Holidays | Cotsen Children’s Library

The Christmas season is a most wonderful time of the year to praise the children’s bookseller. In this post, I’ll pay tribute to one of the most famous: John Newbery, the friend of Dr. Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, who made a fortune selling children’s books and patent medicines (references to the nostrums like Dr. James’ Fever Powder were strategically planted in his books).

One of Newbery’s really clever publishing projects for young readers was a series of books that were suitable as presents for any major holiday– Christmas, New Year’s, Twelfth Night, Valentine’s Day, Easter, and Whitsuntide. Could this series been the answer to the prayers of every brother, sister, papa, mama, uncle, aunt, godfather and godmother who needed a present at the last minute? Thanks to Newbery, the philanthropic bookseller of St. Paul’s Church-Yard, perukes, product placement, and plum pudding go together like Macy’s, Santa, and Sedaris.

Many critics feel that Newbery’s reputation is sullied by his shrewd commercial instincts, even though it is probably true that his success in creating needs that could be gratified only at his bookstore in St. Paul’s Church-yard were instrumental in the creation of children’s literature as we know it. This does not seem to have bothered a handful of modern writers who decided to explain to children the debt of gratitude they owe Mr. Newbery as the namesake of the American Library Association’s annual award for the best American work written for children. There is Josephine Blackstock’s Songs of Sixpence: A Story about John Newbery (1955) and Russell Roberts’ John Newbery and the Story of the Newbery Medal (2003). The latest entry in the field is Shirley Granahan’s John Newbery: The Father of Children’s Literature (2009).

For some reason, John Newbery (of whom no portraits survive) always bears a striking resemblance to Ben Franklin. Front board, Songs of Sixpence: A Story about John Newbery (New York: Follett, 1955), (Author’s collection)

Quite by accident, I discovered in the Cotsen stacks what appears to be the earliest children’s book about John Newbery: A Book for Jennifer (1940) by Alice Dalgleish, founding editor of Scribner & Sons Children’s Book Division and author of well-regarded historical novels for children. It was illustrated by Katharine Milhous, perhaps best known for murals she painted for the Pennsylvania WPA and The Egg Tree, the picture book about Pennsylvania Dutch Easter traditions that won the 1950 Caldecott Medal.

If you are familiar with the dark urban landscape of Leon Garfield’s historical fiction set in the eighteenth century, the recreation of Dr. Johnson’s London by Dalgleish and Milhous in A Book for Jennifer is a bit prim and dull. Milhous’s full-page color plates were paired with the line art based on cuts in eighteenth-century children’s books in Wilbur Macy Stone’s collection, which Dalgleish consulted so that her readers would have some idea of what Jennifer’s books actually looked like. Dalgleish did not identity the sources of those illustrations, but only one or two were reproduced from Newbery titles. There is one howler: the cut identified as a picture of Newbery’s store front is actually the early nineteenth-century one for the Juvenile Library of William Godwin.

True to the spirit of her subject, Dalgleish has repackaged the Newbery myth of enlightened entrepreneurship for American youngsters as a story about a little girl named Jennifer getting not one, but two Newbery books as Christmas presents. With that snow coming down, shouldn’t someone break into a song?

Plate facing page 3, (New York : Scribner, 1941), A Book for Jennifer, (Cotsen 7267)

Page 2, (New York : Scribner, 1941), A Book for Jennifer, (Cotsen 7267)

Here is the scene where Jennifer’s doting godmother gives her a copy of The Important Pocket-Book. Her godmother is about to leave for America and she would like Jennifer to track her good and bad deeds and present the diary for inspection upon her return to England. Jennifer looks underwhelmed by this thoughtful and useful gift, which was published by Newbery and is now of legendary rarity.

Pages 11, A Book for Jennifer

When Jennifer falls ill on Christmas day, her two brothers are driven down to Newbery’s shop to find something to cheer her up while confined to quarters until the plum pudding is ready for flaming. Tempted by John-the-Giant-Killer’s Food for the Mind, a collection of riddles which the boys mistake for a version of the famous gory English folk tale, they think better of their first choice and unselfishly select The History of Goody Two-Shoes as perfect for girls, who should not be upset by anything too stimulating Newbery himself makes a cameo appearance.

