Posts Tagged ‘Children’s literature’
“The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book”*…
Revisiting a topic covered here just over a decade ago: Adam Green on the remarkable mid-17th century to the late 19th century practice of publishing books with “hidden art”…
A “fore-edge painting” is an illustration or design which appears on the “fore-edge” of a book (i.e. on the edge which is opened up, opposite to the spine). The history of such embellishments is thought to go back to the tenth century but it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that the unusual practice really began to take off. The simplest form involved painting onto the fore-edge when the book was closed normally — hence the image appears by default — but a more advanced form involved a rather ingenious technique whereby the painting was applied to the page edges when the stack was fanned at a slight angle. This way the image is hidden from view when the book is closed normally. To hide any remnants of this secret image the exposed edge of the book, when closed normally, was gilded (or sometimes marbled). In his 1949 essay “On Fore-Edge Painting of Books” Kenneth Hobson came up with this rather nice metaphor to explain: “Imagine a flight of stairs, each step representing a leaf of the book. On the tread would be the painting and on the flat surface would be gold. A book painted and gilt in this way must be furled back before the picture can be seen.”
Bookbinders, such as Edwards of Halifax, got even cleverer with variations of the technique, producing books with “double fore-edge paintings”, where one image would be revealed when the book was fanned one way, and a second image revealed when fanned the other. “Triple fore-edge paintings” are where a third image is added instead of gilt or marbling. “Panoramic fore-edge paintings” utilise the top and bottom and edges to make continuous panoramic scenes. “Split double paintings” have two different illustrations, one on either side of the book’s centre, meaning that when the book is laid open in the middle, each is seen on either side. Very rare and skilled variations of the art only reveal the image when the the pages of the book are pinched or tented in a certain way.
Most often the artwork would reflect the content of the book (as shown in the chess example above). Sometimes it would depict the owner (through a portrait or picture of their home). And occasionally it would be oddly incongruous, such as The Poetical Works of John Milton being adorned with a painting of the tomb of Thomas Gray.
One of the finest collections of fore-edge paintings is held at Boston Public Library, which you can see on their Flickr, and on a dedicated website, which includes an introductory essay by Anne C. Bromer of Bromer Booksellers, who along with her husband gifted this wonderful collection to the Boston Public Library. In this post we’ve featured our highlights from their collection…
See many more examples at: “Fore-Edge Book Paintings from the Boston Public Library,” from @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
* Stephane Mallarme
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As we fan the folio, we might send delightfully-illustrated birthday greetings to Michael Bond; he was born on this date in 1926. A writer of both children’s books and teleplays, he is of course best known as the creator of of Paddington Bear.
Bond published the first of his 29 Paddington books in 1958. The series has sold over 35 million copies worldwide (and been featured in several (mostly) animated television series, a film series, and a stage musical).
“Like everything metaphysical, the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language”*…
Hunter Dukes in Public Domain Review, on how scholars and pedagogues in the U.S. began to illustrate the principles of grammar, more specifically, how they began to diagram sentences…
“Once you really know how to diagram a sentence, really know it, you know practically all you have to know about English grammar”, Gertrude Stein once claimed. “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. . . I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves.” While one student’s lexical excitement is surely another’s slow death by gerund, Stein cuts to the heart of the grammatical pull. Is grammar prescriptive and conventional, something one learns to impose on language through trial and error? Or do sentences, in a sense, diagram themselves, revealing an innate logic and latent structure in language and the mind? More than a century before Noam Chomsky popularized the idea of a universal grammar, linguists in the United States began diagramming sentences in an attempt to visualize the complex structure — of seemingly divine origins — at their mother tongue’s core.
The history of diagramming sentences in the United States begins with James Brown’s American Grammar (1831). “Language is an emanation from God”, he writes. “As a gift, it claims our servitude; as a science, it demands our highest attention.” Accordingly, the student of grammar can lift himself up (educationally, devotionally) by knuckling down. “The mind becomes a passenger; the body his chariot; ideas his baggage; the earth his inn; hope his food; and another world his destination.” It was in American Grammar that Brown debuted construing as a method for parsing sentences using a system of square and round brackets to isolate major and minor sections. Major sections are “mechanically independent”; minor sections are “mechanically dependent”. Brown called this form of analysis close reading, but construing was only one half of the system. “As construing is a critical examination of the constructive relation between the sections of a sentence, so scanning is a critical investigation of the constructive relation between the words of a section.” Scanning involves ranking minor sections in ascending numerical order based on their relational distance from the major section. Playing a kind of grammarian god, Brown uses John 1 to demonstrate how his system can cleave sentential flesh. (In the beginning) [was the word] (and the word was) (with God) (and the word was God)…
Dukes goes on to trace, with wonderful examples, those who followed Brown into the syntactical thicket; for example…
More mesmerizing examples at “American Grammar: Diagraming Sentences in the 19th Century,” from @hunterdukes in @PublicDomainRev, with links to the original texts at the invaluable Internet Archive (@internetarchive).
