Category Archives: German-language children’s books

Bulgy Bears Hibernating in Picture Books

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Few of us have encountered bears in the wild, but we know that they hibernate during cold winters when food is scarce.  To survive prolonged periods of inactivity, they must lay on stores of fat.   If the child’s work is playing, then the bear’s is stuffing.  The Katmai National Park and Preserve frame it more scientifically to nature lovers in the promotion of 2022 Fat Bear Week:

Fat Bear Week is a celebration of success and survival. It is a way to celebrate the resilience, adaptability and strength of Katmai’s brown bears. Bears are matched against each other in a “march madness” style competition and online visitors can vote who is ultimately crowned the Fat Bear Week 2022 Champion. Over the course of the week, virtual visitors learn more about the lives and histories of individual bears while also gaining a greater understanding of Katmai’s ecosystem through a series of live events hosted on explore.org.

Sorry Pooh, but bears are more closely associated with food than song in children’s books.  As foragers, they have better manners than their real-life counterparts in the woods and streams, that is to say, they can be persuaded (not effortlessly) to share food they have found. In author/illustrator Joerg Muehle’s Two for Me, One for You (English translation 2019, c. 2012), the bear gives mushrooms to his friend the weasel to cook, but they quickly start a quarrel over how three can be divided fairly between two.  Whose work is more important: bear’s in the woods or weasel’s in the kitchen?  Who likes mushrooms the most?  Who’s bigger?  Who’s grabbier? During the squabble, a fox comes along and snitches the  mushroom in contention, which causes the pair to set aside their differences and enjoy one each.  While this is a good fable for small children, the bear’s gracious capitulation to circumstances seems not quite ursine.  What bear could possibly be satisfied with such a small meal?  To eat so sparingly is surely against its best interest, at least in the run-up to winter..

Alice Bach imagines in The Smartest Bear and His Brother Oliver (1975) a  bear family’s fall feasting, i.e. the consumption of massive amounts of calories in a succession of meals, many on the scale of Thanksgiving dinners.  Mother cheerfully makes the epic shopping trips, wheeling home two carts at a time.  One of her twins, Ronald, hates fall feasting because it takes time away from his project of reading through the encyclopedia.  Were he to accomplish his goal, he would be smartest bear in the world, which would demonstrate to everyone that he’s not the same as his brother Oliver, who has an appetite for everything and anything in the fall, emptying pots of stew and bowls of pudding and plates of flapjacks and syrup and muffins and applesauce.  He is such an eager eater than he sleeps on a blanket next to the kitchen stove so he won’t miss a spoonful.

At every meal, Ronald resists.  The arrival of Aunt Bear at dinner time, loaded down with five enormous baskets of her famous  tooth-achingly sweet winter tarts, interrupts his progress through volume 5.  He says he’s really not hungry, prompting her to scold, “If you don’t eat enough, you might not sleep through the whole winter.  Your stomach will wake up.  There you’ll be, wide awake, while the rest of the bear world is cozy and plump sleeping through the cold time.”  He whispers under his breath, “You all feast without me” and plots to stay awake all winter so he can read through the last volume of the encyclopedia,, a thought that cheers him up enough to eat creamed squash, multiple slices of wheat bread and honey, and some of his aunt’s tarts loaded with nuts and dried fruits, just to be sociable.

Before the dishes can be piled in the sink, Ronald races back to his encyclopedia, thinking he can get to the Rs before the first snowfall, no matter how often his no-neck brother with the clogged-up brain tells him to give his eyes a break.  After an outburst of unbrotherly love, Ma and Pa give them their birthday presents early—a bakery truck for Oliver and a typewriter for Ronald.  Confirmed in his identity as the smart bear of the future, Ronald rebonds with his “identical” twin over an enormous casserole of baked sweet potatoes and marshmallows just before collapsing into the snug family bed until spring.   Stephen Kellogg’s illustrations celebrate the glorious excess, which humans fancy is a bear’s birth rite, although just as likely a projection of our desire to overindulge in rich foods  without consequence when the weather turns nippy.

Victoria Miles’ Old Mother Bear (2007) is more likely to satisfy readers with a taste for “truth and realities” for having poetically documented the last three years in a twenty-four -year-old female grizzly’s life, in which she raises her last litter of cubs. Several of Molly Bang’s inset illustrations show the bear family feeding quietly in the alpine meadows and hills.  The climax of this factual account, based on a real bear in the Flathead River valley of southern British Columbia, is  a series of three double-page spreads in which the mother bear fights off a male half her age and twice her size.  The culmination of the cubs’ education is symbolized by the return with their own young to the huckleberry patches their mother led them to those three summers.   The description of the old bear’s death is somber but ultimately not sad.  Toothless, deaf, and blind, she crawls into an old den on a mountainside.  The den’s roof collapses on the body in the spring and the slope is eventually covered with a lush carpet of anemone flowers.

