leisure. Similarly the wonders of the world could be brought into the home via photography, maps, travel writing, and fiction. The representation of foreign lands inevitably required the illustration and description of their residents, which gave rise to a rich repository of colorful images of diversity.

Children’s books were important vehicles for the expression of senses of national identity that could confirm the superiority of one culture, marginalize others, instill a sense of international brotherhood or regional patriotism. Through a tangle of national types, stereotypes, and archetypes, children’s books shaped discourse as much as they reflected mainstream adult culture.

Cotsen Curator Andrea Immel welcomes attendees

Emer O’Sullivan delivers the keynote talk: “Picturing the World for Children: Early 19th-c. Images of Foreign Nations”

Exploring these themes, and others, this interdisciplinary Cotsen Library conference featured presentations that drew on the approaches of imagology, history, anthropology, psychology, and literary criticism, to discuss modes of expression arising that either targeted children, within or without the classroom, or appropriated discourses for them, to present competing, complimentary or contradictory images of foreign nations.

Presenting scholars represented institutions across the United States, Canada, and Europe, including: Princeton, University of Toronto, University of Innsbruck, University of Cologne, Leuphana University, Aarhus University, Roehampton University, Anglia Ruskin University, Ohio State University, and Wells College. (A full listing of speaker, abstracts, and biographical profiles, as well as the conference program schedule is available on the Conference website.)

Jill Shefrin discussing travel illustrations, maps, and “dissected maps” for children

Setsuko Noguchi discussing Japanese Suguroku picture games at workshop

The conference program also included two workshops focusing on materials from the Cotsen research collection — Japanese Picture Sugoroku games and English “dissected maps” and geography games — with a selection of collection objects available for viewing by attendees.

Two of the Cotsen collection items on display for attendees to
see after the speakers’ presentations:

Detail showing Africa and the Mediterranean area from an English “dissected map” comprised of 40 pieces mounted on mahogany; it served as a jig-saw puzzle to both teach and entertain children learning about geography.
“Africa in its Principal Divisions”
(London: J. Spilsbury, 1767).

Japanese Soguroku Game Board
コドモアソビスゴロク
(“A game on children’s play”)
(Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1917).
Soguroku within sogoroku: the game board’s theme is “children’s play,” with 12 panels of pictures are arranged by month. Each panel shows a children’s leisure activity in that month; the panel for Jan. (bottom right) appropriately shows children playing sugoroku.

Some Presenters & Discussion at the Conference
(click on any thumbnail image to view larger version)

Gillian Lathey:
“Children’s Encounters with Other Peoples at the 1851 Great Exhibition”

Lara Saguisag:
“Foreign Yet Familiar: The Immigrant Child in Progressive Era Comic Strips, 1896-1912″

Eric Johnson:
“Politicizing Childhood: Oncle Hansi and Alsatian Nationalism, 1912-1919″

Cynthia Koepp:
“A World of Difference: Pedagogical Imagination of Louis-François Jauffret”

Nina Christensen:
“Education to Tolerance: World Citizens in 18th C. Century Children’s Literature”

Minjie Chen:
“Foreigners Not (Yet) in One Box: Race & Foreign Nationals in Chinese Children’s Materials, 1890-1920″

Gabriele von Glasenapp:
“Information or Exoticization? Constructing Religious Difference in Children’s Non-Fiction”

One of the lively discussion after the presentations

Opening conference reception, held in the Cotson Library’s Bookscape gallery

A Closer Look at Cotsen’s Collection

Posted on September 3, 2013 by Jeff Barton

The text below is adapted from Byrd Pinkerton’s WPRB blog posting and links to the audio interviews that Byrd conducted with Andrea Immel, Cotsen Curator, in June and July, 2013, with additional photographs taken by Byrd of the items discussed. (Byrd Pinkerton ’15 is a German major who works for WPRB, the Princeton student-run radio station.) A Closer Look at Cotsen’s Collection: Audio Interviews with Cotsen’s Curator by Byrd Pinkerton

It’s easy to experience the Cotsen Gallery, with its giant indoor tree and little cottage. But behind the gallery’s glass wall, there are thousands of books–some tiny, some massive, some gilt or marbled. That’s just a fraction of the collection, since more books (and dolls and lantern slides and board games and toy theaters…) are hiding out elsewhere in the vaults of Firestone.

