Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween from Special Collections and from our spooky friends! First, this very cheerful cloaked skeleton who hopes they’re invited to your Halloween party:

Evans, Henry Ridgely. The spirit world unmasked: illustrated investigations into the phenomena of spiritualism. Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1897.

Next, from the characters in “Little Wee Pumpkin’s Thanksgiving,” none of whom are at all unsettling:

Bigham, Madge. Stories of Mother Goose Village. Chicago & New York: Rand McNally & Company, 1903.

Don’t stress, this anthropomorphized pumpkin with leafy toupee and a skin-colored cravat just wants to make somebody very happy! Is it you? Is it this bossy queen standing in a pumpkin patch?

The stockinged gentleman accompanying the queen here is, I should note, Peter Pumpkineater, the keeper of the pumpkin patch. I don’t know about you, but if I were a pumpkin being tended by someone with the surname Pumpkineater, I wouldn’t be looking quite so placid…

Finally, we bring you copious Halloween greetings from Jack Pumpkinhead, the very aptly named character from The Land of Oz:

Baum, L. Frank. The land of Oz. Chicago: The Reilly & Lee Company, 1904.

Do you love Jack Pumpkinhead? I love Jack Pumpkinhead. I love his clearly-articulated joints, his perfectly spherical head, and his obvious propensity for adventure. I also, as those who know me will attest, just LOVE pumpkins. This is a picture of me during all of the autumnal months:

Jack Pumpkinhead exhibits a surprising range of emotion given his fixed facial features. Here he is looking sweetly bashful!

As always, get in touch if you’d like to set up a time to see any of these books in person, and until then, may you enjoy this time of year with its crunchy leaves, golden light, copious pumpkins, and spooky nights.

From Stories of Mother Goose Village.

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Historic Children’s Books at the Library of Congress

Today’s New York Times has a lovely article about the rare children’s books housed at the Library of Congress, 100 of which are now digitized and available online. (Intriguingly, the children’s book called The Cats’ Party that the article features is entirely different from the identically-titled book that we hold at PPL. We’re pleased to know that two different 19th century authors decided to pen books about feline festivities.)

Check out the Library of Congress’s digitized children’s books here.

Bad Children of History #36: Curtains Are Not For Wiping

Oh how we’ve missed the Bad Children of History! We recently cataloged a book that’s part of our Wetmore Collection, and contains dozens of delinquents and ill-mannered imps: La Civilité Puérile et Honnête, an etiquette book for children with illustrations by Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel.

Boutet de Monvel’s illustrations aptly capture the sneakiness and hilarity of childhood, as well as the joy of hanging out at the seaside with miniature pizza peels.

(Etiquette hot tip: don’t bury your friends’ heads in the sand.)

The “what not to do” images are priceless.

“It wasn’t me.”

“Agh, I dropped my Twinkies!”

This book’s children are naughty, and snotty.

They’re wiggly and squiggly.

 

They’re rude and crude.

We love the action shots.

We also love the recommendation about bread-licking in the “table manners” section.

Bad Children of History #30: Once More, With Feeling

It’s true: we’ve discovered yet another version of Heinrich Hoffmann’s Der Struwwelpeter, this one in Polish, hiding in our Edith Wetmore Collection of Children’s Books.

Złota różdżka was published in Warsaw around 1933; it contains a translation of Hoffmann’s original text, with illustrations by Bohdan Bartłomiej Nowakowski, a prolific Polish illustrator and cartoonist.

Nowakowski’s children are quite impressively, gruesomely bad. Look at the determined scowl on this little stomper!

This book contains all your Struwwelpeter favorites, like the fast-withering Augustus Who Wouldn’t Eat Any Soup (below left) and the tragic Pauline Who Played With Matches and her oddly flame-resistant shoes (below right).

The last page of Złota różdżka features a highly seasonally-appropriate illustration of the respective wintery fates of good and bad children everywhere. May we suggest sharing it with the bad children in your life?

 

Bad Children of History #28: Alfred’s Revenge

Today’s Bad Child of History, Alfred Hardon, hails from a 19th-century story collection called Uncle Paul’s Stories for Boys and Girls, published by the American Tract Society.

Unlike some cautionary tales, which regale us with exciting accounts of juvenile mischief before culminating in the sad results of said mischief, Alfred’s story is pretty tragic from the get-go.

Initially, we learn that Alfred is suffering deep emotional distress due to the fact that William Brown had gone above him in school at spelling that afternoon. (Did you take a look at Alfred’s eyebrows in the illustration above? SO distressed!) And we all know the obvious response to wounded pride, yes?

