Category Archives: Eastern European children’s books

Cotsen Research Report: Feodor Rojankovsky’s Alphabet Books Part II

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This winter Research Grant winner JoAnn Conrad spent a month in Rare Books and Special Collections reading room poring over dozens and dozens of early twentieth-century books in Cotsen and in Graphic Arts.  Her project, “Women’s Work: Magazines, Advertising and Children’s Books in the ‘Golden Age’ of Illustration in the United States,” is one piece of a more ambitious one about the role of early twentieth-century artists who worked across media in graphic design, advertising, and children’s book illustration played in disseminating the visual language of modernism.  Joann’s survey of Feodor Rojankovsky’s  ABCs will be in two parts: today’s second post discusses work he created in the United States.

The A Б Cs of Feodor Rojankovsky

By JoAnn Conrad

In 1925, Vassar graduate Esther Averill moved to Paris, where many young, college-educated American women were seeking to understand their place as writers, artists and as women in a more socially liberating scene. In 1930 Averill and business partner Lila Stanley had a new venture with an American client looking to modernize his line of stationary. Averill turned to Rojan whose drawings enchanted them: “They had color, gaiety and humor, and revealed how thoroughly he understood the graphic possibility of the medium.”[1] The stationary endeavor fell through, but Rojankovksy, eager to enter into the new market in children’s picturebooks proposed they collaborate. The result was the 1931 Daniel Boone,[2] a fauvist-inspired series of brightly colored lithographs celebrating the American hero as he fought Indians and settled the wilderness — a fantasy of the American West shaped, in part, on Rojankovksy’s own childhood fascination with the works of Fenimore Cooper. But Rojankovsky’s experience in modern advertising layout and illustration was also major influence on the book, especially his use of brightly colored graphics to create a feeling of a fantastic West above and beyond the text. The plates were visually stunning but prohibitive to print, and Averill could find no American publisher willing to take it on. She and Stanley therefore established their own Domino Press, which would “specialize in children’s picture books illustrated by gifted young artists and reproduced by means of the excellent color processes that were available in Paris,”[3] and published Daniel Boone themselves. Rojankovsky would go on to illustrate four more Domino books, published in French and English versions and distributed in France and the U.S.,  preceding Rojankovsky’s own immigration by almost a decade.

Illustration from Daniel Boone. Paris: Domino Press, 1931. (Cotsen 16819)

In 1933, on the basis of this impressive start in children’s book illustration and advertising work, Rojan was hired by visionary French children’s book innovator Paul Faucher, creator of Les Albums du Père Castor. Faucher’s radical pedagogy was based on the concept of “hands on,” participatory learning that sought to elicit children’s creative responses to the real world. Faucher’s first team of illustrators consisted primarily of Russian expatriate artists — Nathalie Parain, Alexandra Exter, Hélène Guertik, and Rojankovsky, all of whom had adopted the forms and techniques of the avant-garde, constructivism, and Cubo-Futurism which had been their common experience in the Russian art milieu in the early 1900s. Using elemental shapes, and primary colors to evoke a synesthetic, multi-sensory experience, and deploying non-representational and minimalist images, they sought to establish an unmediated, visceral, and emotional engagement with the viewer. In Paris in the 1930s, they redirected this towards Faucher’s new vision for a modern, interactive picturebook. Decoupled from any Socialist message, these artists, in various ways, extended the modernist experiment into his new pedagogical and commercial enterprise; their attempts at viewer engagement aligned with Faucher’s participatory pedagogy.

Rojankovsky often illustrated for Faucher’s wife, the author Lida who shared her husband’s philosophy, and with her he produced a series of books with naturalistic images of animals in their habitats. But in 1936 Rojankovsky collaborated with Faucher himself on an ABC book/game,[4] the cover of which harkens back to the frontispiece of Zhivaia Azbuka, with animals spilling out from their containment. But whereas in the 1936 book the animals featured inside are consistent with those on the cover, in Zhivaia Azbuka the cover and frontispiece feature wild, exotic animals in contrast to the more ordinary and familiar animals accompanying Chernyi’s verse. Faucher’s ABC is also a game, in this case several bingo-type games of increasing difficulty. Thus, while the ideological thrust of Zhivaia Azbuka had been conservative and preservationist, Faucher’s is clearly pedagogical. Zhivaia Azbuka’s intended audience was Russian émigré children, who most likely spoke Russian at home and in the community, but whose language of instruction in their new home was French. That is, the goal of the book was to expose children who likely knew how to read in French, but who also spoke Russian, to the Cyrillic alphabet and thereby to written Russian; a context which better explains Chernyi’s complex couplets. This is not a beginning reader, or a “Baby’s first ABCs.” In contrast, Faucher’s ABC specifically links letters to sounds, and illustrates these sounds through the initial phonemes of individual illustrations of animals. There are no vignettes, either visual or verbal. Faucher’s is a classic ABC book, with one large, capital letter, its corresponding lower-case cursive letter, and a representative animal on a blank background. The presumptive learning process necessitates a prior knowledge of the represented animal from which the relationship between the initial sound and the letter can be suggested. This process breaks down when the animals are exotic and perhaps unknown to the child.