And though they can’t be climbed on or played with in quite the same way as the Gallery furniture is, these treasures are accessible too. This summer, Princeton student and Cotsen staffer Byrd Pinkerton began a series of radio stories on different objects from the Cotsen Collection, which are now posted on Princeton’s WPRB Station blog.

In each piece, she talks to Cotsen Curator, Andrea Immel about an item, its history, what we do or don’t know about it, and why it might be interesting to researchers. The audio is complemented with text and photographs, but listeners can also page the items themselves and enjoy them in the reading room.

Paper People in the Cotsen Library

Paper dolls at a war conference
(“The Paper People”)

Taken literally, the phrase ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ usually applies to your average book in a bookstore. It also applies, however, to rare books.

When I first decided to highlight pieces of Cotsen Library’s rare book collection for this series, I was eager to talk about some of the showier items the collection has to offer-Queen Elizabeth’s Latin grammar book, the Beatrix Potter original letters or elegant Spanish toy theaters from the 1930s.

Instead, Andrea and I decided to begin with The Paper People an unassuming text, printed and cloth-bound in the 1800s, and see what the information that can be gleaned from the contents, the cover, the catalogue of advertisements, and even the end-papers.

Hear the audio interview, with illustrations, on WPRB blog site.

Jeu de Cavagnole

French game “Jeu de Cavagnole” inside its box

I’m not a fan of bingo. I would go so far as to say that I strongly dislike it. But even I was delighted to play with this 18th century pre-cursor to the game, the French Jeu de Cavagnole.

During our interview, Andrea and I walked through the complicated apparatus of the game, all kinds of ivory spindles, cages and beads with scrolls…

One of the biggest differences between this game and your average bingo experience is the game board. Jeu de Cavagnole decorations have nothing to do with the gameplay at all. They’re just conversation pieces, designed to move the experience beyond simple gambling.

Hear the audio interview, with illustrations, on WPRB blog site.

A is for Alphabet

Panorama cylinder strip

Once we figure out that LMNO isn’t all one letter and S, C and K stop seeming quite so redundant and confusing, we generally don’t spent a lot of time learning the alphabet.

Still, whether we’re thinking about it or not, there’s a new line of alphabet teaching tools for every generation of kids: alphabet puzzles, alphabet blocks, songs and poems and books with associative word pictures.

This week, my conversation with Andrea was all about alphabets throughout the ages. While we’re probably not going to learn a whole about the alphabet itself from these games and books, it turns out that they can tell us a lot about us: the most common parts of our day-to-day, the moral values we want to pass down to our children, even our sense of humor.

Hear the audio interview, with illustrations, on WPRB blog site.

Cotsen Conference: Sept. 11-13 – “Putting the Figure on the Map”

Posted on August 5, 2013 by Jeff Barton

On September 11-13, 2013 (Wed-Fri), the Cotsen Children’s Library will host the conference: “Putting the Figure on the Map: Imagining Sameness and Difference for Children” on the campus of Princeton University, Princeton NJ.

This interdisciplinary program co-organized by Emer O’Sullivan and Cotsen Curator, Andrea Immel will draw on the approaches in imagology, history, anthropology, psychology, and literary criticism. It will focus on modes of expression arising within or without the classroom that either target children or appropriate discourses for them that create competing, complimentary, or contradictory images of foreign nations and their
peoples.

The program will also feature a workshop featuring primary resources from the Cotsen collection.

Registration is free to Princeton University students, faculty and staff; $25 for all others. You may register online at the conference site.

See below for the conference schedule.

For speaker biographies and abstracts,visit the conference website.

See the conference poster (in PDF format).

Conference Schedule:

Sept. 11 (Wed)

5:30-7:00 pm

Cotsen Children’s Library, Firestone Library

Reception

Sept. 12 (Thurs)

Rm 113 Friend Center, William Street

9:30 am

Registration and coffee

10:15 am

Welcome

10:30 am

Session 1: Ethnography on Display

Emer O’Sullivan ”Picturing the World for Children: Early Nineteenth-Century Images of Foreign Nations”

Gillian Lathey ”Figuring the World: Representing Children’s Encounters with Other Peoples and Cultures at the 1851 Great Exhibition”

Silke Meyer (via Skype) ”Politics in the Children’s Perspective: National Stereotypes in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Prints”

12:30 pm

Lunch

2:00 pm

Session 2: Images Instrumentalized

Martina Seifert ”Appropriating the Wild North: The Image of Canada and Its Exploitation in German Children’s Literature”

