Mr. Lloyd Cotsen, the benefactor of the Cotsen Children’s Library, maintained a lifelong interest in illustrated children’s books and visual materials. What began as a family library of picture books read with his young children grew into an expansive historical and international research collection celebrating a rich variety of languages, cultures, genres, and formats. (In this respect, he was a kindred spirit of Alice, who famously questioned the usefulness of books without pictures before dozing off on a hot summer afternoon—much like the ones that have befallen Princeton in an unusually early month this year.)

The Chinese delegation of publishers and editors visited the Cotsen Children’s Library gallery, the child-friendly reading space open to the public. (Photo courtesy of the delegation)

On a humid day in July, the Cotsen Children’s Library welcomed a delegation of publishers and editors from China. The twenty-two members, representing more than a dozen publishing houses and media organizations, came to explore Cotsen’s collection of Chinese-language materials. In the United States, publishing for children is typically the business of dedicated imprints or specialized presses. In China, however—especially during the height of the children’s book boom that began in the mid-2000s—numerous publishers, from university presses to the most unlikely candidates (including those traditionally specializing in niche domains), hopped onto the crowded bandwagon of publishing for young readers.

The Cotsen collection holds more than 15,000 titles of Chinese-language children’s materials, spanning from pre-modern times to the present. The bulk of the collection dates from after the late 19th century, when China’s crushing defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) prompted anguished intellectuals to seek national salvation and revitalization. Looking earnestly abroad for answers, they found hope in children’s books and instructional materials—often carrying illustrations—translated from the victorious Japan and the West. They hoped to provide the next generation with engaging and pedagogically effective reading materials, so that boys would grow into learned citizens and strong soldiers, and girls into wise mothers nurturing patriotic sons (Judge 109).

Political fluctuations, pedagogical initiatives, and constraints related to technology, resources, and consumer purchasing power have all shaped the history of Chinese children’s books. For the delegation, we selected titles that reflect China’s non-linear, and often halting, progress in producing illustrated materials for children.

Right: Wang Tong, Vice President of the China International Book Trading Corp. (CIBTC), views From Feng Tzu-K’ai’s Drawings of Children. (Photo courtesy of Dr. Martin Heijdra)

“When father is out,” in From Feng Tzu-K’ai’s Drawings of Children. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1956. (Cotsen 72422) (page 17)

The book was published by the Foreign Languages Press, which, like CIBTC, is a subsidiary of the China Foreign Languages Publishing Administration, a state-owned institution responsible for international publicity and communication. Feng Zikai (丰子恺, 1898-1975) developed a distinctive style of comic art, blending the cartoon format he first encountered in Japanese publications with traditional Chinese brushwork and painting. Some of the artist’s most beloved works humorously and tenderly depict the childhood of his own children. The Feng Zikai Chinese Children’s Picture Book Award—the first international award for Chinese-language picture books—is named in honor of this prolific artist.

Curator of the Cotsen Children’s Library and delegates from the Jiangxi Publishing and Media Group Co. Ltd. pose with books from the 21st Century Publishing House, its children’s imprint. (Photo courtesy of Dr. Martin Heijdra)

On the left, held by Lin Yun, General Manager of China Peace Publishing House Co. Ltd., is the Chinese edition of No! That’s Wrong! Unbeknownst to us when we made the selection, Lin—who was the primary editor of the book—was one of the visitors. On the right, held by Vice General Manager Zhou Jiansen, is a nonfiction title that explains Karl Marx’s Das Kapital in comic book format.

No! That’s Wrong! Nanchang: Er shi yi shi ji chu ban she, 2011. (Cotsen 153522Q)

In No! That’s Wrong! a critically acclaimed debut picture book by Ji Zhaohua and Xu Cui, a rabbit challenges conventional wisdom about dress codes and decides for itself the “right” way to wear a strangely shaped piece of clothing it stumbles upon in the forest. At a pivotal moment in its struggle, the rabbit breaks the fourth wall to block unsolicited opinions from an invisible narrator-commentator.

An Illustrated Version of Das Kapital. Nanchang: Er shi yi shi ji chu ban she, 1996. (Cotsen 84282) The comic book explains both Karl Marx’s magnum opus and the history of how it was written.

Curator and delegates from Phoenix Juvenile and Children’s Publishing Ltd. (Photo courtesy of Dr. Martin Heijdra)

Held by Chief Editor Liu Zongyuan is a title from his publishing house: The Sweet Orange Tree (2015) written by Cao Wenxuan and illustrated by Zhu Chengliang (Cotsen N-000687). The story’s protagonist is a boy with cognitive disabilities—a recurring theme in the works of the Hans Christian Andersen Award-winning author.

A wooden building block set. Shanghai: Xin Yi Toy Company, undated. (Cotsen 31279)

In addition to books and magazines, we displayed non-book materials, such as this wooden building block set, manufactured by a toy company in Shanghai, possibly during the 1950s. It appears no less versatile or challenging than Lego.