Front cover of Paul Faucher’s ABC / jeux du Père Castor. [Paris]: Flammarion, 1936. (Cotsen 21253)

Frontispiece to Zhivai︠a︡  Azbuka. Paris: N. P. Karbasnikov, 1926. (Cotsen 9209)

Tearable cards from ABC / jeux du Père Castor.  (Cotsen 21253)

back free endpaper game board from ABC / jeux du Père Castor.  (Cotsen 21253)

Word-Letter associations that work in Faucher’s ABC. (Cotsen 21253)

Word-Letter associations that don’t work in Faucher’s ABC. (Cotsen 21253)

ABC books such as Faucher’s, with their one-to-one correspondence of letters and sounds illustrated by images of single words were extremely popular in the late 1800s and early 1920s,[5] and reflect an early pedagogical approach to reading, one which would be displaced by phonics by mid-century. In 1936, the popularity of this type of ABC book was on the wane, but Rojankovsky, long after settling in the U.S. would return to this format one last time with his Animals in the Zoo, in 1962.[6] The page layout is reminiscent of Faucher’s book from over 25 years earlier, but what is even more notable is the cover, which features a giraffe in an old-fashioned zoo enclosure, whose ‘spots’ are made out of letters. Rojankovsky would again use this technique in his final ABC book in 1970.[7] Interestingly, this technique of constructing an animal’s body out of letters in an ABC book was used in a 1917 ABC book by Sybil Rebman, published by the Chicago-based P.F. Volland Company. But rather than just filling the animal’s outline with random letters, in Rebman’s book each animal associated with a letter in the alphabet is constructed out of letters which also spell out the word for that animal. Although neither Rebman nor Volland have the name recognition of Rojankovsky, in 1917 her illustrations and concept are artistically innovative (albeit pedagogically dubious), whereas in 1962 Rojankovksy’s repetitive wild-life images and simplistic format look dated. Nonetheless, Rebman’s use of letters is conventional in that they spell out a word, while Rojankovsky’s use of letters decouples them from any corresponding sound or meaning.

Animals in the Zoo (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1962).

Inside pages of Animals in the Zoo. 

ABC: An Alphabet of Many Things. New York: Golden Press, 1970. (Cotsen 152493)

Sybil Rebman’s Animal Alphabet. Chicago.: P.F. Volland Company, 1917. (Cotsen 21871)

In addition to the English editions of his books for Domino Press, by 1936 many of Rojankovsky’s books in Les Albums du Père Castor were translated into English and distributed in the U.S., brokered by the director of the Artists and Writers Guild, Georges Duplaix. Thus well in advance of his arrival in 1941, his work was well received. Duplaix would be a critical player in Rojankovsky’s life and work, facilitating safe passage out of southern France ahead of Hitler’s army in exchange for a long-term exclusive contract. When Duplaix launched his new commercial venture The Little Golden Books series in 1942, Rojankovsky joined a stable of other émigré artists, including Gustaf Tenggren and Tibor Gergely, to produce some of the most widely published children’s books of the 20th century. Of the over 35 books Rojanksovsky illustrated for the Golden Books from 1943 to 1970, there are none that fit the classic ABC book format. Instead, Rojankovsky’s work focuses mostly on animal stories. His second Golden Book – Animal Stories, written by Duplaix,[8] links animal stories to the alphabet in what seems to have been Rojankovsky’s main interest in ABCs all along– experiments in typography.  In the heart of the book, in between fanciful tales of animals and a display of Rojankovsky’s illustration styles, there are 6 pages of illustrated block letters, each accompanied by a small verse  (21-26). These were later issued as a set of nesting blocks.[9] Even more interestingly, these letters were used in a series of magazine advertisements for Puss n’ Boots cat food during the 1940s.[10]

Georges Duplaix and Feodor Rojankovsky. Animal Stories. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944. (Cotsen 7370)

Playschool Golden Book Nested Blocks. Golden Press, Inc. Licensed by Playschool, 1958.

