Category Archives: German-language children’s books

Gingerbread Alphabets and Books: “Useful Knowledge by the Pound”

Posted on by
walnutbinding

The front board of Neues Pfefferkuchen-ABC fuer artige Kinder. (Stuttgart: Lowes Verlag Ferdinand Carl, ca. 1907) Cotsen 72959.

After a really aggravating day, there probably isn’t a teacher alive who hasn’t wished that the human mind absorbed knowledge like a sponge soaks up water.  Crafty teachers devise strategies that just might make learning this or that easy.  Supportive publishers have been known to design children’s books that look like rewards for cooperating.  One of my favorites is shown above, with its binding that looks like a tasty big cookie topped with split almond halves.  Its title?  Die neue Pfefferkuchen-ABC, which can be loosely translated as The New Gingerbread ABC (“pfefferkuchen” being another name for “lebkuchen,” the German spiced honeycakes topped with chocolate icing traditional at Christmas time).

pearsandbears

The plate for the letter B in Neues Pfefferkuchen-ABC.

Many cultures try to associate the sweet with mastery of the letters of the alphabet.  For example, Alberto Manguel describes a medieval Jewish initiation rite in which the teacher wrote a passage from the Bible on a slate and read it aloud to his pupil. The boy repeated them and if he did it correctly, was allowed to eat the holy words once the slate was spread with honey as a reward (thanks to Lissa Paul for this anecdote).

gaffer

The frontispiece to The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread: A Little Boy who lived upon Learning. (London: Printed for T. Carnan, 1782). Cotsen 6712.

A time-honored way of encouraging literacy in early modern England was to offer letters or hornbooks made of gingerbread as an inducement to learn their ABCs more quickly.   Above Gaffer Gingerbread invites children to spend their pocket money wisely on cakes that will “feed the Little Folks, who are good,/ At once with Learning and with Food.”

abcmolds

A mold for a cookie hornbook and a cast from it. The letters could easily be cut apart into little tiles for spelling practice. The letterforms suggest that the mold is probably not more than one hundred years old.

At home, the conscientious  gaffer took charge of inspiring his own little reluctant learner Giles, which was not all that difficult.   By profession a gingerbread baker, the gaffer made his son a special gilt-covered, spicy “book.”

giles-gingerbread-bookWhile the gaffer’s presentation of a table of two-letter syllables was novel, the truth is that any primer then contained such a chart, which helped children take a critical first step in learning to recognize and sound out combinations of letters.  The eighteenth-century references to gingerbread letters, alphabets and books I’ve found don’t offer any evidence that such a thing was actually available.

The “book” as pictured would have been quite unwieldly.  It probably would have broken apart with normal handling–like nibbling a corner as a reward for learning a little bit.  Size may not have been as much as a problem as we think, because the gingerbread kings and queens sold at fairs could be quite large and detailed, if the surviving molds are any indication.  The real test was carving the letters deep enough in the mold so that they would emerge from the oven sharp and legible.  Using a very stiff dough with no eggs or butter would have helped.

giles-with-book

This is Giles holding a gingerbread hornbook that is not anywhere as large as the one his father made for him. Page [31] in Cotsen 6729.

 Another curious discovery I made researching this post was that neither Cotsen’s 1779 nor 1782 edition of Giles Gingerbread has the diagram of the gingerbread syllabary.  Both pamphlets are complete.  Missing pages wouldn’t be all that surprising for one of the most famous Newberys: it was first published around 1765 by John Newbery, the stepfather of Carnan, the publisher of the Cotsen copy.

The syllabary is present in the earliest known edition of Giles Gingerbread circa 1766 in the British Library, which can be accessed via Eighteenth-Century Collections On-line.  I’m guessing the copy in Norwich, which is dated to 1764, also does.   Very few copies of any British edition of Giles Gingerbread survive, having been read (not eaten) to pieces, so it is difficult to determine when and why the syllabary was dropped.  Digital copies of the American piracies from the 1760s and 1770s don’t have it either.

The diagram was probably just a bit of complicated typesetting that could be cut.  It slowed down the story, to tell the truth.  But it is amusing to imagine that children who had read Giles Gingerbread pestered their parents for a hornbook just like it and the beleaguered publisher removed the offending passage to keep peace with gingerbread and pastry bakers all over Great Britain!  Don’t quote me on that–it’s pure fantasy.

hornbookabc

An antique mold for a gingerbread hornbook that looks something like the one Giles is holding.