Lara Saguisag ”Foreign Yet Familiar: Theorizing the Immigrant Child in Progressive Era Comic Strips, 1896-1912″

3:15-3:30 pm [break]

Amanda Brian ”Civilizing Children and Animals in Lothar Meggendorfer’s Moveable Books”

Eric J. Johnson ”Politicizing Childhood: Oncle Hansi and Alsatian Nationalism, 1912-1919″

Sept 13 (Fri)

Venue to be announced

10:00 am

Session 3: Internationalism, Pacifism, and Tolerance, I

Nina Christensen ”Education to Tolerance: Citizens of the World in Eighteenth-Century Children’s Literature and Children’s Literature of Today”

Cynthia Koepp ”An Anthropologist Shows Children a World of Difference: The Pedagogical Imagination of Louis-François Jauffret”

Minjie Chen ”Foreigners Not (Yet) in One Box: Discourse on Race and Foreign Nationals in Chinese Children’s Reading Materials, 1890-1920

12:00 pm

Lunch

1:15 pm

Session 4: Internationalism, Pacifism, and Tolerance, II

Farah Mendlesohn ”National Characters, National Character: Children in Pacifist and Anti-Militaristic Publications for Children Between the Wars”

Gabriele von Glasenapp ”Information or Exoticization?: Constructing Religious Difference in Children’s Non-Fiction”

Margaret R. Higonnet ”No Child Is an Island”

3:30 pm

Session 5: Primary Materials Workshop

Cotsen Children’s Library, Firestone Library

Jill Shefrin ”Pictures for Tarry-at-home Travellers”

Setsuko Noguchi ”Around the World in One Game: Japanese Picture Sugoroku”

5:00 pm

Closing words

For more information, please contact Andrea Immel, Cotsen Curator.

The Cover Designs of Jemmy Catnach

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Andrea Immel

The disreputable printer Jemmy Pitts was highlighted in the post for Twelfth Night 2013, but he was not the only no-good early nineteenth-century job printer in the seedy Seven Dials district near Covent Garden in London’s West End. Seven Dials marked the convergence of Little and Great White Lyon streets (now Mercer), Little and Great Earl (now Earlham), Little and Great St. Andrews (now Monmouth), and Queen (now Shorts Garden).

Seven Dials was also home to Jemmy Catnach (1791-1841), who was vilified for catering to the reading public’s insatiable appetite for rude ballads, accounts of violent crimes, sensational divorce cases, and the like. He was the subject of the chapter “Catnachery, Chapbooks & Children’s Books” in Percy Muir’s Victorian Illustrated Books (1971). Muir, who knew how to turn a phrase, damned Catnach for having printed his stuff with “mean and old typefaces” and adorning them with blocks “worn to a degree of indecipherability that hid their almost complete irrelevance to the text they were supposed to illustrate.”

In Cotsen there’s a stout volume consisting of thirty-odd pamphlets, many issued by Catnach, which make a liar out of Muir. Bound in are several titles in the so-called Catnach “series” of Large Books. Here is a typical list, from the rear cover for Little Tom Tucker, [ca. 1835?].

The advertisement doesn’t given any clues as to what the pamphlets looked like. If Muir is to be believed, it whould be taken for granted that a jobbing printer like Catnach will always produce a shabby product with tell-tale signs of recycling other printers’ cast-off type and blocks.

Given Catnach’s high marks for slipshod design, these delightfully exuberant covers on the nursery favorites in the Large Books come as a shock. And not a broken font in sight.

The style of the typefaces and wood-engravedblocks suggest the Large Books must have been issued relatively late in Catnach’s long career.

But once a rogue, always a rogue, even one vying for respectability. The rear cover of another Large Book in the Cotsen volume is illustrated with a block John Bewick made for the frontispiece of Richard Johnson’s False Alarms (London: E. Newbery, ca. 1787). And where did old Jemmy come by the block? Was it purchased from John Harris, Elizabeth Newbery’s successor, or his son, John junior?

A tribute to winter by Maurice Boutet de Monvel for the first day of spring

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Andrea Immel

I often get a glimpse of unfamiliar books in the collection when they circulate from the stacks to the reading room and back. One such book was Rondes des quatres saisons(1884), which celebrates the passing of the seasons in four pieces, with lyrics by the poet Leon Valade (1844-1884), music by Leopold Dauphin (1847-?), and illustrations by several artists, including Maurice Boutet de Monvel (1851-1913), best known for his patriotic picture book biography of Joan of Ark.

