Category Archives: Cotsen Curatorial

Hilaire Belloc, Meet Edward Gorey

Posted on by

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8O15Kf36wk

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

Colin Thompson’s Imaginary Book Case for Puzzling through the Pandemic (and National Library Week)

Posted on by

Here is a detail of an imaginary library by English-Australian author-illustrator Colin Thompson.  But it’s not from a book illustration.It is several shelves from a design for a Ravensburger jigsaw puzzle.  After writing and illustrating twenty-four pictures books, writing another nineteen picture books illustrated by other artists, three volumes of poetry, six young adult novels, and the Flood Series in fifteen volumes, Thompson has changed his focus.  Since 2016, he has concentrated on producing illustrations for a smashing series of jigsaw puzzles.

The pieces spread out on a table make an intriguing and colorful display.   Some puzzlers consider a five-hundred piece jigsaw hardly worth bothering with.  Kind of like the Monday New York Times crossword.   If you are the only person in the house putting it together, it’s large enough to take a while, but not so long that despair sets in on those days when nothing wants to fit together.

One of the pleasures of a Colin Thompson puzzle is its whackiness.  This one features fractured book titles. Some of the edge pieces go together relatively fast becauseof the added clue of completing the titles.  And it’s more fun that frustrating to see where some of the some of the surprising details like a flower pot or a honking goose are going to land.

Last week the New York Times ran an article about Ravensburger in Germany.   Demand for their jigsaw puzzles has increased so much since the beginning of the pandemic, that the firm can’t produce them fast enough.  And the process can’t be sped up because of the emphasis on quality.  So have fun scrolling through the list of Colin Thompson puzzles and dream for the days when stores will be able to keep them in stock again.