 

Vegetables in Picture Books from Mighty Asparagus Spears to Monstrous Turnips

Posted on by
14993page12

The hero of Jan Le Witt’s The Vegetabull.

Vegetables, those inanimate edible objects, are the stars of fewer stories for children than creatures with legs, antennae, feathers or fur.  Here are some interesting vege-tales In honor of the Thanksgiving holiday, in which the gigantic specimens did not meet their ends in creamy gratins and buttery purees…

12147page285

Aunty Root’s luxuriant trailing leaves make a nice contrast to the elaborate border of carrot greens. Max Froehlich, “Die Ruebentante,” on page 285 in Heim der Jugend, edited by Adolf Cronbach and H. H. Ewers. (Berlin: Siegfried Cronbach, 1905) Cotsen 12147

“Die Ruebentante” –or Aunty Root–was the creation of  Max Froelich, who seems to be unknown except for the work he published in Heim der Jugend: Ein Jahrbuch fuer Kinder und Eltern (1905).  In this cautionary tale, a stout lady turnip of a certain age goes for a walk on a moonlit night, trips over over two potatoes in the dark and tumbles down into the mud, unaware of the moon grinning in the heavens.  “Don’t wear your slippers outside” is the blindingly obvious moral of this ridiculous story.

The next vegehero is of such majestic proportions as to inspire shock and awe.  Vladimir Radunsky’s The Mighty Asparagus (2004) was honored with a New York Times Best Illustrated Book for that year even though a child might ask a parent why the asparagus makes the little king so nervous or how come the queen likes the big stalk so much?  Perhaps the judges thought the nudge-nudge, wink, winks would be over the children’s heads and not spoil the adult reader’s pleasure in the text.  Likewise the good-natured liberties taken with the paintings of Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna, Perugino, and several other Renaissance artists …   Here is the fold-out plate showing the full grandeur of the asparagus.

asparagusspread21-22

The fold-out plate folded (panels 1 and 4). Vladimir Radunsky, The Mighty Asparagus. (New York: Silver Whistle/ Harcourt, 2004) Promised gift.

asparaguspagefoldout23-24

Panels 2 and 3.

asparaguspage22

Panel 4.

asparagusspread25-26

Panels 5 and 6, in which the musicians sing the ballad of the asparagus.

The Mighty Asparagus is, of course, a fractured version of the venerable folk tale of the turnip and Brian Alderson’s telling illustrated by Fritz Wegner is one of the most enjoyable  of the many versions.  A poor farmer finds himself the proud cultivator of the most prodigious, round, unblemished specimen ever seen in those parts.  Such a “right champion turnip” can only be fit for a king, so once the farmer and his family manage to pull it out of the ground and heave it onto a wagon, off they go to the castle.  The king is so impressed with this “most champion turnip” that he fills the farmer’s cart full of gold.

53048page15

Page [15] in Brian Alderson, The Tale of the Turnip. Illustrated by Fritz Wegner. (Cambridge: Candlewick Press, 1999) Cotsen 53048. Inscribed by the author to Lloyd E. Cotsen.

Now when the rich squire gets wind of his neighbor’s good luck, he is so consumed with jealousy that he must take the finest horse in his stable, who is worth more than a thousand turnips, and present it to the king, confident of receiving an even bigger and better reward.  The squire gets his money’s worth in turnips all right, as the new owner of the right champion vegetable.

With badgers in bright Russian folklorist costumes, Jan Brett gives her picture book of “The Turnip” a new twist.  By eliminating the greedy resentful neighbor, she focuses instead on the communal effort of pulling the turnip out of the frozen field.  The successful conclusion of this Herculean labor is celebrated with singing and dancing.

7374091frontboard

Cover design for Jan Brett, The Turnip. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2015). Cotsen in process 7374091.

Taking a hint from Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo, Mother Badger grabs her griddle and gets down to making a mountain of turnip pancakes to warm everyone up.  It seems unlikely that a savory Chinese or Korean turnip pancake was on the menu, so I like to imagine that she whipped up a kind of latkes, made from half grated potato and half grated turnip, which would taste equally good with butter and syrup or sour cream and smoked fish.  If you are still feeling hungry after Thursday’s overindulgence, there are recipes for either kind of turnip pancake on the Internet.

7374091page30The holiday season is officially declared open!