Rondes crossed my desk on Monday, when winter was doing its best to reassert itself as it does when the weather finally starts to warm up. While leafing through the volume, I found this chilling, but charming illustration of children stamping their feet to keep warm in a snow shower.

Rondes des quatres saisons came to the Cotsen Children’s Library with the acquisition of the Diana Rexford Tillson Collection in the mid-1990s. Its vast holdings of picture books, scores, sheet music, sound recordings, and toys documenting the history of music education and appreciation were thoughtfully selected by Miss Tillson, who was for years a Suzuki method violin teacher. Small discoveries like this Boutet de Monvel illustration are reminders of how rich Miss Tillson’s collection is. Thanks to her vision, it will continue to support in the years to come both the musicologist looking for a rare edition of Sir Thomas Morley and the performer looking for a piece of sheet music to rearrange for barber shop quartet.

Ride an Elephant and Happy Lunar New Year!

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Minjie Chen

The Cotsen Library is home to an international poster collection that depicts children and reflects childhood from diverse historical periods, geographical areas, and cultural backgrounds. Through a pilot project in 2012, the Cotsen Library enhanced catalog records of a small set from its Chinese-language poster collection to allow researchers to search for posters by title, creator, or publisher information in both Chinese characters and pinyin phonetics. Subject headings were standardized to bring consistency to terms that describe the posters. A brief summary of the visual content is also provided.

The small set of about 50 posters dates from the early twentieth century through the mid-1980s. They cover a delightful variety of subject matter, including nianhua (年画, New Year prints) that decorated people’s homes, instructional wall charts for classroom use, and Communist propaganda posters that sent political messages to children and adults alike.

An untitled and undated New Year print gives us a glimpse of multiple facets of Chinese art, culture, history, and political dynamics. The only text in the picture is a red stamp of “Tianjin Yangliuqing Painting Shop” (天津楊柳青畫店), a press based in one of the most famous production centers of Chinese New Year prints. Traditional Yangliuqing art was known for the so-called “half printed, half painted” woodblock New Year prints: combining mass production and original folk art, pictures were first printed in monochrome outline, and each piece was then hand-colored by artisans. The Costen’s copy was printed and painted on a sheet of xuanzhi (宣纸, Chinese rice paper), measuring 30 x 20 inches.

Catalogers occasionally find themselves facing the little-envied job of coming up with titles for library materials that carry no such information. This New Year print posed such a task. How would you name an image portraying three children on the back of an elephant? The old catalog record suggested a title about celebrating the harvest. In order to justify that theme, one might have expected to see depictions of abundant grain overflowing from containers. However, could the basket of fruit in the young Chinese girl’s hand be an Eastern equivalent of cornucopia?

New Year print:
[Ji xiang ru yi] (吉祥如意, An auspicious and wish-fulfilling year).
Tianjin, China: Tianjin Yangliuqing Painting Shop, circa 1958-1980.
Cotsen Children’s Library, call number 64129

Boy on the back of an elephant. A common pattern for traditional Chinese folk art. (Image source)

It is unclear whether this New Year print was made around 1958-1959, when the Yangliuqing Painting Shop was established but not yet merged into the Tianjin People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, or around 1974-1980, when the shop name was restored.¹ The picture is a fascinating manifestation of how tradition underwent adaptive transformations and survived a new political environment under the Chinese Communist regime.

Traditional Symbols and Communist Twists

Chinese New Year prints traditionally employ visual symbols and homophonic riddles to convey good wishes for the coming new year. Young children are among the favorite subject. Often portrayed with pink cheeks and chubby torsos, healthy-looking youth symbolize the success of family reproduction and a hopeful future. It is important to point out that images of children in Chinese New Year prints did not denote a child audience, but were intended for all viewers, particularly adults who wished to accomplish the foremost Confucian virtue and goal of raising a large family with sons and grandsons. Children were nonetheless an important part of the viewing experience. Superstitiously believing that children’s naïve voice carried some realizing power, an adult would engage a child in observing and talking about the pictures on the morning of the New Year’s Day, hoping that those lucky words from a child’s mouth would make happy things happen.

