Category Archives: Moveables

Banned Books:  Lawrence Schimel’s Rainbow Family Stories Illustrated by Elina Braslina

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A collage of covers for Schimel’s Rainbow Family Books in a variety of languages.

Last summer, two children’s books ran into trouble with authorities in Hungary and Russia because they featured families headed by same-sex parents.  At first, I assumed the books originated in the old Eastern bloc and anticipated a bit of a wild goose chase finding copies for Cotsen.

A little detective work on the web revealed that copies in English translation (the texts were originally written in Spanish) would become available September 2021 from Amazon acting as distributor for Sphere, the Russian charitable foundation and co-publisher with the Russian LGBT Network.  According to the Amazon listing, a very limited number would be given away, which was puzzling.   The description didn’t specify if customers would the Russian edition, whose sale was prohibited by the country’s gay propaganda law–or something else.  Amazon charged for the books when the order was placed and gave a firm shipping date in September.

Two weeks ahead of schedule, the books were left on the doorstep.  They turned out to be a North American imprint issued by Orca, an independently owned Canadian book publisher that champions Canadian authors and its indigenous peoples, promotes diversity, and prints in Canada on Forest Stewardship Certified paper. Three other English-language editions have been issued in different parts of the world: by Peniarth in the United Kingdom and Wales; by Oratia in New Zealand and Australia; and New Africa Books in South Africa.

Both books feature a rainbow family or a gay or lesbian couple with children: the little boy has two mommies, and the girl two daddies.  The unstated point is that these families are ordinary and easy for any child to relate to.  Early One Morning is narrated by a little boy, who describes how he and the big marmalade cat get themselves some breakfast without making a mess while the rest of the family sleeps in.  The little boy proudly tells his sleepy parents and sister about this small but mighty step towards independence. Bedtime, Not Playtime tells about the fun the family had one night when the bedtime routine was disrupted.   When the dog steals the girl narrator’s stuffed bear and won’t let it go, daddies and daughter have to chase him all through the house to rescue the toy.  Once the mission has been accomplished, the romp suddenly ends when daddies and dog fall asleep, leaving the little girl wide awake with her teddy.  There’s nothing to be done except for them to quietly count sheep in bed.

I had incorrectly assumed that these books had been self-published by amateur authors and likely to have relatively low production standards.  Not only were the books attractive, they were superb examples of storytelling in a genre that lends itself to the visual teaching concrete information rather than narrative.  A board book’s format places significant limitations on its creators beyond the situation where a member of the intended cannot yet read and needs a literate mediator. Whatever a board book’s contents, the competent reader will resort to improvising on the text in order to point out to the listening child connections between their circumstances and those in the book..

After seeing the books, I wanted to know more about the circumstances of their creation and publication by award-winning author Lawrence Schimel, a distinguished literary translator, writer, and anthologist bilingual in Spanish and English.  His poetry, science fiction, and children’s books often deal with LGBT and with Jewish themes.  Schimel’s board books attempt to connect  not only with “ kids who might be in same-sex families or discovering their own LGBT identity, but for all kids to see these families that exist in the world…and to prevent a generation from growing up brainwashed by this political homophobia.”   According to Schimel, the books have now been published in 37 languages in 46 editions.

To attempt this much in a really elementary reading text is testimony to the combined talents of Schindler and his gifted Latvian collaborator, illustrator Elina Braslina.  Her chunky, colorful, two-dimensional  figures are very nicely differentiated.  Daddy number one daddy is white, bald and heavyset, while daddy number two is of color and wears glasses. They both have beards and look like nice guys.  Mischief radiates from the big round eyes of the great big orange cat and the black and white terrier.  Refreshingly, the kids are just kids who are alert, happy, secure, and loved.  In less skillful hands, the joyfulness of the stories could have been overwhelmed by good intentions. Schimel and Braslina humorously present special occasions many parents and children share every day.. Being overexcited and trying to quiet yourself down when you are the only one awake.  Trying to respond to a wideawake toddler before you’ve had your coffee. Portraying moments like these may not change the world, but their power shouldn’t be discounted either.Thanks to Lawrence Schimel, who contacted me and provided additional information that has been incorporated into the post.

