Cover of RBM (vol. 14, no. 2) Fall, 2013

An illustration from a Cotsen Library book was featured on the cover of the Fall 2013 issue of RBM: Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, issued by RBMS, the Rare Book and Manuscript Section of ALA.

This black-and-white reproduction was based on a hand-colored engraving of a children’s home geography party, printed in Dean & Munday’s The Little Traveller, or, A Sketch of the Various Nations of the World (ca. 1830). 

Cotsen Library had used a color reproduction of this engraving on the poster and website for its September, 2013 conference in Princeton entitled, “Putting the Figure on the Map: Imagining Sameness and Difference for Children,” as noted in the text below, taken from the credits page of RBM.

Teaching Geography: hand-colored wood engraving, “The Party,” from “The Little Traveller” (Dean & Monday, [ca. 1830]) (CID 3885)

 On the Cover: (RBM, vol 14, no. 2, p. 62)

“The Party,” hand-colored wood engraving from: The Little Traveller, or, A Sketch of the Various Nations of the World: Representing the Costumes, and Describing the Manners and Peculiarities of the Inhabitants: Embellished with Fifteen Beautifully Coloured Engravings / by J. Steerwell. (Lon­don: Dean and Munday, Threadneedle-Street, [ca. 1830]). The copy of the book from which this illustration is taken is in the Cotsen Children’s Library, part of Princeton University Library’s Rare Books & Special Collections Department.

This illustration was also reproduced on the website and print brochure for a Cotsen Library conference at Princeton on September 11-13, 2013, tided. “Putting the Figure on the Map: Imagining Sameness and Difference for Children.” The conference explored how children’s books were important vehicles for the expression of senses of national identity during the nineteenth century, a time when the world seemed to shrink, thanks to improved communi­cations and transportation that facilitated travel, whether for commerce, conquest or leisure. Similarly the wonders of the world could be brought into the home via photography, maps, travel writing, and fiction. The representation of foreign lands inevitably required the illus­tration and description of their residents, which gave rise to a rich repository of colorful im­ages of diversity. Through a tangle of national types, stereotypes, and archetypes, children’s books shaped discourse as much as they reflected mainstream adult culture.

Exploring these themes, and others, this interdisciplinary Cotsen conference featured presentations that drew on the approaches of imagology, history, anthropology, psychology, and literary criticism, to discuss modes of expression arising that either targeted children, within or without the classroom, or appropriated discourses for them, to present competing, complimentary or contradictory images of foreign nations.

For more information about the Cotsen Library or this conference, visit the Cotsen website: http://www.princeton.edu/cotsen/