Robert Louis Stephenson’s classic – A Child’s Garden of Verses – has been illustration many times. I recently browsed 6 that were published between 1895 and 1919 that are easily available on Project Gutenberg. Enjoy art associated with familiar poems! The links below show the artist and date and publication.
Project Gutenberg has the two Rootabaga books published by Carl Sandburg in the 1920s. Both books were illustrated by Maud and Miska Petersham. I remember hearing about these books when I visited Carl Sandburg’s last home in North Carolina with my daughter in 2003…but didn’t encounter them again until this year. Enjoy the text and the illustrations!
This week’s eBook was published in 1921: Wonderwings and other Fairy Stories. The author was Edith Howes of New Zealand. The illustrations were created by Alicea Polson. It is available on Project Gutenberg. There are other books by Howes on Internet Archive; as I was looking at the Wikipedia entry for the author I decided to browse The Cradle Ship which was published in 1916 and became a minor landmark in sex education for children!
The eBooks for this week are by Edna Groff Deihl published in 1924 and available on Project Gutenberg. She wrote books for children in the early decades of the 20th Century. She evidently produced the books based on stories she told her children. There is a picture of her with her 4 children in 1916 when she spoke to the Story Telling Club in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Enjoy!
The four eBooks this week are all Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Wonderland; the illustrators are different. They are all available from Project Gutenberg. I’ve chosen 2 illustrations from each book as samples – look at the whole book by clicking the illustrator’s name.
The first one is from 1869 and the illustrator is John Tenniel. According to the Wikipedia entry for this illustrator, his black and white drawings are the definitive depiction of the characters….and the illustrations did look familiar to me!
There are two from 1916 – illustrated by Gordon Robinson and Arthur Rackham. Robinson is the least well known of the illustrators while Rackham is very well-known.
The most recent is from 1921with illustrations done by Charles Folkard; the book is Lewis Carroll words as songs (music by Lucy E. Broadwood).
Project Gutenberg has More Stories of the Three Little Pigs published in 1921 (a decade before my mother and father were born) and part of the Instructor Literature Series from F.A. Owen Publishing Company. It was written by Sarah Grames Clark and Illustrated by Bess Bruce Cleaveland. As I browsed the book I wondered if either of my parents saw it during their elementary school years.
Four books by Thorton W. Burgess are this week’s book of the week. They were published between 1911 and 1920 – available on Project Gutenberg for online viewing. He was a prolific writer of children’s books and a conservationist. These are some of his earlies books and are well-illustrated.
Mother West Wind's Animal Friends
"Weggeloopen!" was published in 1919 – a story about a mischievous boy named Paul, who frequently disobeys his parents and often gets into trouble. The illustrator was Cecil Aldin – a British artist and illustrator. The book contains many of his drawings which depict the time in the first decades of the 1900s. It is available from Project Gutenberg.
There are quite a few books illustrated by Cecil Aldin available on Internet Archive, but this is the only one not in English! Because of the publication date, I wondered if the illustrations for this book were done after his only son died in World War I in 1916.
Leonard Leslie Brooke was a leading children’s book illustrator in the early 1900s. This week’s book of the week is his Ring o' Roses published in 1907 and available from Project Gutenberg. There are 4 sample images from the book below. Enjoy!
The week’s featured eBooks are six historical books for children - written in the early 1900s (1903-1924) by Francis Margaret (Madge) Fox. It’s interesting to think about how childhood has changed in the past 100+ years…and the books available to them. My grandparents were children during this time and their families were settlers/farmers of the prairie; they likely did not have any children’s books in their households and lived in very rural communities. There were not as many libraries in the US in the early 1900s as there are now and books were beyond the means of many families. Now we have whole sections of libraries dedicated to books for children! When I volunteer at the used book sales at the library, the ones for children are our most reliable sellers.
Madge Fox’s papers are held by the University of Michigan Library. Their site has a short biography of her life.
Books – and other reading material – have changed a lot between the 1960s and now.
In the 1960s they were all physical – printed on paper. There were already paperbacks, but I remember hard backs more – textbooks and reference books along with fiction. Now those physical formats still exist, but there are digital forms available too. I have shifted almost entirely to digital forms (Kindle and Internet Archive mostly) for my reading. Most of what I read is something I will only read once so there is no reason to have the book permanently. Another reason I like digital books: the weight of the device I use for reading is less than one book; I can access a lot of books with no additional weight!
