Vintage French postcards are all over Etsy and Pinterest. Some are portraits of pretty young ladies. Many others advertise tourist destinations or famous French aperitifs. Sets that illustrate fairy tales seem to be more unusual and Cotsen is fortunate to have some examples from the so-called Golden Age of Postcards between 1890 and 1915.
One of the most sumptuous sets in the collection (Cotsen 60506) retells Perrault’s fairy tale of “Sleeping Beauty” (“La Belle au Bois Dormant”) in six scenes. They may look like postcards, with unsigned color illustrations centered on borders of attractively torn paper set on a gold background, but they were not designed to be sent through the mail. Flip any of the cards over and the back is a beautifully composed advertisement dated 1900 promoting Aristide and Marguerite Boucicault’s Le Bon Marché, the first department store in France, as one of the foremost attractions in Paris..
“Little Thumb” (“Le Petit Poucet”), also from Perrault’s Histoires du tems passé is illustrated in 10 scenes reproduced from half-tone photographs of carefully posed models (Cotsen 60505). The color was added by hand or with stencils. The man playing the ogre mugs at the camera while wielding a huge knife and grabbing one of the hero’s little brothers by a foot. Never mind if the thief Petit Poucet swimming in the ogre’s seven-league boots looks as he won’t be able to run like the wind to rescue his siblings. B. Chenas sent a one-line message on each card sometime in 1908 to Mlle Gabrielle Perez, a guest at the Patte d’oie (“The Foot of the Goose”) in Herblay, Seine-et-Oise, a northwestern suburb of Paris about twelve miles from city center.
The postcard collection has three versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” (“Le Petit Chaperon Rouge”). The set with sepia photographic illustrations is signed in the lower right hand corner “J.K” and numbered in the lower left-hand corner “660” (presumably the publisher’s number for a title within a series). Cotsen 60503 consists of five scenes featuring an adorable little girl with bobbed hair wearing a print apron over a ruffled skirt and sabots. The skeletal wolf standing next to her in the second card looks as fake as the wolf’s head in grandmother’s mob cap in the fifth one. Everything after that may be missing. There’s no publisher or address lines on the back, so perhaps these charming cards were made for another purpose.
The second “Red Riding Hood” (Cotsen 60502) in twelve acts is based on “The Big Bad Wolf,” the 1934 sequel to the wildly successful 1933 Disney Silly Symphony “The Three Pigs.” The story is a mash-up of Perrault and the English folktale. The piggies dance with Red down a path through the woods until they are ambushed by the wolf in an outrageous fairy costume. The girl doesn’t lose her nerve and runs away, while the cowardly pigs shiver on the ground. They do pull themselves together fast enough to get to the grandmother’s cottage in time to save their friend from the vile hairy beast.
“Le Chaperon Rose” is a slightly saucy version of the fairy tale in five beautifully produced hand-colored photographs acted out for the camera by two exquisitely turned out children around eleven or twelve (Cotsen 60501). The wolf, played by a boy in a short suit accessorized with a cane, watch, and bowler hat, greets Chaperon Rose, dainty in a pink gown bedizened with tucks and ruffles. She presents him with a rose from her basket and pins it to his lapel, a gesture which obviously pleases him. She invites him to kiss her on the check, accepting his token of esteem with a coy, knowing look. “N. Guillot” sent sweet kisses to Mlle. Yvonne Guillot in Lille—perhaps a father travelling on business or a grandparent staying in touch between visits in 1907.
Category Archives: Fairy and folk tales
Cinderella Lives Happily Ever After in Advertising Ephemera
East of the sun or west of the moon, Cinderella is probably the best known fairy tale in the world and her story has been co-opted by shrewd businessmen eager to sell products. Three creative examples of advertising ephemera from the collection which exploit the cinder wench are highlighted here.