* Ludwig Wittgenstein
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As we parse, we might spare a thought for a man whose sentences were eminently diagrammable, Kenneth Grahame; he died on this date in 1932. A career officer at the Bank of England–he retired as its Secretary– he is better remembered as the author of tales he created to delight his son Alastair, The Wind in the Willows and The Reluctant Dragon (both of which were made into films by Disney: The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad and The Reluctant Dragon).
“I subscribe to the Fiona Apple school of titles: I wanted people to know exactly what they were getting into”*…
How many words can you fit in a subtitle? For a slew of modern books, the answer seems to be as many as possible. Just look at Julie Holland’s “Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You’re Taking, the Sleep You’re Missing, the Sex You’re Not Having, and What’s Really Making You Crazy,” Erin McHugh’s “Political Suicide: Missteps, Peccadilloes, Bad Calls, Backroom Hijinx, Sordid Pasts, Rotten Breaks, and Just Plain Dumb Mistakes in the Annals of American Politics” and Ryan Grim’s “We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement.”
Blame a one-word culprit: search. Todd Stocke, senior vice president and editorial director at Sourcebooks, said that subtitle length and content have a lot to do with finding readers through online searches. “It used to be that you could solve merchandising communication on the cover by adding a tagline, blurb or bulleted list,” he said. But now, publishers “pack the keywords and search terms into the subtitle field because in theory that’ll help the book surface more easily.”…
The whole story at “Book subtitles are getting ridiculously long. What is going on?”
* W. Kamau Bell
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As we search for optimization, we might spare a thought for Lois Duncan Steinmetz– better known by her pen name, Lois Duncan– she died on this date in 2016. A journalist, poet, and novelist, she is probably best remembered as a pioneering author of young adult novels, dubbed the “queen of teen thrillers.” (Indeed, in 2014 she was awarded the Grand Master award from the Mystery Writers of America, alongside James Ellroy.)
We might also send puffing birthday greetings to Wilbert Vere Awdry; he was born on this date in 1911. Better known as “Reverend W. Awdry,” he was a train enthusiast and children’s author, who married his passions to create Thomas the Tank Engine (the central figure in Awdry’s Railway Series, and the star of a long-running animated children’s show).
“The only thing I know is that I know nothing”*…
Heraclitus of Ephesus; detail from Raphael’s The School of Athens, circa 1509
Poor Diogenes Laertius. He gets no respect. A “perfect ass”—“asinus germanus”—one nineteenth-century scholar called him. “Dim-witted,” said Nietzsche. An “ignoramus,” declared the twentieth-century classicist Werner Jaeger. In his lyric moods he wrote “perhaps the worst verses ever published,” an anthologist pronounced. And he had “no talent for philosophical exposition,” declares The Oxford Companion to Philosophy.
Then why waste time on him? For this excellent reason: Diogenes Laertius compiled the sole extant work from antiquity that gives anything like a comprehensive picture of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. He may have been a flaming mediocrity. He may have been credulous and intellectually shallow. He may have produced a scissors-and-paste job cribbed from other ancient sources. But those other sources are lost, which makes what Diogenes Laertius left behind, to quote the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “truly priceless.” Eighty percent of success is showing up, Woody Allen supposedly said. Well, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers showed up. And by dint of that, its author has become what Nietzsche called “the night watchman of the history of Greek philosophy: no one can enter into it unless he has given him the key.”…
Jim Holt on on one of the more curious accidents of intellectual history: “Lovers of Wisdom.”
* Socrates
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As we ponder provenance, we might spare a thought for Hans Christian Andersen; he died on this date in 1875. A prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, he is best remembered for his (often curiously-titled) fairy tales. Those tales– which include “The Princess and the Pea,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “Thumbelina,” “The Little Mermaid,” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes”– have inspired plays, ballets, and of course both live-action and animated films.
In Andersen’s honor his birthday– August 2 (1805)– is celebrated as International Children’s Book Day.
“Fear is a wonderful thing, in small doses”*…
In the original edition of Heinrich Hoffman’s 1845 German children’s book, the most famous character—Struwwelpeter, or “Shockheaded Peter,” whose name later became the book’s title—appeared last. In six short, illustrated stories, Hoffman, a physician from Frankfurt, told grisly moral tales: of a boy who wasted away after refusing his soup, another who lay writhing in pain after a mistreated dog exacted revenge, and yet another who had his thumb cut off after he sucked on it one too many times. Struwwelpeter’s sin was that he never cut his nails, bathed, or combed his hair; his punishment was distinct and cruel—he was unloved…
More original illustrations from the book that inspired Edward Scissorhands at “The 19th-Century Book of Horrors That Scared German Kids Into Behaving.”
* Neil Gaiman
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As we mind our p’s and q’s, we might send polymathic birthday greetings to James Weldon Johnson; he was born on this date in 1871. An African-American author, college professor, lawyer, diplomat (US consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua), songwriter, and civil rights activist, he is probably best remembered for his leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where he started working in 1917 and of which he later became the first African-American head.
A part of the Harlem Renaissance, Johnson’s literary works included memoir, poems, novels, anthologies– and a children’s book.
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