In the 1960s, we had sets of general references like encyclopedias at home; now we either use a search of the internet or sites like Wikipedia to get that type of information – i.e. digital vs a physical book. And the wed sites are usually free rather than purchased. There is also the added advantage that the information is refreshed frequently (although we do have to become more adept at accessing the quality of the information provided). In addition, many references I use now come in the form of apps (for example, Cronometer for calorie/nutritional information about foods, Merlin for bird identification, iNaturalist for other organism identification, and NPS for details about national parks).
It seemed like books were expensive in the 1960s; there were some we bought but most of them we checked out from libraries (school or public) or they were provided during the school year. My mother bought children’s books for my sisters and me prior to us becoming proficient reader; some of those books still exist – distributed primarily to her grandchildren over the years. Kindle books are available from my library…but I buy one occasionally. And Internet Archive has older books that are freely available and newer ones that can sometimes be checked out for 14 days (or for 1 hour which is ideal if it is a needed reference). It still is probably true that physical books are popular with young children/new readers.
Finding a particular book in the 1960s was done with card catalogs or a ‘books in print’ reference. Today I search the Amazon site; books are easy to find and then purchase. I don’t remember going into book stores in the 1960s, perhaps because we lived in a small town rather than a city….or my parents deciding that libraries should fulfill our need for books as we became good readers.
As I was growing up it always seemed like there were never enough books near at hand to read. That set the stage for me to start buying books – new and used – as an adult (past the 1960s) so that I would always have a substantial pile of books at home, ready to read. When digital forms of books became able – it was like a dream come true. At first, I printed some of the eBooks so that I could read them offline. Gradually, I began reading more and more books entirely online. These days I never lack for reading material…and I donated most of my physical books. We have a lot of empty bookcases.
Previous Then and Now posts
Project Gutenberg has the 1912 version of Clement C. Moore’s Twas the Night Before Christmas illustrated by Jessie Wilcox Smith. The Santa is more elf like….short, very round…and not dressed in red and white! A little perspective on how the vision of Christmas has changed over the last 100 years….
I discovered an edition of A.A. Milne’s A Gallery of Children with illustrations by Henriette Willibeek LeMair (Saida) – one of my favorite illustrators of the era. It was published in 1925 and is available from Project Gutenberg. I picked three illustrations from the book to include with this post…but follow the link to the book to find many more.
She was most active as an illustrator in the early 1900s. I posted about 4 books she illustrated back in August 2021. It was a thrill to find another. According to her entry in Wikipedia, in 1920 she married and converted to Sufism…publishing sporadically thereafter.
I browsed 3 books written by A. A. Milne from the early 1920s available on Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive last month. They were all before the Winnie-the-Pooh books although two of them contain material that later became part of the books that made Milne famous.
A Gallery of Children illustrated by H. Willebeek Le Mair (1925) is my favorite of the group because of the illustrator. I posted about 4 other books she illustrated by in August 2021; she’s one of my favorite illustrators of the early 1900s.
Once Upon a Time illustrated by Charles Robinson (1922) was written in 1915…before the birth of Christopher Robin at a time when ‘life was not very amusing.’ It was published at the end of 1917. Milne commented that ‘I am still finding it difficult to explain just what sort of book it is.’
When we were very young (1924) is dedicated to Christopher Robin Milne (or Billy Moon as he prefers to call himself). He was born in 1920. The Internet Archive book does not include illustrator’s name; the A. A. Milne entry in Wikipedia lists E.H. Shepard (Punch cartoonist).
Palmer Cox (1840-1924) was a Canadian illustrator and author who created a series of Brownie books (humous verse books with comic drawings of mischievous but kind-hearted small creatures). His creations were so popular that one of the first hand-held cameras was named after them (the Eastman Kodak Brownie camera). His unique house in Quebec was named Brownie Castle. The characters are in individual costumes, sometimes very stereotypical…but they work together on their endeavors. The books depict positive interactions of very diverse individuals! The plaque on his tombstone reads: In creating the Brownies he bestowed a priceless heritage on childhood.
I browsed 6 Brownie books over the past couple of months – freely available on Internet Archive/Project Gutenberg.
I found and browsed 5 books illustrated by Alice B. Woodward in June. They are all freely available on Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg.
The first one I found was published in 1895: Eric, Prince of Lorlonia, Or, The Valley of Wishes: A Fairy Tale of the Days of Chivalry. It is one of her earliest books.