Rojankovsky illustrated “Puss n’ Boots” cat food advertisement, Saturday Evening Post, [1949]

Golden Books had not abandoned the ABC-book concept or format, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s, this task had already been taken over by a new group of illustrators – Richard Scarry, Garth Williams, and Cornelius DeWitt. The format also changed: No longer single letters with a single representative figure on a white background, the emphasis had switched to filling the pages with as many representative images as possible. Rojankovsky replicated this in his final book, which fittingly was an ABC book — Alphabet of Many Things (1970), but the end papers again reveal his fascination with typography.

Page spread from ABC: An Alphabet of Many Things. (Cotsen 152493)

Endpapers from ABC: An Alphabet of Many Things. (Cotsen 152493)

Rojankovsky’s use of foliage to construct letters of the alphabet appears in many titles to many of his books, which are otherwise unrelated to Alphabet books: Animals on the Farm (Knopf, 1967), and Frog Went A-Courtin (1955), to cite two, and the 1950s-style ABC book format is replicated in the 1960 Animal Dictionary for the Little Golden Books,[11] but, with the exception of Frog Went A-Courtin these are rather joyless, perfunctory endeavors, displaying none of the wit and innovation of Rojankovsky’s other work. Rojankovsky was working under exploitative terms both for Paul Faucher and for Duplaix and the Golden Books. His compensation was low, and the demands of such large-scale publishing operations limited his artistic freedom. Much of his later work seems to be re-assemblages of previous pieces, and one might wonder whether his “recognizable style” is more a function of images he repurposed for his own self-preservation, particularly when his entire oeuvre is examined. A revisitation of his work through the lens of ABC-books reveals its range and variety even when working with the constraints of publishing houses, during political turmoil, and across continents.

Watson, Jane W, and Feodor Rojankovsky. Animal Dictionary. New York: Golden Press, 1960.

[1] Allen, Irving, Polly Allen, and Koly T. Rojankovsky. Feodor Rojankovsky: The Children’s Books and Other Illustration Art, 2014. Kindle edition, location 893.

[2] Averill, Esther Holden, Lila Stanley, and Feodor Rojankovsky. Daniel Boone: Historic Adventures of an American Hunter Among the Indians. Paris: Domino Press, 1931.

[3] Esther Averill Biography from the “Jenny Linsky and the Cat Club” page: http://www.93950.com/cat_club/bio.htm

[4] Faucher, Paul, and Feodor Rojankovsky. ABC / jeux du Père Castor ; dessins de F. Rojan.

[5] The Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton has a digital archive of historical ABC books with many examples https://etc.princeton.edu/abcbooks/. Two of the most prolific publishers during the turn of the century period were Raphael Tuck (London), and the McLoughlin Brothers (New York).

[6] Rojankovsky, Feodor. Animals in the Zoo. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1962.

[7] Rojankovsky, Feodor. ABC: An Alphabet of Many Things. Golden Press, 1970.

[8] Duplaix, Georges, and Feodor Rojankovsky. Animal Stories. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944.

[9] Playschool Golden Book Nested Blocks. Golden Press, Inc. Licensed by Playschool, 1958.

[10] Coast Fishing Company, Wilmington, Ca. The one-page ads with a featured animal, accompanied by a letter of the alphabet inscribed by Rojankovsky, ran in the Saturday Evening Post from 1947 to 1948. These were compiled into a promotional book in 1949.

[11] Watson, Jane W, and Feodor Rojankovsky. Animal Dictionary. Racine, Wis: Golden Press, 1960.

