Jules Feiffer | Cotsen Children’s Library

The Phantom Tollbooth. New York: Epstein & Carroll, [1961]. (Cotsen 21727)

Norton Juster’s 1961 fantasy The Phantom Tollbooth is that rare classic in which the text and original illustrations are inseparable, rather like Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland. Mention Alice and some illustration of her drawn by John Tenniel probably pops into the mind. Is Milo ever anyone but the skinny boy in a black sweater Jules Feiffer drew? And there’s only one cover design for the book. This one.

But when a work becomes so famous that translations in other languages are called for, covers and dust jackets have a way of changing publisher to publisher, country to country..

Here’s the front board of the Korean-language version. The right illustration is on the turquoise background, but the shade of turquoise is not quite the same as in the original. Look carefully and you can see that the figures of Milo and Tock are shiny. They were printed on a material other than paper and applied to the dust jacket. American books almost never have a colored band that wraps around the boards, but it’s common in the packaging of Japanese books–and I assume elsewhere in Asia. And the raised white characters below the banner with the English title are interesting typographically whether they are legible or not.

The selection of typefaces are the most noticeable change in the design for the Lithuanian-language. The slate blue background is handsome, but perhaps a little dark, compared to the turquoise original. The color did not photograph true, so you’ll have to take my word that it’s quite dark..The cover artist for the Romanian-language edition substituted another illustration for the original one of Milo and Toc and colorized it. Some of the figures were also printed on the same shiny material and laminated to the cover just as in the Korean translation. Should Milo’s car be orange? Why does he have blue hair? By the way, the sea in the middle distance is actually turquoise and the sky slate blue.

Now for the covers that are completely different from Feiffer’s. All the familiar characters are there, but without making any reference to the original illustrator. The Hebrew and German covers are in a surrealistic style, which underscores the possibility that the journey was all in Milo’s mind. The German translation has no text illustrations except for road signs, a concept that works very well.

The brightly colored cartoony covers for the Japanese- and Serbo-Croatian-language editions impose themselves on Juster’s world, rather than bringing out different dimensions of it. It’s unclear why Tock was given the teeth of a human being instead of a dog, unless the change was to make him look more friendly.

The French Livre de Poche paperback is unique in placing Tock and the Humbug center stage, with Milo and his car floating in the background along with the author’s name in an extremely small sans serif type. The French translation is, incidently, completely unillustrated except for Juster’s map. Last but not least is the Polish translation with a cover design by Grzegorz Kierzkowski. The title set in a wild mixture of different typefaces hints that what is to come may violate rhyme and reason! Kierzkowski deserves credit for having the confidence to reimagine Juster’s story without reference to Feiffer.

Norton Juster himself presented to Cotsen this delightful tasting menu of modern cover design on the translations of his celebrated fantasy. Thanks, Norton, for this very welcome and unexpected addition to the collection! You can hear Cotsen’s Outreach Coordinator Dana Sheridan’s interview with Norton on the Bibliofiles.

The Poetry-Drawing Book (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960) was supposed to provide children with a substitute for coloring books, which co-editors William Cole and Julia Colmore believed were “insulting to their imagination and intelligence” with “the banal and badly drawn” pictures. Their volume was designed with a blank page facing each poem, space for a boy or girl to draw whatever ideas the reading of the poem prompted. To facilitate self-expression with pencil, crayons, or watercolors, the book was spiral-bound so that it would lay flat on a table (or the floor). Cole and Colmore argued that this concept would encourage “a child’s innate sense of color and design, and to give free rein to his imagination. At the same time our book functions as an introduction to the magical world of poetry.”

Bill Cole was not an educator, but a journalist, publicity director, publisher, board member of the Poetry Society of America and Poets and Writers, and connoisseur of light verse and knock-knock jokes. The Poetry-Drawing Book was just one of many anthologies he produced for children over his long career.

Cotsen’s collection of manuscripts includes a very special copy of The Poetry-Drawing Book, whose purchase was underwritten several years ago by the Friends of the Princeton University Library. It belonged to Cole and his penciled initials are in the upper-left-hand corner just above the plates the clown is juggling. Cole and Colmore claimed that the book had been “tried out on hundreds of children” and perhaps a few of the “enriching, enlightening, and often hilarious” results were selected to go on the cover.Cole’s son Rossa grew up to be a professional photographer, but the Cotsen copy of The Poetry-Activity Book does not happen to be filled with the little boy’s drawings. Cole intended it to be a showcase for somewhat older aspiring artists.

There is a drawing by the thirty-one-year old Jules Feiffer, political satirist and illustrator of Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth.

To deliver a message of good cheer satirist Jules Feiffer, photographed in New York City, March 3, 1976, has chosen theater rather than cartoons. The result is "Knock Knock," his hit Broadway farce. (AP Photo/Jerry Mosey)

Jules Feiffer in 1976 (AP Photo/Jerry Mosey).

Feiffer was born in 1929. If he was thirty-one when he painted this rather ominous feline, then he must have done it in 1960. The Poetry-Drawing Book. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. (Cotsen)

And another by twenty-eight-year old cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty, author/illustrator of Who Needs Doughnuts (1973) and Alia’s Mission: Saving the Books of Iraq (2004).

If Stamaty was born in 1947 and he drew the rootin’ tootin’ shootin’ television when he was twenty-eight, then his page was completed in 1975.

Another surprise is this elaborate color drawing by a master of the macabre in black and white, Edward Gorey, then thirty six.

This enchanting vision of the snake in the garden would have been executed in 1961 by the thirty-six-year-old Gorey, who was born in 1929.

And that’s what happens when you give an artist a blank page…

There is an array of the famous Pere Castor activity books on the Cotsen virtual exhibitions page.

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Tag Archives: Jules Feiffer

The Phantom Tollbooth’s Classic Cover Morphs

A Celebrity Activity Book: Art by Gorey, Feiffer, and Stamaty in William Cole’s Poetry-Drawing Book!