This New Year print from Cotsen is both a continuation of that “baby-loving” tradition and a departure from certain age-old characteristics. In a society that favored sons over daughters, boy figures dominated the subject of traditional New Year pictures. The presence of two young girls in this post-1949 picture, however, reflects an adherence to the idea of gender equality promoted by the Chinese Communist Party. All three children wear red scarves, indicating their membership in the Young Pioneers, which is a school children’s organization that answers to the Chinese Communist Party. (Former Chinese president Hu Jintao was the national leader of the organization in 1983-1984.)

Giant-sized peaches, shown in the basket on the right, are a traditional symbol of longevity in Chinese culture. The golden pineapple on the left also conveys wishes for good things, because the name of that fruit and the word for “prosperity” are homophones in southern Fujian dialect. Another homophone is played on the elephant. In the Chinese language, qixiang (骑象, riding an elephant) and jixiang (吉祥, auspicious) sound similar. The visual motif of elephant riding can actually be traced to the popular depiction of Samantabhadra, a bodhisattva often seen perched on an elephant in Chinese art and sculptures.

A final point of interest is the blossoming branch held high in the girl’s hand on the left. Traditionally, a more common object held by the elephant rider would have been an expensive-looking ruyi (如意). The term literally means “wish fulfillment,” and, according to popular belief, it has originated from the use of the handheld object as a self-sufficient backscratcher. Ruyi made from precious metals and stones used to be royal possessions. In Communist China, it would likely be a distasteful object associated with wealth, power, and privilege, and thus wisely avoided by the anonymous folk artist of this picture. The position of the girl’s arms, and the way she tilts her head closely resemble what we see in a ruyi-holding boy in traditional depictions. Is the pink flower branch an earthly substitute for rich men’s ruyi for political safety?

A ruyi decorated with pearls, made during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Collection of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan. (Image source)

You may find this picture in our library catalog by its new title: “Ji Xiang Ru Yi” (吉祥如意, An auspicious and wish-fulfilling year). Attesting to the flexibility and resilience of a folk art tradition, “Ji Xiang Ru Yi” has merged old and new, catered to both popular and political tastes, and wished for another new year of good luck to come.

(The author thanks Mr. Don Cohn for offering insightful cultural information about Samantabhadra.)

Note:

1. Tianjin Yangliuqing hua she. (n.d.). Retrieved May 23, 2012, from http://www.tjwh.gov.cn/whysz/0906meishu/meishu-0102.html

For the twelfth day of Christmas…

Posted on January 6, 2013 by Andrea Immel

Among the traditional Christmas songs is “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” a memory-and-forfeits game played by the fire that describes the staggering array of gifts bestowed upon one person. The song has inspired many parodies, most of them too lame to stick in the mind, with the notable exception of Alan Sherman’s, with the diabolical substitution of a “naked lady with a clock where her stomach ought to be” for the fifth day’s bling. Then there’s P. D. Q. Bach’s “Twelve Days after Christmas” or Craig Courtney’s ”Musicological Journey Through ‘The Twelve Days’ of Christmas…’”

Upper wrapper of Pitt’s “new edition” of the Twelve Days of Christmas (cover title)

Accumulative rhymes like “The Twelve Days of Christmas” were enjoyed in the days when people passed the time playing all kinds of complicated word and memory games. While the Cotsen Children’s Library does not have a copy of Mirth without Mischief (London: Charles Sheppard, ca. 1780), where the rhyme made its first appearance in print, it has a delightful one issued ca. 1810 by of all people the disreputable printer James Pitts in the notoriously seedy Seven Dials district of London.

In 2012, the Huffington Post asked PNC Wealth Management to cost out the true love’s haul and the numbers came to a hefty $107,000. But that’s actually way below cost, as Iona and Peter Opie , authors of The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, could have told the money men. If they had read the rhyme carefully (close reading is a skill everyone needs), they would have realized the mistake in basing the estimate on the last day’s worth of presents only. The true love had to shell out for not one, but twelve partridges (1 x 12 days), 22 not two doves (2 x 11 days), 30, not three French hens (3 x 10 days) and so forth for a whopping total of 364 items instead of a Grinchy 78.

On to the main point…

In The Twelve Days of Christmas, Sung in King Pipin’s Hall, the text begins as usual, illustrated with fine large cut of the partridge in the pear tree.

The first day of Christmas
My true love gave to me
A partridge in a pear tree..