“The Beginning, Progress and End of Man:” Rare Harlequinades of Emblems Acquired

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The title page of the J. Deacon edition, a recent purchase by Cotsen, is printed parallel to the folds of the harlequinade. Adam is wearing a fig leaf. (Cotsen unprocessed)

Among the earliest moveable books are harlequinades, whose illustrations metamorphose when the flaps at the upper and lower edges are opened up and down.  The most familiar examples illustrated key scenes in popular pantomimes staged in the late 1760s and early 1770s and a list of these “turn-ups” appeared in the 1775 catalogue issued by print seller Bennett and Sayers, where they were described as “moral and instructive Emblems for the Entertainment of Children” rather than promoting them as the novelties they were.

Calling them “emblems” might have been a tactic to reassure prospective customers that turn-ups  extracted morals from plays regarded as less than improving. This language may also alludes to their sober ancestor that had no connection with the stage, The Beginning, Progress and End of Man, a small illustrated collection of  emblems or “speaking pictures” from the 1650s.  The license of May 30 1650 called it  “a small tract of several foulded pictures…in verse.” Probably written to fit the panels and flaps, neither the illustrations or verse was polished enough to get the attention of print curators or literary critics.  Nevertheless, it has  survived (see below), while the Sayers edition,  “Adam and Eve,” the title presumably taken from the first panel’s subject has not.

Cotsen has acquired another early edition of The Beginning, Progress and End of Man at the  Justin G. Schiller Ltd. Sale at Heritage Book Auctions in Dallas, Texas  December 16 2020.   It is the stated third edition of the text in five panels and the only one with contemporary hand-coloring.   The five  metamorphosing subjects are Adam (to Eve, to mermaid), Abel (to Abel, to Cain killing Abel), the lion (to griffin, to eagle and child) the youth (to heart, to money bags), and man (skeleton).  The block of the rampant lion faces right and has the face of a man that could be Charles I..  Below  is the back of sheet with all the flaps open, followed by a shot of the other side with center five images visible.Dating the Cotsen copy more precisely than between 1671 and 1704 is not possible, given the available information about the publisher.  Two J. Deacons traded from the Angel in Gilt spur street.  The publisher could be either  Jonah Deacon, a broadside ballad monger, who teamed up with P. Brooksby,  J. Blare, and and J. Back to undercut the five Ballad Partners, or John Deacon who also dealt in cheap print from the Angel as well as the “Rainbow, Holborn, a little above St. Andrews Church.”  One day we may have enough new more information about the different publishers to establish a more accurate chronological sequence.

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The Beginning, Progress and End of Man has only begun to attract attention within the last fifteen years.  Malcolm Jones reproduced the British Library’s 1650 edition with flaps closed and a transcription of the text in The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight (2010) as an early example of “lift-the-flap” pictures.  He correctly connected it to the better known genre of anatomical sheets, but passed over its ties with emblem literature for children.  It seems to have been unknown to the authors of  classic studies on  17th-century English children’s books like William Sloane’s 1955 bibliography, Warren W. Wooden’s Children’s Literature of the English Renaissance (1986), and  C. John Sommerville’s The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England (1992).

Jacqueline Reid-Walsh’s articles and monograph Interactive Books: Playful Media Before Pop-ups (2018) on the long history of genres like the harlequinade which are hybrids of books, toys, and games, has put Beginning, Progress, and End of Man on the map. The union catalogue on her website Learning as Play: An Animated, Interactive Archive of 17th– to 19th-Century Narrative Media by and for Children has the most complete census of surviving copies: the one in four panels published by B. Alsop and T. Dunster (1650) at the British Library in the Thomason Tracts and at Pennsylvania State University Library; the five-panel E. Alsop and T. Dunster edition of 1654 at Harvard; and  the five-panel J. Deacon edition ca. 1688  purchased by antiquarian Anthony à Wood at the Bodleian Library.   The details of the Cotsen copy will be sent along shortly.

Reid Walsh’s research also shows that The Beginning, Progress, and End is an intriguing but little understood text that must have been wider circulation than the census of printed editions can possibly would indicate. We know this because of the survival of manuscript copies made by boys and girls in England, North America, and Scotland, none of them labored copies, all of them individual as their creators, who might be considered outsider artists…

Elizabeth Winspear’s four-panel version with a polka-dotted lion (Lisa Unger Baskin Collection, Duke University Library).

A Scottish boy’s handiwork from the 1820s.   His lion’s eyes seem to glow.  The bouquet is entirely his.   The baby in the eagle’s claws in the detail below is particularly well-dressed. (Cotsen unprocessed manuscripts)