Category Archives: Cotsen Curatorial

Really Big Coloring Books: “You Chose the Topic, We Make Your Book”

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Really Big Coloring Books in St. Louis, Missouri aims to make your coloring book dreams come true.  Its lines include LapTop Coloring Books (panoramic flip-top books 17 x 11 inches), Power Panel Coloring Books (8 x 11 inches), Travel Tablet Coloring Books (36 pages 5.5 x 8.5 inches), Promotional-Custom Coloring Books (8 pages with 4-color covers guaranteed in 30 days or less), and the Specialty Coloring Books, which in my opinion are highly collectible.

The Speciality Coloring Book  line is topical, bi-partisan, patriotic, and not always politically correct.  Since 1988, Really Big Coloring Books  has produced pamphlets on Obama, Ted Cruz, 9/11, gun safety, coming out, international terrorism (among other things) and most recently at lightining speed, a “true to life graphic educational comic coloring book about the Coronavirus -COVID 19.”The text covers the bases,including essential information about the virus, ground zero at Wuhan, China, correct hand washing techniques and other methods of prevention, a time line of the disease’s spread between December 2019 and February 26 2020, the United States government’s efforts, and how to stay well-informed as the disease spreads.  The editorial team does a good job keeping it non-partisan and factual.Because the publication is intended for all ages, there is a generous helping of generic “fun” but educational activities that can be done with pencil and paper.  They seem very appropriate for passing time in the doctor’s waiting room.  Maybe some physicians have stocked the magazine racks with copies.Really Big Coloring Books, as the preceding publication shows, can be an excellent citizen as a publisher.  There are other times when the firm goes unapologeticaly rogue, as in this 2019 extravaganza on North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.   Nobody can complain that It wasn’t clearly labeled as inappropriate for persons with crayons under the age of eighteen years.  The staff cartoonists seems to have relished this particular assignment because the graphics are pretty inspired for a coloring book.

The maze and connect-the-dots are the most light-hearted of all the fun activities, although others are cruder.  Dennis Rodman has to take his licks.  The back cover states emphatically that Really Big Coloring Books has no animus against the North Korean people, just the “delusional tyrant who truly believes he is a God amongst humans” who makes their lives miserable.  Are we ready to start living in less interesting times???????

Hilaire Belloc, Meet Edward Gorey

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The astonishingly prolific Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) lived to see the humor in being remembered for a book of light verse he published in 1907, Cautionary Tales for Children.  The cautionary tale, with its ghoulish mission to prevent juvenile misbehavior, can, for some children, be the stuff of nightmares.  Overkill is its mad method, as the  transgression is always imagined in a worst case scenario so that the dire punishment hardly ever fits the crime.

Mr. Belloc’s tongue-in-cheek self-defense of the exaggeration for satiric effect isn’t going to convince anyone without a black sense of humor themselves:  ” And is it True?  It is not true. / And if it were it wouldn’t do, / For people such as me and you / Who pretty nearly all day long / Are doing something rather wrong. / Because if things were really so, / You would have perished long ago / And I would not have lived to write / The noble lines that meet your sight, / Nor [Edward G.] survived to draw / The nicest things you ever saw.”    Maybe Calvin Trillin is right in saying parents find Belloc hillarious; children have to grow up and deal with their own offspring before they can titter at his brand of beastliness.

The late Edward Gorey (can it be that he has been gone for 20 years) was the ideal illustrator for Belloc, as can be seen in the illuminating self-portrait and his cover design for the poems., which shows shows the black forefinger of Fate pointing to the children gambolling across the grass, little thinking they are doomed.

In this second post in honor of  Children’s Book Week, Sir Peter Ustinov reads a selection of Belloc’s tales with Gorey’s illustrations scrolling in the background.

And here is the author himself, in a most memorable pose reproduced from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London.