While trolling for children’s books and games at the Papermania fair held several weeks ago in the basement of the Hartford Civic Center (you could hear the marching band playing for the UConn men’s basketball game upstairs), I made the happy discovery of this aptly titled Parlor Foot-ball Game, issued by picture book and game ...
The Southern Pictorial Primer. Richmond, Va.: West & Johnston, 1864. We are always on the lookout for Confederate imprints, and through the generous book scouting of AAS member Rich West, we were alerted to the eBay presence of this copy of The Southern Pictorial Primer. It was published by West & Johnston, a firm which also ...
Aladdin. Cincinnati: Peter G. Thomson, ca. 1877-1889. Although McLoughlin Bros. dominated American picture book publishing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, they were not without worthy competitors; among them was Peter Gibson Thomson (1851-1931). This lusciously chromolithographed version of Aladdin sports a marvelous palette of colors and shades, and was probably the work of ...
The Doll and Her Dresses. London: Frederick Warne & Co.; New York: Scribner, Welford & Co., ca. 1870. This picture book is part of Warne’s Picture Puzzle Toy Books series, in which the young owner is supposed to cut out and paste cutouts of dress accessories and room ornaments to the existing color illustration, filling in ...
Afternoon Tea: Rhymes for Children. New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons; London: Frederick Warne and Co., ca. 1880. This delicate color-printed illustration of children at play is taken from a book of children’s poetry published jointly in New York and London by the England-based houses of Thomas Nelson and Sons and Frederick Warne. Both publishers were ...
The Death and Burial of Poor Cock Robin. Philadelphia: Davis, Porter & Coates, ca. 1866-1868. This poignantly humorous image of the owl digging departed Cock Robin’s grave is taken from an “indestructible” picture book that had its pages reinforced with cloth for the hard use of young and eager hands. This hand-colored wood engraving is characteristic ...
Barrow, Frances. New Little Mittens. New York & London: D. Appleton and Co., 1869. This wood-engraved frontispiece is a comic scene set in the culture clash between a Chinese gentleman going out for a stroll, and an ignorant American sailor who pulls his queue and says “My stars and stripes! What a long tail our pussy ...
Reynard the Fox. After the German Version of Goethe by Thomas James Arnold. London: Trubner & Co.; New York: Theo. Stroeffer, 1870. This is a folio format edition of the celebrated animal adventurer Reynard the Fox. This luxurious metal engraving of Reynard reclining after a busy day of hunting prey was engraved by Rudolph Kahn after ...
Although we might think of Santa and an evergreen Christmas tree as inevitably wedded in nineteenth-century children’s book illustration, that was not necessarily the case. Until about 1840, New Year’s Day was favored over Christmas as the family-appropriate winter holiday in the young American Republic, particularly in New England, where the descendants of the Puritans ...
Howe, Samuel Gridley. The Blind Child’s First Book. Third edition. Boston: New England Institution for the Education of the Blind, 1852. This is a fairly early (and rare) example of printing for the blind using raised type known as Boston Line, developed by the book’s author Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-1876), who gained national fame as the ...
In the most recent issue of the Almanac, we had a feature article about the process of bringing new items into the collection. This got us thinking about some of the interesting ways in which these treasures are found. In the coming weeks, each curator will share one of their favorite stories about finding a ...
The Game of Jack of All Trades. New York: McLoughlin Bros., ca. 1900. This is a welcome addition to our holdings of McLoughlin Bros. games. McLoughlin published an extensive line of small boxed card games, like Jack of All Trades. Games and picture books about professions and trades were used since the late eighteenth century to ...
?The Adventures of Teasing Tom and Naughty Ned with a Spool of Clark’s O.N.T. Cotton. New York: F.B. Patterson, 1879. Books printed as advertisements were frequently directed at children, as is the case of this chapbook hawking Clark’s cotton thread. Not only do Tom and Ned play hooky from school, but they use a spool of ...
Bullard, Asa. Children’s Book for Sabbath Hours. Springfield, Mass. & Chicago: W.J. Holland & Co., 1873. With the secularization of American society after the Civil War, this book by minister Asa Bullard answered a need to give children something wholesome yet entertaining to read while keeping the Sabbath free from raucous play. This is a selection ...
Mann, Mary Peabody. The Flower People. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1875. First published in the early 1840’s, Mary Peabody Mann’s The Flower People introduced the study of botany to children under the guise of conversations between a girl named Mary and various plants. In this case, Mary is speaking to a leaf that she ...
