Gingerbread Alphabets and Books: “Useful Knowledge by the Pound”
After a really aggravating day, there probably isn’t a teacher alive who hasn’t wished that the human mind absorbed knowledge like a sponge soaks up water. Crafty teachers devise strategies that just...
View ArticleThe History of Birthday Cake Decoration
The perfect birthday cake in children’s books may appear in the last chapter of Beverly Cleary’s Beezus and Ramona (1955). Beezus, who has just turned ten, is sitting in the living room reading one of...
View ArticlePitching Pennies: Master Michel Angelo’s Juvenile Sports and Pastimes
If you enjoyed “Cure for the Summer Time Blues” and “Stitching a Soviet Monkey,” here is a third post featuring a children’s book with instructions for making playthings. Master Michel Angelo’s...
View ArticleThe Truth Within: A Harlequinade About Inner Virtue
The juxtaposed irony of a work with the above title being contained in a slip case covered with beautiful marbled paper isn’t lost on us. But that doesn’t make the actual content of the case any less...
View ArticleA Field Guide to Fairies
Identifying the fairy in this famous illustration isn’t hard. This next example isn’t difficult either… Don’t be too quick to say there aren’t any fairies in this lovely drawing by William Blake…....
View ArticleEncounters with Illustration Processes, or “What Did You Do on Your Summer...
Remember being asked the, “What did you do on your summer vacation?” question at the beginning of each new school year? And usually being hard-pressed to come up with a “good” answer? Here’s a...
View ArticleRosamund’s Dilemma: A Purple Jar or A Pair of Shoes?
Maria Edgeworth’s most famous (or infamous) short story is “The Purple Jar,” the first in the series of the Rosamund stories, which began appearing in The Parent’s Assistant (1796). Why has this...
View ArticleCurator’s Choice: Two Picture Bibles for Children from the 1760s
Everyone has heard of John Newbery, the first publisher of the modern children’s book and namesake of the American Library Association’s annual award for the most distinguished contribution to American...
View ArticleA Mystery Manuscript: Robert Brightwell junior’s Scientifick Amusement (1752)
About twenty years ago Cotsen purchased this little manuscript bound in blue sugar paper boards from John Lawson, an English antiquarian bookseller and great collector in the field of the history of...
View ArticleA New Picture Book Bio of John Newbery, the Man Behind the Medal
Balderdash! John Newbery and the Boisterous Birth of Children’s Books (2017) is an explanation of where children’s books came from for preschoolers. This is the first collaboration of author...
View ArticleMarks in Books 7: Home Repairs to Children’s Books nearly Read to Death
This copy of The Toy-Shop is a good example of a book that has almost been read to death. Who was responsible? It’s natural to pin the blame for the book’s poor condition on the owners who wrote...
View ArticleCurator’s Choice: Pen Flourish Figures in a Dutch Boy’s Copybook ca. 1733
This week when I was retrieving some manuscripts, I got distracted and made a discovery. I didn’t remember ever having looked at the materials on the shelf where the one manuscript lived and stopped...
View ArticleHow to Celebrate a Birthday in 1792: Stephen Jones’ The Oracles
Celebrating a child’s birthday at a social gathering was a late eighteenth-century trend that was rather controversial because it undercut the traditional Christian practice of reflecting on one’s life...
View ArticleFrom Far from the Madding Crowd to Back Onto Center Stage
Life is all about serenity, isn’t it? Comfort, peace of mind, and the chance to hang out the “Do Not Disturb” sign when you want a little down time and R&R… But sometimes you can have a little too...
View ArticleThe Newbery Books Anna Green Winslow Read 1771-3
Anna Green Winslow, America’s most famous child diariest, wrote journal letters regularly to her parents in between 1771 and 1773 when she was living in Boston with her paternal aunt Mrs. Deming. Her...
View Article“Of Toys I Scribble:” Christopher Comical’s Lecture upon Games and Toys
Books on children’s games published before 1800 anywhere in Europe tend to survive in remarkably low numbers and the 1789 Lecture upon Games and Toys in two parts is no exception. There is one copy...