She became a prolific illustrator in the early 1900s. The other 4 books are from that period. The illustrations are richly colored….full of detail…enhancing the story the book is telling.
The Brownies and other Tales by Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing in 1910
The Pinafore Picture Book by W.S. Gilbert in 1908
The Story of Peter Pan Picture Book by Daniel O’Connor in 1915
The Story of the Mikado by W.S. Gilbert in 1921
She continued to work into the early 1930s so there could be additional books that become more accessible as the copyright expires.
Heinrich Schliemann was a pioneer in the field of archaeology focusing primarily on pre-Hellenistic archaeology. His techniques were often destructive by today’s standards but that is often the case with pioneers in the field. He did publish his finds and I browsed through 3 of them back in May - all freely available. I’ve selected a few images from each of the books.
The Book of the Mycenae (1877)
Is that the back part of a crane on the right side of the pot? The three disks give me ideas for Zentangle tiles. Two of them are clearly nature based – an octopus and a bee.
Ilios : the city and country of the Trojans (1880)
The simplicity of the gold bracelets…I wondered if people wore them all the time once they put them on or if they were items were only worn intermittently. The decoration on the whorls – another source of Zentangle patterns. It’s appealing when a culture has the practice to make ordinary objects into art.
Tiryns; the Prehistoric Palace of the Kings of Tiryns, the results of the Latest Excavations (1886)
(Use the arrows to move through the three sample images to take a closer look). This is the only book of the three that has color images…using it effectively to depict the fragments of wall painting with the whole pattern derived from the fragments. The fragments of vases were complete enough to have meaning on their own. The terracotta idols appeared to be mostly women!
I posted about Sir Arthur Evans a few weeks ago. He was another pioneering archaeologist with some overlap with Schliemann; Evans took over the excavation of Knossos after Schliemann’s plan to do so ended with his death.
Dorothy P. Lathrop was a prolific illustrator (and sometimes writer) of children’s books from 1919 to 1967. Some of the books she illustrated very early in her career are available online now that they are old enough to be out of copyright and I am featuring 4 of them in this week’s eBook post with some sample images from each one.
Down-Adown-Derry: A Book of Fairy Poems by Walter De La Mare (1922) I picked sample images because I liked the botanicals – dandelion puffs and Indian pipes.
A Little Lost Boy by William Henry Hudson (1920) Do you recognize the birds? Flamingos, roseate spoonbills, (maybe) osprey.
Grim: the story of a pike by Svend Fleuron (1921) More birds: heron and terns and osprey!
It will be a treat when more of her work becomes available…with the passage of time/copyright.
Project Gutenberg has the 1885 edition of Bret Harte’s The Queen of the Pirate Isle with illustrations by Kate Greenaway. I was looking at it more for the illustrations than the text since I was working my way down the list of books she illustrated. She set a style for children’s clothes in her illustrations (see the Wikipedia entry for her and then look for the books in the ‘Books Illustrated’ list in Internet Archive…it’s a good way to look at the work of an illustrator when the works are old enough to no longer be under copyright). She died in 1901 so books are out of the copyright window.
For girls – the clothes seem more for ‘dress up’ play that for everyday activity. I’ve clipped 6 images from the book to provide a flavor of the book….and Kate Greenaway illustrations of children.
I found a book published in 1896 – made available on Project Gutenberg – that is prompting a project: Gobolinks by Ruth McEnery Stuart and Albert Bigelow Paine.
The book has a short introduction describing how to create the images (folding a paper…putting blots of ink on one side then closing the paper to create the ‘shadow’ side) and then some poetry about what the images ‘look like’ – goblins or insects or birds on a wire (lots of opportunity for imagination).
I decided to try some of my own gobolinks…using some food coloring that has been in the cabinet so long it had dried out completely. I rehydrated it and made a first attempt with some printer paper. Dropping the color from the food coloring bottles made huge, dark blobs!
After a few days, I decided to try again with some lightweight cardboard/card stock tiles that I could later overlay with a Zentangle pattern. I folded them in different ways.
My plan was to make a drop of food coloring and then moved the color around with a toothpick before closing the fold. I quickly realized that the lightweight cardboard absorbed the food coloring very quickly (glad I had a newspaper layer underneath). The others turned out reasonably well although the color is very dark. I’ll use the white gel pen when I overlay the patterns.
And I’ll dilute the color next time I make some Gobolink tiles!
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Celebrating the whole of life....
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