Page 25, A Book for Jennifer

“Quaint” was the verdict of the anonymous reviewer in Kirkus.

A final Digression for Christmas Shoppers that should not be Skipped

I would be doing my gentle readers a disservice if this tribute to the great-grandaddy of children’s booksellers did not close with a puff for three marvelous independent booksellers in the Princeton area, who could give the old man some stiff competition. To wit…

The Bear and the Books on Broad Street in Hopewell has over 4000 titles lovingly and knowledgably selected by Bobbie Fishman, who was the long-time children’s book buyer at Micawber’s and Labyrinth before going out on her own.

Jazam’s on Palmer Square has a small but choice selection of books—many signed by the authors or illustrators—complementing with all the wonderful toys and games.

Labyrinth Books on Nassau Street has a cozy nook in the back with everything from board books to YA fiction. Buyer Annie Farrell has real bookish creds as the daughter of librarian and a rare books curator and a mother of two.

Yes, it’s supposed to be more convenient and cheaper to order from Amazon, but why not visit stores where people who are passionate about children’s literature want to put the best of the best in hands of their customers’ children? In Princeton we are really lucky to have easy access a truly priceless resource, great children’s booksellers…

In the 1680s antiquarian John Aubrey was the first Englishman to mention the observance of April Fool’s Day. He stated that it was celebrated all over Germany, but folklorists assume that the holiday was imported from France, where seems to have been well-established by the 1650s. They also speculate that this mock-holiday arose to fill the gap as the tradition of sanctioning all kinds of misrule during the Christmas holiday season waned (think the cruel jokes perpetrated on Shakespeare’s Malvolio during Twelfth Night). In comparison, April Fool’s was a more civilized occasion for mischief-making, being confined to one day and the only kind of horseplay authorized was to trick others into making public spectacles of themselves.

In the eighteenth-century England, perpetrating hoaxes upon the unwary was ubiquitous on April 1, if we can believe contemporary writers. Age and class came into play because children were allowed to try and deceive adults and members of a higher class could impose on those of a lower class. Making an April fool of someone was not below the likes of Jonathan Swift, who in 1713 sat up late with some friends cooking up a prank. A favorite ploy was to convince someone to go on a “sleeveless errand” (aka a wild goose chase) for things that didn’t exist, like pigeon’s milk or the biography of Eve’s mother. .

The first description of an April Fool’s sleeveless errand was described in a notice in the April 2^nd 1698 issue of Dawk’s News-Letter: “Several persons were sent to the Tower Ditch [ the moat around the Tower] to see the Lions washed.” One of the city’s great tourist destinations, visitors since the reign of Elizabeth I went the royal menagerie to gawk at caged lions, tigers, bears, elephants, etc. The lions were kept in the barbican called the Bulwark, which eventually was renamed the Lion Tower. The fast-talking trickster would try to persuade a gullible victim that every year on April 1 the lions were taken down to the moat for a bath. All someone had to do to enjoy the spectacle was enter by the White Gate. Of course, there was no such gate or any wet lions… In the nineteenth century, the merry sometimes distributed fake admission tickets and one is shown above.

In honor of the day, here are two accounts of washing the lions from two eighteenth-century children’s books, which may be unknown in the literature on the holiday. Cotsen has copies of both, but to give readers an idea of the look-and-feel of children’s books during the period, the facsimiles are reproduced from the British Library copies on Eighteenth-Century Collections On-Line. The first account comes from the last chapter of Travels of Tom Thumb Over England and Wales (1746), where the intrepid little narrator confesses to being taken in by the story about the lions’ annual grooming ritual. He also mentions that the most common visitors to the Tower lions are pregnant women, who wanted to know the sex of their babies!

The second, longer description of washing the Tower lions comes from chapter 8 of Richard Johnson’s The Picture Exhibition (1783). The narrator is a school boy, describing a picture he drew of an April Fool’s prank in progress. He clearly disapproves of the incident and there is something unpleasant about the watermen’s gratuitous cruelty towards the poor country bumpkin. While the tone of the narrator’s lecture about appropriate behaviour is too prosy for modern tastes, he was expressing quite enlightened views at a time when blood sports were tolerated and jokes based on highly offensive gender and class stereotypes perfectly acceptable.