Category Archives: Nature

For the Friends of Flaco: A Picture Book About Owls

Posted on by
Reply

Today I discovered a rather surprising book, Buebchens Traum  [Little Boy’s Dream], with a lovely snowy owl on the cover, by a Dagmar von Natzmer published around 1909 in Potsdam, by a firm in Potsdam, Germany.  No entry for her or the book in the usual sources, so she may not have written or illustrated another picture book.  Or maybe “von Natzmer” was her maiden name and she published under her married one later in her career.

The story is quite simple. A little boy falls asleep in the woods and has a marvelous dream about owls.  Not ominous birds of prey, like Mr. Brown in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin or a whimsically befuddled creature like A. A. Milne’s Owl, who doesn’t quite manage to live up to his species’ reputation for wisdom.  Von Natzmer’s well-dressed owls look as if they belong in a parlor instead of the deep forest.

A mighty hunter looks with pride at his game sack filled with mice.

This handsome couple prepares to celebrate their nuptials in the woodland.

The band plays for waltzing birds in evening dress

and little girl owls twirling around in frilly pink dresses.

The boy wakes up at dawn and his dream of the elegantly anthropomorphized raptors vanishes.

How should we react to pictures of owls that diverge so far from the actual creatures?  A picture book this eccentric has its own peculiar charm, but it is also a bittersweet reminder of the differences between the projections of the imagination and undomesticated nature.

We can recognize Flaco in the hunter in green, having taught himself how to catch vermin after twelve years in captivity.  Of course the ones he ate were probably full of rodenticide.   The people who worried about how long he could survive in the wilds of New York City also were concerned that the Eurasian eagle owl would never find a mate.   He did hoot a lot from the heights of tall buildings–was he calling for a female?  Characterized as a very curious bird, we wanted to believe that his ability to explore and survive this strange new environment compensated for the lack of the companionship of his kind, at least for a while.  If he had settled down, surely he would not have chosen a female pretty in pink…

Von Natzmer’s owls reconfirm Beatrix Potter’s opinion that dressing birds posed a stiff challenge to the artist.  Jemima Puddleduck in her bonnet and shawl is a small masterpiece because of the way the fabric is draped around the contours of her meticulously realistic body.   But an owl in a military uniform?  Its legs are so long that the observant reader notices that the figure looks like an owl’s head stuck a little clumsily on top of a man’s body.   Those of us who never saw Flaco during the last twelve months will leave a deeper impression of “owlness” from the many photographs of him that captured the black eyes intent, yet expressionless stare, the beak’s cruel curve, the illusion of weight the splendid feathers lent to a four and a half pound body with a six-foot wingspan than the color illustrations of these fantastical owls.  Still, von Natzmer’s wonderful endpaper design of an owl in flight would make a beautiful card to leave under Flaco’s favorite tree in Central Park.

Marks in Books 11 : Hanukkah Gift Inscriptions

Posted on by

To celebrate the eight days of Hanukkah in 2022, here’s a post from a few years ago about books that a mother gave as gifts to her children during the Jewish holiday in 1966…

The gift exchanges, which are central to American winter holiday rituals, are not so easy to document.   Opening presents within the family circle may be a familiar subject for advertisements, book and magazine illustrations, and family photographs, but how often is it possible to reconstruct who got what from whom any given year?   Gift tags, with hand-written notes identifying the giver and the recipent go the way of wrapping paper and ribbon, as do lists of presents made for the purpose of writing thank-you notes.

So it was pure luck to discover a handful of books from the Cotsen family’s collection that Mrs. Cotsen gave to her children during the eight days of Hanukkah in 1966.  Mother carefully wrote the child’s name and the occasion on the blue family bookplate illustrated with a faun by Robert Anning Bell.  And her picture book selections were so imaginative…

There were, of course, books appropriate for the season.  The older of her two sons received a copy of A First Chanukkah Word Book.He also received from his mother a rather sophisticated picture  book with see-through pages by Finnish illustrator Tove Jansson, featuring her characters from the Moomintroll series.  It was designed in such a way that there was no good place to put the book plate!For her younger daughter, there was a book about nature issued by Ladybird Books, the English equivalent of Golden Books, that was so successful that the publisher never needed to expand the market overseas.  Perhaps Mrs. Cotsen found it in a London bookshop and brought it home. The littlest member of the Cotsen clan got the book in a most unusual format about a little bear cub who did everything his mother told him to grow up big and strong.  The story is imposed on a giant uncut signature, which is folded up like a map and  placed in a folder with a ribbon tie.  The reader has to unfold the sheet to see how the cub changed during the course of his regimen…The last book given as a present to the entire family in 1966, was a traditional fairy tale retold as a Hanukkah story, complete with snow, dragons, and a good reb overcoming an evil one:  It still finds its way into lists of books for the Jewish holiday.   And when it was read aloud, everyone liked it.   Mrs. Cotsen gets credit for identifying a story that would bring the family together.In memory of Florence Sacks, a wise and steadfast friend.