Revenge!

We’re not told what Alfred has in mind, although the narrator tells us that:

Alfred Hardon was a passionate, self-willed boy, and the well-deserved success of his classmate had awakened evil feelings in his heart, and the bitter seed that had already been sown there immediately sprung up into hatred, and a resolution to be revenged.

Oof, bitter seed! That sounds pretty bad. We find out exactly how bad in the next paragraph, when Alfred’s teacher arrives at school with a “grave countenance” and explains his current condition to his classmates.

As soon as the opening exercises were over, the teacher said: ‘Most of you have, no doubt, heard of the sad accident which has befallen Alfred Hardon. He was found late last night on the floor of Mr. Brown’s barn, just beneath the beam to which William’s swing is fastened, insensible, his right arm broken, and with other injuries, some of which are so serious that, till this morning, his life was despaired of.

‘You have probably heard that it was thought he fell while swinging; but his father called me in as I was passing the house this morning, and, with great sorrow, told me Alfred had confessed that he went to the barn yesterday afternoon, secretly, and for the wicked purpose of cutting one of the ropes of the swing in such a way that when William next used it he would be sure to fall.’

Alfred’s classmates utter “a suppressed murmur of astonishment and indignation” as the teacher explains that Alfred, bedridden with his numerous injuries, is now “very humble and penitent,” and hopes to speak to Willie to ask his forgiveness.

The remainder of the tale consists of paraphrased Bible lessons, which I shall not recount here. Just remember, readers: don’t let bitter seeds take root in your heart, or divine intervention may push you off of a roof beam.

Bad Children of History #27: George Graceless

Oh hooray, it’s time for another installment of Bad Children of History! Today’s bad child is culled from a book with a true emotional rollercoaster of a title:

Melancholy! Intrigue! Danger! A little white horse! This wee book is undated, but was probably printed around 1820.

As the saga unfolds, the reader is introduced to good children with names like Kitty Kindness, Billy Meanwell, Sammy Sober, Bobby Bright, and Tommy Telltruth. (King Pippin himself is actually Peter Pippin, the King of the Good Boys.) YAWN.

The tension builds as we meet a gaggle of ne’er-do-wells with equally alliterative and terrible names such as Harry Harmless, George Graceless, and Tom Tiger.

It’s clear that trouble is brewing when the bell rings to return to school, the Good Boys race to see who can get to the schoolhouse first, and the Wicked Boys stroll into the woods with the express purpose of destroying birds’ nests.

After tearing down innumerable nests, including that of a robin who was left “making such piteous moans, as would have melted a heart of stone”, George Graceless scales a “great high tree” to reach the nest of a turtle dove. What happens to a wicked boy who climbs a great high tree?

You guessed it! He plunges head-first into a narrow but apparently very deep river while one friend reaches out a tentative finger and another takes a picture with his iPhone!

Oh save me, save me, I shall be drowned; oh, that I had attended to the good advice of Little King Pippin, cried he, and with these words, down he went to the bottom, and was never seen more; the rest of his companions began now to see the folly and wickedness of neglecting their books for idle mischief; and heartily repented that they had not staid at school instead of playing truant.

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I heartily repent, I usually head back out of the woods, but this questionable quartet is filled with dread and decides to “stroll about” until it becomes “quite dark”. (Cue scary violin music!)

They fall asleep under some bushes, which seems like a good idea, until:

in less than an hour, they were awakened with such terrible howlings of wild beasts as was scarce ever heard, tigers, wolves, and lions, hunting for their prey, with eyes that glared like balls of fire, rushed by them every instant.

Amidst this impressive biodiversity, Harry Harmless falls to his knees to pray, whilst his companions, who have never even bothered to learn any prayers, are quickly devoured by two monstrous lions.

Not that the title gave it away or anything, but the next morning, a pretty little white horse awakes Harry Harmless with her neighs. He climbs into her mysteriously unpopulated saddle and is promptly delivered to his home.

Bad Children(‘s Books) of History #25: Folly of the Beasts of the Earth

Special Collections has recently acquired an eye-popping addition to our Whaling Collection: Das Jagen, Fangen, Zähmen und Abrichten der Thiere, a 19th century German children’s  book about hunting animals. (The title translates as “The Hunting, Catching, Taming and Dressing of Animals”.)

The book’s frontispiece shows a spectacular, full-color whale-hunting scene, complete with befuddled walrus, spectator seagulls, and a very morose whale with a baleen mustache.