View ArticleBored with Nothing to Do in 1799: Projects from The Young Gentleman’s and...
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a child with time on its hands must be in need of something to do. This was a truth understood very well by Dr. William Fordyce Mavor, the editor and chief...
View ArticleFor Saint Nicholas’s Review: Children Naughty and Nice
Christmas comes but once and year and when it does it brings….annual performance appraisals of children. This belief that St. Nicholas passes judgment on us may evaporate soon enough, but not before...
View ArticleThe Jacob’s Ladder Toy and Its Mysterious History
The Jacob’s Ladder is an old-timey pastime that has made a surprising comeback recently. Twenty years ago wooden versions were available only from retailers making a stand against modern soulless...
View ArticlePicky Child Eaters Before Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle
According to Jennifer Traig, author of Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting, there is very little evidence in the historical record for “concerns over children refusing what...
View ArticleStays and other Secrets of perfect Posture
People in eighteenth-century portraits hold their bodies as if they were dancers. Even a squirmy toddler tenuously balanced on his mother’s knee has beautiful posture. Were those gracefully lifted...
View ArticleThomas Boreman’s Tiny, Tiny “Gigantick Histories”
How a “tiny, dumpy volume” altered the concept of children’s books — When Thomas Boreman issued The Gigantick History of the Two Famous Giants, and Other Curiosities in Guildhall, London in 1740,...
View ArticleMore “Gigantick Histories” that “altered the concept of children’s books”
Thomas Boreman’s “Gigantick Histories” were landmark publications in the history of children’s books, as we saw last week. Beginning with the first tiny book — The Gigantick History of the Two Famous...
View ArticleJohn Bewick’s Progress of a Good and a Bad Boy: A New Attribution
A few weeks ago I was cataloging a new addition to the Newbery collection,The History of Jacky Idle and Dicky Diligent, a generous gift of The Friends of the Princeton University Library in 2018. I...
View ArticlePaying for Private School Tuition in the 1730s
The Princeton class of 2019 has just graduated and cleared out of the dorms. Next year’s crop of applicants for spots in the class of 2023 will be touring campus all summer. Parents’ nagging worries...
View ArticleMarks in Books 9: Daydreaming Boys Draw in Their Schoolbooks
Many copybooks do not look especially interesting, until you go through them carefully page by page. This one is tacked into a raggedly limp leather wrapper is a case in point. It was made by a...
View ArticleMarks in Books 10: Sibling Stand-off in a Copybook?
Don’t judge this copybook by its spotted vellum boards. It looks anything but promising, but it is noteworthy on several counts. Elizabeth Harris, who may have lived in South Molton, Devonshire,...
View ArticleThe Voice of the School Boy
The adult writer has the privilege of impersonating the child, throwing its voice as if it were a ventriloquist’s puppet. How often was the child allowed to speak in authentic tones before the...
View ArticleRegistration open for the 2019 Cotsen Symposium on Children’s Books and...
Traditionally research into pre-20th century children’s literature has focused on titles written and consumed in a particular country. However, most 18th- and 19th-century children, parents, and...
View ArticleGobble, Growl, Grunt: The First Alphabets of Animal Noises
Reading any book of animal noises to the baby, where it is obligatory to squeal like a pig or roar like a lion, is one of the most enjoyable assignments of parenthood. It can chase away the fog of...
View ArticleA Girl’s Silence Is Golden; or An Old Take on “Lock Her Up!”
Children’s books can contain surprising survivals and one of the strangest I’ve seen recently is the woman’s mouth closed with a padlock, a symbol of female self-control that is at least as old as the...
View ArticleThe “Fanaticism” Frederick Douglass Found in the Columbian Orator
The thirteen-year-old Frederick Douglas put down fifty cents for a copy of Caleb Bingham’s The Columbian Orator, which had been first published in 1797. He described the anthology both as “a rich...
View ArticleBooks Tell Stories… Perhaps More than One?
