Category Archives: Cotsen Curatorial

Catalogue Shopping in 19th-century Germany: Toys, Magic Lanterns, Macaroni and More

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There is quite a selection of catalogs in the Cotsen collection and one of the most spectacular on is among the most puzzling–an oblong volume  23 x 35.5 cm bound in scuffy marbled paper with a worn sheep spine.  It has no title page, but there is a ragged stub that suggests there once was one.   It consists of 149 leaves of hand-colored lithographic plates and the illustrated objects have printed captions in German.  Many have manuscript notes as well.  There is a description of the volume in two different hands on the front pastedown endpaper: “Album quincaillerie,”  “quincaillerie” being the French word for “hardware.”

“Hardware” doesn’t accurately describe all the things this merchant–perhaps based in southern Germany–offered for sale.  Brass tools, candlesticks, and Shabbos lamps.  Cutlery of wood or horn.  Brushes and ornamental hair combs and decorated clay pipes and guns and swords and noodles in different shapes and sizes.  And toys.  Magic lanterns, jigsaw puzzles, minature kitchens, bilboquets, pull toys with wheels, noise makers, magnetic tin toys, china dolls heads and great deal more.

Our mystery merchant could have been in the retail business,  distributing  for products manufactured by a wide range of craftspeople.  There is some evidence for this hypothesis in the leaf displaying sundry materials for teaching geography.  

The globe in the square box in the lower-left hand corner appears to be a miniature or pocket globe issued with an illustrated panorama attached to the bottom of the box entitled Die Erde und ihre Bewohner.   Here is Cotsen’s copy in a little orange box, with a round, unillustrated title label (the box appears to have been restored). But the panorama spilling out of the box in the plate illustrates  exotic foreign animals and not people from around the world as in the Cotsen copy.  So are they really the same thing?

Luckily the answer was there in the two objects at hand.  The label on the Cotsen copy has “2. Abtheilung” in small lettering below the title, which suggests there were two editions or versions of Die Erde und ihre Bewohner.  In the right-hand corner of the catalog’s plate is shown the second version, a lacquered wood cylindrical case with a slot that the panorama inside is pulled through.   The panorama there shows just the portrait of  the “Neuhollander” or Australian aborigine, but it is the same  “Neuhollander” in the Cotsen set.

The manuscript annotation below notes that there are two versions, one with twenty-eight illustrations and one with fifty-six.  There are fifty-six people represented in the Cotsen set, so presumably the natural history set illustrated twenty-eight animals.  Identifying the makers of the other toys in this catalog would be a wonderful research project, either for a dedicated soul or team of people.

You can see more of the extraordinary variety of materials that were for sale through this retailer here

Samuel Marshak’s Letter that Went Around the World: A Tribute to the Post Office

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Samuil Marshak, Pochta. Illustrated by Mikhail Tskekanovskii. 5th edition. (Leningrad: GIZ, 1930). Cover title. Cotsen 35487.

In 1927 Samuil Marshak wrote the poem Pochta to praise the efficiency of modern communications with some droll humor and a little dash of wonder.  The plot is brilliant in its simplicity.

A little boy writes a letter to the children’s book author Boris Zhitkov, but Postman Number 5 delivers it to his Leningrad apartment after Zhitkov has left for London.  The letter is forwarded to London, where it misses him again.  It doesn’t reach him in Berlin and has to be redirected to Brazil.  The letter goes around the world before catching up with Zhitkov in Leningrad.  When he receives the letter, covered with cancelled stamps and addresses crossed through, he is amazed at the remarkable network of postmen in different countries connected by trains, airplanes, and ships it represents.

The letter’s voyage can be tracked on the map to the left.

Pochta is such an inspired collaboration between author and illustrator that it is hard to imagine the text being brought to life anywhere as well by another illustrator.   But the late Vladimir Radunsky, a wildly creative Russian-born American artist, conceived a delightful interpretation all his own that pays tribute to his brilliant predecessors.  Hail to the Mail (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1990) is not a literal translation of Marshak’s poem, but a cleverly expanded version with an American spin by Richard Pevear. Pevear, as you’ll see below, gets top billing on the Radunsky’s title page, with its clever allusions to the design concept of the Soviet one.Here is the first attempted delivery of the letter to one John Peck, which Radunsky dramatizes as an encounter between Postman Tim and an unidentified gentleman who seems to be living in Peck’s New York apartment (his portrait is hanging on the wall to the left).  The letter now travels west across the vast North American plains to Boise, Idaho.

Peck has decamped for Zurich, so the letter flies west across the Pacific and Asia to Switzerland.  Of course he has left for some place else–Brazil.  The letter, safetly stowed in the special cabin in a transatlantic ship, arrives after his return home to New York City.Peck the world traveler is amazed that the letter has followed him from place to place, thanks to the dedicated mailmen.  When Postman Tim finally places it in his hands Peck sings “Glory to them, I saw, and Hail / To their heavy bags that bring the mail.”

It is incredible, Internet or no Internet, and Pevear found the right English words to recreate Marshak’s:

A letter can travel / Without / Any trouble / Take a stamp / And lick it — / No need for a ticket — / Your passenger’s sealed / And ready to whirl / On a few-penny / Journey / All over the world. / And it won’t eat or drink / On the way / and there’s only one thing/ It will say/ As it comes down to land: / Certified.

So with only ten shopping (and shipping) days until Christmas, let us carol “All hail to the mail” and give thanks to those tireless folks at USPS, FEDEX, and UPS who process and deliver the packages that do so much to make the season merry and bright!