But it does not conclude with the drummers drumming (the version of the text animated in the Jacquie Lawson e-card and circulated widely on web sites), but with the lords a-leaping, the earliest version cited by the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. Note that Jemmy Pitts’s cut of the twelve lords shows them pole vaulting down a hill, instead of executing grand jetés,which is how they are frequently portrayed.

Woodcut of the twelve pole-vaulting lords

Be that as it may, at least Pitts adorned one page of his Twelve Days of Christmas with a fine cut of a couple kissing under a ball of mistletoe suspended from the ceiling that Joseph Crawhall might have been proud of.

Under the mistletoe…

Our inquiring readers may be wondering what King Pippin has to do with “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” This could be an allusion to the hero of The History of Little King Pippin (London: F. Newbery, 1775), who was king of the good boys and presumably had premises suitable for large-scale holiday entertaining!

Santa, Little Miss Christmas, Holly Belle and their creator Elizabeth Anne Voss (alias E. Voss, E. A. Voss, B. Gartrell, Betty Gartrell, and Elizabeth Gartrell).

Posted on December 23, 2012 by Andrea Immel

Some of the most adorable images of the 1950s were reproduced on the covers of paper doll and coloring books, proclaims the web site Paper Goodies from Judy’s Place.

Miss Christmas and Holly Belle paper dolls designed by Elizabeth Anne Voss.

Merrill Publishing Company in Chicago is considered to have published some of the best of its kind. The proprietor Marion Elizabeth Merrill demanded–and got–quality artwork for printing on thin cardboard stock of books that would sell for just 29¢. Jean Woodcock bought Merrill in 1979 and in 2008 a selection from Merrill’s archive of original artwork for cover designs was offered for sale by Mitch Itkowitz.

Among Merrill’s popular illustrators was Elizabeth Anne Voss (1925-1969). Her pretty little Caucasian girls with almond-shaped eyes wearing dresses bedizened with bows, ribbons, and trims are instantly recognizable. Their continuing appeal is confirmed by the fact that high-quality pdfs of her paintings can be purchased for printing out and recreating the originals at home in a slightly smaller format. Voss’s fans have speculated that there were two sisters working for Merrill at the same time because covers in the same style are signed “E. Voss,” “E. A. Voss,” “B. Gartrell,” “Betty Gartrell,” and “Elizabeth Gartrell.”

Thanks to a recent gift of a small group of covers and artwork by Voss from the late 1950s and early 1960s from her husband Donald H. Voss ’44, *49, I’ve pieced together some information about Betty Anne, as she was known. She was the daughter of Nancy Reynolds and the engineer Robert D. Gartrell, who is famous in horticultural circles for the Robin Hill Azaleas, a group of hybrids he developed while living in New Jersey. One cultivar was named after his artist-daughter. Before her marriage to Donald Voss in 1952, Betty Anne signed her work with her maiden name Gartrell.

A cover signed with Betty Anne’s married name.

Covers in the Voss donation suggest that cover designs signed “Gartrell” or “Voss” could be in simultaneous circulation for some years, so it’s no wonder people have assumed that E. A. Voss and B. Gartrell were two people. This confusion might have been cleared up much sooner if Voss had illustrated picture books instead of covers, in which case it’s more likely that she would have been the subject of articles in standard reference sources.

Some of Voss’s best loved images appeared on the covers of books with holiday themes, although typically she did mostly outline drawings for the coloring books.

Voss’s title page designs for two editions of Little Miss Christmas and Santa.

The copies of Little Miss Christmas and Santa and Little Miss Christmas and Holly-Belle in the Voss donation suggest that Merrill must have asked her to redo the cover paintings periodically to keep them fresh. Voss designed new gowns and accessories, added and subtracted figures, which necessitated rearranging the composition, etc. The typefaces and their layout could vary significantly from cover to cover, although at first glance they look rather similar.

Two variant covers by Voss for Little Miss Christmas and Santa.

The hair styles of Little Miss Christmas and Holly-Belle seem to be the only constants in these two cover designs.

One of the nicest items in the Voss gift is the copy of Little Miss Christmas and Holly-Belle with Santa Claus in the background. It’s not a coloring book, as I discovered while processing the collection, but Betty Anne’s preliminary drawings for the costumes for the two characters fastened into printed covers.

Can you spot the differences between the drawings (left) and the published artwork (right)?

Cotsen is most grateful to Donald Voss for this tribute to his wife, whose work is so characteristic of the period.

Original Voss artwork showing Santa and Little Miss Christmas.

So a Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

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