Cotsen Research Report: Feodor Rojankovsky’s Alphabet Books

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This winter Research Grant winner JoAnn Conrad spent a month in Rare Books and Special Collections reading room poring over dozens and dozens of early twentieth-century books in Cotsen and in Graphic Arts.  Her project, “Women’s Work: Magazines, Advertising and Children’s Books in the ‘Golden Age’ of Illustration in the United States,” is one piece of a more ambitious one about the role of early twentieth-century artists who worked across media in graphic design, advertising, and children’s book illustration played in disseminating the visual language of modernism. Joann’s survey of Feodor Rojankovsky’s ABCs will be in two parts: today’s post covers books he created in Poland and in Paris

The A Б Cs of Feodor Rojankovsky

By JoAnn Conrad

Feodor Rojankovsky is probably best known in the United States for the illustrations in the thirty-eight Little Golden Books he produced from 1943 to 1970, but he also worked for other American children’s book publishers, magazines and advertisers.  Fifty years old in 1941 when he fled the advancing Nazi army and arrived in the U.S, he had already established himself as a successful illustrator in a variety of media and genres in several European countries the previous three decades. Rojankovsky’s work for child or adult audiences has a recognizable quality in its consistent use of color and expressive attention to detail, so it is possible to trace artistic influences, cultural, and publishing trends in his work as he moved through time and space, starting in Russia during WWI and the Revolutionary period, then in Poland and Berlin in the early 1920s, next in Paris during the 1930s, and ultimately in the U.S. from the early 1940s until his death in 1970. This two-part research report will focus on a format Rojankovsky consistently returned to – the ABC book – to chart his unique style with its vivid animal and fairy tale imagery, as well as his responses to the demands of different publishing, political, and artistic milieus.

In 1919, Rojankovsky, then in Ukraine, was conscripted by the White Army to fight in the Russian Civil War. Pushed west into Poland by the advancing Red forces, Rojankovsky finished out the war in a Lvov detention camp, where he remained in exile after the war.   By the early 1920s he relocated to Poznan in western Poland, supporting himself as a graphic artist and designer, producing book covers, set designs, postcards depicting architecture in and around Poznan, fashion drawings, illustrations for magazines, cartoons, and children’s books.  His colorful, eclectic fusion of representational and modernist art fit the mood in Poznan, which was forward looking with the prospect of robust commercial development.  His work also embodies the complex relationship that existed between the avant-garde, graphic design, mass media, and advertising.

Renine Wierszyki. Warszawa: J. Mortkowicz, [193-?]. (Cotsen 12139)

Rojankovsky illustrated five children’s books in Poland, but only Ewa Selzburg’s Renine Wierszyki was suitable for small children, with an image and short verse on each page.  For more on this author see Bookbird (1988/2) (1988). http://www.literature.at/viewer.alo?objid=14676&viewmode=fullscreen&scale=3.33&rotate=&page=21

The poetess and the artist were well-matched as collaborators.  Here is Reni, looking at a photograph of her mother, and “mother” to her doll sitting under the table.

(Cotsen 12139), p.1.

On the next page, Reni’s godmother attends her baptism.  She is likened to a good witch, mixing folklore into ordinary reality.  Rojankovsky introduces an exaggerated first letter into the design which is picks up the first word in the first line of the poem – “A kto. . ?” Redundant to the verse, the large “A” attaches to the figure of Reni’s godmother.

(Cotsen 12139), p. 2.

The iconic use of large letters attached to the images rather than the text is a running motif throughout the book’s layout and themes, which invites comparisons to the ABC genre, even though it is not actually an alphabet book. Similarly, the large “M” integrated into the sphere of a wizard who is bringing more children to Reni’s world, is neither in the scale of the figure nor that of the verse. It is a nonsensical structural element in the illustration because the large M does not refer to ‘wizard’, but only alliterates with the first letter of the first word in the first line – Moze [maybe].

(Cotsen 12139), p. 4.

By making these large letters redundant and irrelevant to the text, Rojankovsky was playing with typography in ways that resonated with his contemporary and compatriot, El Lissitzky, who, along with Chagall and Issachar Ber Ryback belonged to the avant-garde Kultur-Lige in the 1910s, where they experimented with floating, disconnected, abstracted letters.

Cover title for El Lissitzky, “Chad Gadya” [Only a Kid]. Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1919. (Cotsen 2126)

El Lissitzky would continue this experimentation when he went to Berlin in the early 1920s and met up with Kurt Schwitters,[i] who also was using letters in ways that were neither related to their role as signifiers of sounds or as carriers of meaning.  In this respect these books are diametrically opposed to ABC books in which the link between the sign and the sound(s) is presumed.  It is important to note here that Rojankovsky himself was in Berlin at the same time as El Lissitzky and he returned to Poznan only after the financial crash in 1923.