Books — especially children’s books — tell stories. The “stories” they tell can be in a wide variety of formats: short stories, verse tales, moral tales, narratives in the form of dialogues, or...
View ArticleAn Old Bachelor Visits an Old Friend and His 14 Children: a Humorous Essay on...
Young characters in eighteenth-century children’s books have a reputation for being preternaturally well-behaved goody-goodies. That stereotype probably contains some truth, but we don’t have to dig...
View ArticleBanned Books of the Past: Robert Dodsley’s Chronicles of the Kings (1740)...
Eighteenth-century children helped themselves to fictional travellers’ tales such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1729) or Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) that were not intended...
View ArticleLooking at an Icon: A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744)
John Newbery’s first children’s book, The Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744) has long been famous for uniting amusement and instruction in a new, more modern way and its status has been taken for granted...
View ArticleHow a Young Woman Writer Got Her First Book Published: Lucy Peacock and The...
Very few classic eighteenth-century children’s books have an origin myth, or story about how an adult came to write for a real child because the book he or she imagined didn’t exist and decided the...
View ArticleMarks in Books 14: A Botched Book Curse
A bound volume of eighteenth-century almanacs does not seem like a logical addition to Cotsen’s collection of illustrated children’s books. I can’t explain why the third volume of the Diaria...
View ArticleWhittington and His Cat: The Encounter Between Cultures Illustrated
There’s no magic in the rags-to-riches story of Dick Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London, shown at the left at the height of his fame from a chapbook ca. 1808 published by T. Sabine and son...
View ArticleMore Pretty Little Pocket Books for Children
The word “pocket book” was a term for a wallet or small purse for money and personal objects in the eighteenth century. That wasn’t its only meaning, however. It also referred to books– especially...
View ArticleBefore Viral Animal Videos: Andrew Lang’s Animal Story Book (1896)
Any old family vacation house by the sea should have a neglected cache of old books somewhere and I discovered one in the second story bedroom, where I picked out The Animal Story Book edited by...
View ArticlePicture Book Herstories of Great American Women Cookbook Writers
Count on Deborah Hopkinson, a distinguished author of children’s non-fiction, to take on the challenge of introducing two giants of American culinary herstory in picture book biographies. Her...
View ArticleLearning to Make Invisible Inks and Other Projects from The Young Gentleman’s...
If you are interested in learning more about how adults have tried to keep children from being bored by dreaming up interesting projects, this post about a pioneering magazine for children may be of...
View ArticleBenjamin Harris’s Protestant Tutor (1679): Teaching Religion, Reading, and...
Late seventeenth century journalist Benjamin Harris probably would have gotten his bearings pretty quickly in our toxic media environment. Familiar with bad actors, feverish conspiracy theories,...
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View ArticleThe HMS Victory Goes Down: A Famous Naval Disaster Illustrated in The Pretty...
The Pretty Book of Pictures for Little Masters and Misses is the best known natural history book John Newbery issued–not because its illustrations were so fine, but because the majority were copied...
View ArticleCoronations for Children: Pomp versus Precedence
The coronation of King Charles III—the first since his mother’s in 1953—has caused a lot of ink to be spilled on both sides of the Atlantic. Much of the commentary has revolved around the question,...
View ArticleCharacters from the Popular Stage in a Deck of Handmade Cards
Strange things are shelved in the Cotsen manuscripts section. It’s unclear what exactly they are, why they were made, and who made them. When the object has no obvious clues that might set off a...
View ArticleStudents, Teachers, and Classrooms Illustrated in the Catalogue of the Cotsen...
The last two volumes of the Catalogue of the Cotsen Children’s Library, a comprehensive index, have just been published, bringing this huge project to completion. This post will offer a survey of the...
View ArticleThe History of Christmasses Past: A Christmas Tree Made of Yew Boughs
Queen Charlotte, consort of George III, is now believed to have introduced the custom of displaying indoors decorated yew branches at Christmas from her native Mecklenberg-Strelitz in northern Germany,...
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