Ida Rentoul Outhwaite (1888-1960) is not a household name in America, but she is one of the Southern hemisphere’s most beloved children’s book illustrators. Famous for having created distinctly Australian fairies and elves, Outhwaite was not above 
drawing pictures for advertising brochures. “Cinderella’s Dream and What it Taught Her” (ca 1931; Cotsen 86877) is one of her rarest works. A Fairy Queen visits Cinderella’s dreary room late one night, saying sweetly, ‘I am here to cheer you dear, / For you work like a drudge all day: / But listen to me, and you soon will see / How your work will become mere play,” as soon as she purchases all the versatile germ-killing products manufactured locally in Melbourne by J. Kitchen & Sons. (Several will be essential in cementing her power as princess.) No longer will her ugly, fault-finding sisters complain of shrunken woolens once they are 
washed in Kitchen’s Merino. Her glass slippers, filthy from running home from the palace through the streets, can be disinfected like the drains and sinks with Kitchen’s strong Phenyle, a deadly poison sold in glass bottles marked with molded Xes. Her dressing table in the palace will have bottles of Kitchen’s Velvet Salts, talc for the bath, and medicated soap to keeping the fair complexion fresh. The flame of the prince’s love will burn true as long as she discreetly stocks Kitchen’s Velvet Shaving Stick–or so it is promised.
What must it have taken for mild-mannered Will Keith Kellogg to break away from his brother Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, of Battle Creek Sanatorium fame, and start his own cereal company in 1906?
After improving the recipe for their flavorless corn flakes by sweetening them with malt syrup, Will had to figure out how to distinguish his breakfast cereal from his brother’s. He set out to vanquish his competitors through the stream of premiums designed to create customer loyalty. Between 1910 and 1940, Kellogg Co. produced lines of blotters, paper dolls, radio shows, souvenir postcards, and pamphlets mostly aimed at children.
A 4-volume set of Story Game Books featuring characters famous in children’s literature copyrighted in 1931 are now collectibles. The “Sunshine Fairy” offered general instructions for play and noted that each one in the volume would have individual directions that would need to be learned. The first story in the first volume was Cinderella’s rise from dirty rags to silken gowns (Cotsen 22579).
The prosaic retelling was accompanied by a board game designed by Bess Devine Jewell, a commercial artist who also illustrated Pansy Eyes: A Maid of Japan (c.1922). This twelve-square adaptation of the classic game of the goose sets players on a quest to find the maiden whose foot will slide into the glass slipper, which cannot be stretched to fit. The back cover was covered with information from Kellogg’s Home Economics Department on meal planning for growing children. Mothers were advised that if their little ones did not like milk, “Cereals are especially helpful in getting milk into the diet.” A box top from any of Kellogg’s five nutritious cereals and 10 cents glued to the inside of the letter mailed to the company would send a copy of Cinderella and friends to anywhere in the US except for Wisconsin, Washington, Nevada, and Kansas.
Mrs. Cinderella (Cotsen 21954) has a very complicated origin, compared to the previous two pamphlets. For its pavilion in the 1939 World’s Fair, General Electric commissioned William Duncan and Edward Mabley, co-principals of the famous puppet troupe Tatterman Marionettes, to write and perform a piece promoting the wonders of electricity. After the exposition, the show was taken on the road and performed hundreds of times across the country. Programs for the original production have survived, but this colorful pamphlet illustrated by North Carolina artist Corydon Bell seems to have been printed for distribution in retail outlets: the name of Herr’s Garage in Landisville, Pennsylvania is stamped on the rear cover.
It’s unclear how faithful the story in verse here is to the original script for the puppet show that played at the World’s Fair, but the outlines were probably very similar. The prince carries his bride over the threshold of their starter palace and leaves her the next morning to explore the premises. After a morning of dusting and mopping, Cinderella discovers that the goblins in residence whose delight is undoing her work. With a stiff upper lip and sore back, she tries to bake in the ancient kitchen and do the laundry in a wash tub while they wreak more havoc. Surely her fairy godmother can help her with the gnome problem… She recommends calling General Electric at G-E 1939. No sooner had she hung up the receiver when a host of elves in tip-top physical condition and dashing uniforms. Armed with guns, they shoot at the goblins and force a retreat.
The elves have just begun to work. The inadequate kitchen and laundry room are completely modernized, from the plumbing to the cabinetry. Within hours they install the entire range of GE labor-saving appliances–refrigerator, dishwasher, garbage disposal, toaster, coffee maker, washing machine, water heater. The powerful new vacuum cleaner makes the disgraceful living room carpet look like new in sixty minutes. And they thoughtfully prepared a hearty, heartwarming meal for her charming prince when he comes home.
The moral is too obvious to bear repeating, but here it is anyway:
The General Electric Co. is able / To sell you, thru a plan that’s all its own, / ADDED HOURS OF FREEDOM,/ And for happiness you need them,/ Cause there’s nothing so important as your home.
Someone–a woman–who owned of this copy left a tart note inside. complaining about a woman of her acquaintance who swallowed the message whole before learning that “all men are rats.”