Cotsen Children’s Library

On September 11-13, 2013 (Wed-Fri), the Cotsen Children’s Library will host the conference: “Putting the Figure on the Map: Imagining Sameness and Difference for Children” on the campus of Princeton University, Princeton NJ.

This interdisciplinary program co-organized by Emer O’Sullivan and Cotsen Curator, Andrea Immel will draw on the approaches in imagology, history, anthropology, psychology, and literary criticism. It will focus on modes of expression arising within or without the classroom that either target children or appropriate discourses for them that create competing, complimentary, or contradictory images of foreign nations and their
peoples.

The program will also feature a workshop featuring primary resources from the Cotsen collection.

Registration is free to Princeton University students, faculty and staff; $25 for all others. You may register online at the conference site.

See below for the conference schedule.

For speaker biographies and abstracts,visit the conference website.

See the conference poster (in PDF format).

Conference Schedule:

Sept. 11 (Wed)

5:30-7:00 pm

Cotsen Children’s Library, Firestone Library

Reception

Sept. 12 (Thurs)

Rm 113 Friend Center, William Street

9:30 am

Registration and coffee

10:15 am

Welcome

10:30 am

Session 1: Ethnography on Display

Emer O’Sullivan “Picturing the World for Children: Early Nineteenth-Century Images of Foreign Nations”

Gillian Lathey “Figuring the World: Representing Children’s Encounters with Other Peoples and Cultures at the 1851 Great Exhibition”

Silke Meyer (via Skype) “Politics in the Children’s Perspective: National Stereotypes in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Prints”

12:30 pm

Lunch

2:00 pm

Session 2: Images Instrumentalized

Martina Seifert “Appropriating the Wild North: The Image of Canada and Its Exploitation in German Children’s Literature”

Lara Saguisag “Foreign Yet Familiar: Theorizing the Immigrant Child in Progressive Era Comic Strips, 1896-1912”

3:15-3:30 pm [break]

Amanda Brian “Civilizing Children and Animals in Lothar Meggendorfer’s Moveable Books”

Eric J. Johnson “Politicizing Childhood: Oncle Hansi and Alsatian Nationalism, 1912-1919”

Sept 13 (Fri)

Venue to be announced

10:00 am

Session 3: Internationalism, Pacifism, and Tolerance, I

Nina Christensen “Education to Tolerance: Citizens of the World in Eighteenth-Century Children’s Literature and Children’s Literature of Today”

Cynthia Koepp “An Anthropologist Shows Children a World of Difference: The Pedagogical Imagination of Louis-François Jauffret”

Minjie Chen “Foreigners Not (Yet) in One Box: Discourse on Race and Foreign Nationals in Chinese Children’s Reading Materials, 1890-1920

12:00 pm

Lunch

1:15 pm

Session 4: Internationalism, Pacifism, and Tolerance, II

Farah Mendlesohn “National Characters, National Character: Children in Pacifist and Anti-Militaristic Publications for Children Between the Wars”

Gabriele von Glasenapp “Information or Exoticization?: Constructing Religious Difference in Children’s Non-Fiction”

Margaret R. Higonnet “No Child Is an Island”

3:30 pm

Session 5: Primary Materials Workshop

Cotsen Children’s Library, Firestone Library

Jill Shefrin “Pictures for Tarry-at-home Travellers”

Setsuko Noguchi “Around the World in One Game: Japanese Picture Sugoroku”

5:00 pm

Closing words

For more information, please contact Andrea Immel, Cotsen Curator.

The disreputable printer Jemmy Pitts was highlighted in the post for Twelfth Night 2013, but he was not the only no-good early nineteenth-century job printer in the seedy Seven Dials district near Covent Garden in London’s West End. Seven Dials marked the convergence of Little and Great White Lyon streets (now Mercer), Little and Great Earl (now Earlham), Little and Great St. Andrews (now Monmouth), and Queen (now Shorts Garden).

Seven Dials was also home to Jemmy Catnach (1791-1841), who was vilified quite correctly for catering to the reading public’s insatiable appetite for rude ballads, accounts of violent crimes, sensational divorce cases, etc. He was the subject of the chapter “Catnachery, Chapbooks & Children’s Books” in Percy Muir’s Victorian Illustrated Books (1971). Muir, who knew how to turn a phrase, damned Catnach for having printed his stuff with “mean and old typefaces” and adorning them with blocks “worn to a degree of indecipherability that hid their almost complete irrelevance to the text they were supposed to illustrate.” Never one to mince words was Muir.

In Cotsen there’s a stout volume consisting of thirty-odd pamphlets, many issued by Catnach, which make a liar out of Muir. Bound in are several titles in the so-called Catnach “series” of Large Books. Here is a typical list, from the rear cover for Little Tom Tucker, [ca. 1835?].

Little Tom Tucker. London: J. Catnach, [between 1813 and 1838]. (Cotsen 5038)

The advertisement gives no clues as to the production values of the pamphlets. If Muir is to be believed, then it should be taken for granted that a job printer like Catnach always produces a shabby product with the tell-tale signs of recycled cast-off type and blocks from other prints.

Given Catnach’s reputation for slipshod design, these delightfully exuberant covers on the nursery favorites in the Large Books come as a quite a surprise, with not a broken font to be found.

Mother Goose and the Golden Egg. London: J. Catnach, [ca. 1825]. (Cotsen 8793)

The style of the typefaces and wood-engraved blocks suggest the Large Books must have been issued relatively late in Catnach’s long career.

A Visit to the Zoological Gardens. London: J. Catnach, [ca. 1825]. (Cotsen 5035)

Dame Trot and Her Comical Cat. London: J. Catnach, [ca. 1825]. (Cotsen 5035)

But once a rogue, always a rogue. The rear cover of another Large Book in the Cotsen volume is illustrated with a block John Bewick made for the frontispiece of Richard Johnson’s False Alarms (London: E. Newbery, ca. 1787). And where did old Jemmy come by the block? Was it purchased from John Harris, Elizabeth Newbery’s successor, or his son, John junior?

A fine puzzle for someone interested in learning more about the largely neglected children’s books published early in Victoria’s reign…

Cotsen Children’s Library

Princeton University

Cotsen Conference: Sept. 11-13 – “Putting the Figure on the Map”

Conference Schedule:

James Catnach’s Fancy Chapbooks in the Series of Large Books