Cover design by Kurt Schwitters, Käte Steinitz, and Theo. Doesburg for Die Scheuche: Merz 14/5. Hannover: Aposs-Verlag, 1925. (Cotsen 3510)

(Cotsen 3510)

Six of the twenty-one pages of Renine Wierszyki feature these giant letters, in no particular order.  As we turn the pages, we follow Reni through her day, cooking, climbing trees, playing with her cat, and eventually reading the pages of an ABC book. In yet another nonsensical moment, the poem informs us that the black letters and red numbers in Reni’s alphabet book must be learned quickly because the box in which the book comes might be appropriated for some other use. Rojankovsky’s illustrations send a mixed message: The simple, clear images in primary colors seem addressed to a child audience, whereas the text reveals deeply-held attitudes about children and sexuality (i.e., the story about a wizard delivering babies). Similarly, the gigantic, non-referential letters in the illustrations ironically subvert and challenge the correspondence between the letters of the alphabet and sounds and meaning.

Rojankovsky left Poland for Paris in 1925, joining the 100,000 other Russian migrants who fled the Soviet Union for Paris during the twenties.. With the hope that the Soviet experiment would be temporary, emigres established a Russian-language press, intent on keeping the culture and language alive in exile. The mood of these publications was nostalgic and conservative, dominated by images of peasants and fairy-tale characters.  Illustrating Russian-language periodicals in Paris — иллюстрированная россия [Illustrated Russia] and ухват [the grabber] — was how Rojankovsky began his career as a graphic artist in Paris.

In the Parisian expatriate Russian community, Rojankovsky rekindled his friendship with popular poet and satirist Sasha Chernyi, who asked him to illustrate his ABC verses.

Cover design. Zhivai︠a︡ Azbuka. Paris: N. P. Karbasnikov, 1926. (Cotsen 9209)

The first of three Russian-language children’s books Rojankovsky would illustrate for Chernyi , живая азбука [Living Alphabet] was his first actual ABC book and his first children’s  book produced during a nearly fifteen-year stay in Paris.Ideologically based in the preservationist impulses of a culture in exile, Zhivaia Azbuka’s pedagogy is focused more on teaching cultural continuity and less on early reading skills. The images are familiar, composed of scenes reminiscent of a bucolic, rural life. The page highlighting the letter “M” is exemplary:

(Cotsen 9209), p. 19.

The humorous and banal scene takes place in a room that hints at a Russian home, perhaps even a dacha. The picture hanging on the wall reinforces this peasant theme, but also is an inside joke – it is the cover of the July 1926 issue of Illustrated Russia, the ice-cream man [мороженщикъ] in Russian peasant garb, in a Russian village, illustrated by Rojankovsky!

The linking of animals, particularly wild animals, and letters of the alphabet in Cyrillic and Latin is a convention that Rojankovsky would return to, but the use of the letters in this book is of note in comparison to those in the earlier Renine Wierszyki.

The first page features the letter “A,” which introduces both lines of the couplet –

Aстра в садик  [Asters in the garden]

Аист, вам пора поход!  [Stork, it’s time to go].

(Cotsen 9209), p. 8.

Each subsequent page follows the same logic, a couplet in which the first letter of each line highlights the letter in question. Following both Rojankovsky’s penchant for illustrating animals and the more conservative imperatives of the Russian émigré community, the images are more representational than abstract. The featured letter is also much smaller than the giant letters in Renine Wierszyki, and are necessary to the text. It is the relationship of the letter to the text and to the initial word that the image references, and in this way it adheres to the logic of ABC books, which the large, disconnected letters in Renine Wierszyki subverted.

By 1927, Rojankovsky, his name now shortened to Rojan to appeal to French audiences, was entering the mainstream world of French graphic arts and publishing. Despite the chauvinistic and often hostile reception of the post-WWI art world to foreign influence, there was a world of opportunity in advertising and children’s picture book publishing, both of which elevate the role of the visual. Advertisments and picture books are modern forms informed by modernist concepts and they represented a radical social and conceptual shift towards a direct appeal to the imagination and emotion accomplished through the saturation of visual space.  Color was central to this visual space because of its raw emotional thrust implemented by optical means, as can be seen in the experiments of late-19th and early 20th century painters from Van Gogh, to the female avant-garde artists Sonia Delaunay and Alexandra Exter, to Matisse and the Fauvists, and to Wassily Kandinsky.  These artistic experiments were incorporated into the graphic and commercial arts in large part because those on the periphery of the art world found work in these emergent media, thus translating the avant-garde into popular culture.  Rojan found his way in this world and his style in his French and American advertising work was to be his introduction to the Parisian world of children’s book illustration, and ultimately to his career in America.

To be continued…