More Pretty Little Pocket Books for Children

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A woman’s hanging pocket in the collection of the V & A.

The word “pocket book” was a term for a wallet or small purse for money and personal objects in the eighteenth century.  That wasn’t its only meaning, however.  It also referred to books– especially memorandum books (i.e. “diaries” in British English) or vade mecums, compilations of useful information– that could be comfortably stowed in a weskit pocket  or the hanging bag attached to a tape that tied around a woman’s waist.   Related to almanacs, they were revamped for adults by enterprising publishers in the 1740s, among them John Newbery, more famous for his children’s books.  Twenty years later he went back to the drawing board and reconceptualized the pocket book for younger customers.  Newspaper advertisements confirm that the publisher really was its compiler. .The Important Pocket-Book or Valentine’s Ledger (ca. 1765), which was also a tie-in to The Valentine’s Gift, may be the first of its kind and a good model for the genre as a whole, whether or not  Continental children’s books publishers were influenced by it.

Cotsen 5354.

The more famous Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), which could be carried on its owner’s person without any trouble, was not meant for ready reference or record keeping. The Important Pocket-Book was, with its  tables of money, weights, and measures and a  calendar for recording daily expenses over a twelve-month period that was not keyed to a particular year, making it saleable over a long span of time.  On the facing pages Newbery added a second calendar for tracking good and bad deeds, a feature which does not seem to have caught on.  He also selected stories from classical literature such as Cornelia, mother of the Graecci, and combined them with anecdotes from modern history, and short fiction reprinted from others of his juveniles. Selections were accompanied by both copperplate engravings and wood cuts. Shown below is the cut of Father Time illustrating a story about a time-wasting school boy and an opening from the moral ledger that was marked up for about a month.  Someone tried to erase the notes, but “Bad” is still visible on the right hand side.  The entire package of material was attractively bound in boards covered with Dutch floral paper shiny with gilt.Prentjes Almanach voor Kinderen, a charming Dutch pocket book bound in pale apple-green printed boards (Cotsen 3466), is much smaller than The Important Pocket-Book  and appears to have been issued annually by its publisher W. Houtgraaf. In 1799, the contents featured a page of information about eclipses, which was probably suggested by the three forecast between April and October, culminating in a total solar eclipse. The selection of literature was somewhat lighter in character than the stories in the Newbery book.  Prominently featured was a series of illustrated poems about children’s pastimes,  itinerant street vendors, and strolling players.  English street cries for children often portray as many sellers of foodstuffs as small commodities, whereas the Almanach shows just one vendor tempting children with sweet teeth with a basket of “china apples, i.e. oranges.”  A somewhat unusual subject is the man crying umbrellas, a convenience that was still something of a novelty in  Europe. Children were surely more likely to flock around the bagpiper with his trained animals than the seller of useful objects, especially when the musician undoubtedly would perform for anyone with pennies burning in their pockets.  While it was a well-established practice to draw vendors full-length,  I can’t help but wonder if it was deliberate that the attractive nuisance is shown without an audience, whereas the ink vendor has a customer that looks like a school boy to his left.The daintiest of the three pocket books is, of course, French, but it may come as a surprise that Reveries orientales (Coten 65141) was issued in by Louis Janet in 1794 during the French Revolution.   I did look at a near contemporary catalogue of moral, instructive, and amusing children’s books issued in Lyons by Bohaire  (Cotsen in process)  to see what pocket books he stocked and found three or four for ladies with elegant engravings and bindings that sound as fashionable as this one in embroidered cloth with tiny drawings under isinglass (or horn) with a little pocket lined with rose paper on the inside of the rear board.  The tiny engraved plates are based on the ones by famous Roccoco artists for the celebrated Cabinet des fees, a multivolume anthology of French fairy tales and stories from the Thousand and One Nights.  The rather perfunctory monthly calendars of accounts surely could not compete with the illustrations, like the one for the tale of the miserly merchant Abou Cassem.John Newbery probably would not have approved of this frivolous approach to a kind of children’s book that he believed ought to help form good habits and regular self-examination, but the French and Dutch examples here suggest that the conventions for pocket books were just as fluid as they were stable.