(Let’s pretend those dual arches are an exaggerated version of the southern right whale’s “characteristic double spout“, and/or that the sad whale is blocking our view of a smaller, simultaneously-spouting cetacean.)

This generally text-heavy book contains five plates, each of which bears nine tiny engravings. (I don’t recommend scrolling through the following section of engravings if you are 1) a small child, despite the fact that this is a children’s book, or 2) of a delicate constitution.)

The engravings, as you’ve likely gathered from the above, exhibit all manner of grisly ways in which humans kill other animals (some of which I consider anthropologically suspect, but I’m not a hunting expert).

For instance, there’s the old “bear impaled on a spiky board” trick:

There’s also the “scaring seals with weird faces over a grassy cliff onto curved spikes”  approach:

And, lest we forget, the “whipping birds while mounted upon a galloping horse” technique:

The digitized book can be viewed in its entirety online, either here or here. If you do look over the digital version (or come to Special Collections to view our copy in person), I challenge you to find the engraving of the sneaky person hunting reindeer while dressed in a reindeer suit. Really.

Bad Children of History #24: Ransacked by Rufus

Readers will be unsurprised to learn that a fine source of historical bad children is the 1864 book Frank and Rufus; or, Obedience and Disobedience. (I was hoping for an old-fashioned version of Goofus and Gallant, but alas, it’s not really like that at all.) Its author, Catharine M. Trowbridge, also wrote the 1867 book Charles Norwood; or, Erring and Repenting, which sounds to me like Frank and Rufus was so good that she wrote the same thing again, but with a different main character.

Anyway, one of the stars of this book is the young Rufus Dean. He’s a sweet boy with lots of friends, although his impish constitution sometimes leads him down misguided paths.

Here’s Rufus slyly pocketing a dime and a half-dime that his mother left on the windowsill. Why would such a sweet boy do such a thing, taking what Trowbridge calls “a very formidable step in the downward path”? The author explains that “he had repeatedly yielded, when tempted, to disobedience and deceit; and in this way, had greatly weakened his moral power to resist temptation.”

What happens to a boy with weakened moral power? I didn’t  read all 280 pages to find the details, but I can tell you that Rufus becomes a drunk and disgraces his family name, and that his sister, when grown, even refuses to name her first-born son after him, as the name Rufus is “tarnished”. Frank, on the other hand, having learned obedience, becomes someone whose “fellow citizens honored and trusted him” and whose “faithful and judicious mother found in him the support and joy of her old age.”

Take note, dear readers: don’t steal 15 cents, or the situation may snowball until your mother looks wan, your sister hates you, and you’re forced to seek “relief in the stimulus of the wine-cup”.

 

Bad Children of History #23: My Goopy Valentine

This week’s Bad Children of History come from a treasure trove of misbehavior: Gelett Burgess’s 1909 book Blue Goops and Red: A Manual of Polite Deportment for Children who would be Good, Showing How & How Not to Behave Everywhere. (This book is also a treasure trove of illustrations with a flippable half-page that changes the scene–I’m certain there’s a name for these, but I don’t know what it is.)

Each two-page spread of Burgess’s book has a rhyme about an occasion in which one could behave or misbehave, facing an illustration showing (blue) goops with poor deportment, and then, after one flips the half-page, (red) goops behaving properly. Here’s a topical example:

Oh, isn’t it a pity,

When valentines are pretty,

To send the horrid, comic ones to me?

But often in the city

Some children think they’re witty,

And so I get the kind I hate to see!

Two notes here: one, are the goops actually children? They look sort of like… gingerbread people, although their parents seem to be definitively human. Two, I think it behooves the narrator to consider why children send him or her insulting valentines, but I suppose that’s beside the point.

Here’s the half-page flipping feature I mentioned earlier. Look at those bad goops jeering over a so-called valentine of an old maid while their overly-indulgent parents look on! Wait… wait… look at those nice goops with their tidy envelopes and their relaxed human parents!

Blue Goops and Red also has some absolutely fantastic end-papers. Look at these! Goops galore!

Bad Children of History #21: Squirrely Charlie

Today’s Bad Child of History comes from Maria H. Bulfinch’s 1867 volume Frank Stirling’s Choice. His name is Charlie, and while it’s not 100% clear what he’s doing in this illustration, it obviously isn’t something a responsible adult would condone.

Is Charlie climbing the furniture while wielding a Vienna sausage on a chopstick? Is his upright posture defying the laws of physics? Why is he gesturing at that rustic, twiggy cross? What does Frank think of this whole endeavor?

Frank Stirling’s Choice also contains one of the best footnotes I’ve seen in 2016:

Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, folks.