Titles donated by China Peace Publishing House Co. Ltd.

China Peace Publishing House generously donated four of its titles to the Cotsen Children’s Library:

Do Not Let the Sun Fall, written by Guo Zhenyuan and illustrated by Zhu Chengliang (2018)
A Night of Camping in the Library, written by Gao Hongbo and illustrated by Li Haiyan (2023)
Amu, the Nanai People’s Hero, written and illustrated by Li Dan (2024)
To the Mountains, by Yang Xiaoyan (2022)

Reference

Judge, Joan. The Precious Raft of History: the Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China. Stanford University Press, 2008.

Gustave Dore’s rendering of the ogre’s discovery of little Thumb and his brothers.

The Oxford English Dictionary succinctly defines an ogre as “a man-eating monster, usually represented as a hideous giant” in folklore and mythology. It comes from the French via Perrault’s fairy tales (its mate is an “ogress” and their offspring an “ogrichon” according to Mme d’ Aulnoy). An ogre is never welcome when scouring the countryside for its next meal, whether a good supply of baby belly buttons, eaten by oni, the ogres of Japan or a brace of fat boys rolled in well-seasoned bread crumbs and fried in butter, the favorite dish of the giant Snap-‘em up in Uncle David’s nonsensical story from Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House (1839). The ogres I’ve found in picture books from the last ten years seem to belong to an altogether different subspecies.The title of Michael Morpurgo’s The Ogre Who Wasn’t (2023) gives fair warning. A somewhat forced reinvention of Grimms’ The Frog Prince is odd place to invoke the presence of a monster. Motherless Princess Clara discovers a teeny tiny ogre in the garden and stows him under the bed in a hot pink character shoe. Because her father is away most of the time, the disagreeable servants try to constrain her but she defies them by keeping an extensive menagerie in her room and running wild in the garden barefoot in dirty shorts with uncombed hair. One evening she confides her pain to her best friend the loyal little ogre, who reveals that he is really the Toad King and has magical powers, which can be put at her service. He grants her wishes to scrap the help and give her a stay-at-home dad with a nice new wife. There is nothing more for the new racially blended family to do in this sweetly vapid story but live happily ever after.The creature in Peter McCarty’s 2009 picture book Jeremy Draws a Monster is quite satisfying–big, blue, and bulky with multiple horny protrusions, pinpoint eyes, big nostrils and bare earholes (funny preparatory drawings turn up on the endpapers). But things go awry almost immediately. It wants a sandwich, when it ought to threaten Jeremy, a much more substantial mouthful. It wants consumer goods to help pass the time, including a television so it can watch the game. Donning a dandy red hat, it goes out on the town and hogs the single bed when it gets back very late. That is the last straw. Jeremy draws a suitcase and one-way bus ticket and escorts the big blue pest to the station in the morning. Then he joins the neighborhood kids in games for the first time. Obviously the ogre is a projection of Jeremy’s imagination, which probably explains why his creation won’t eat him and goes without putting up a fight. If it isn’t real and only looks dangerous, then the story deflates without any conflict between the two unequal characters. Even if the point were that monsters are all in your head, of which I’m unconvinced, the imagination demands the possibility of them being real.Leave it to David Sedaris to think up Pretty Ugly (2024), a typically weird story, the last to be illustrated by the late Ian Falconer. Dedicated to Tiffany, Sedaris’s sister who committed suicide, he also pays tribute to the ability of sister Amy to make ghastly faces. Whenever the adorable little ogrichon Anna is good, she is awful, prompting her parents and grandmother to coo that she really is “something.” She does have the bad habit of making dreadful faces–the fuzzy bunny terrifies her adoring gran–and is warned quite correctly by her mother that if she doesn’t stop it, she’s going to be sorry. The features of her most horrible face of all (shown to the left) cannot be reversed and the medical intervention fails to restore her face to its original state. While her loving family can live with their little monstrosity, her peer group has no problem reminding how her how hideous she has become. After secluding herself in the wood shed for a miserable three days, Anna remembers her grandmother’s consoling words about true inner beauty and sticks her hand down her throat to turn herself inside out, which solves the problem (below). There is nothing traditional about this ogre story, but if ogres created picture books about family life, they could do worse than take Sedaris as their model.I’m not sure why authors and illustrators who reinvent Western folklore’s traditional baddies tend to smooth off their rough edges. While an ogre is terrifying, it is not a complicated creature. It stomps around, uses brute force to capture people, and devours them. Maybe it tosses the bones into a large, grisly, untidy heap outside the cave A brave and quick-thinking child like Little Thumb has a shot at defeating one. But perhaps the classic stand-off between big and small compares unfavorably with old and modern stories about Japanese yokai and needs big injections of horror and violence to hold its own in today’s media environment. Time to clap if you believe in ogres?