Board Books and Prophesying Nursery Rhymes

As the arrival of my new niece or nephew approaches, it seems the family guessing game has shifted slightly from what sex the baby will be to on what day will it arrive? We’ve also begun thinking about what we can do to make the child’s life as bright and rich in opportunities as possible. For many in our family, of course, a large part of that has been about gathering books the child might come to love and learn from.

This week’s posting is a look back at a mid-twentieth century children’s “board books”, a special type of children’s book explicitly designed for toddlers and infants. Board books are manufactured in a very particular binding format, using chunky leafs of pressed paperboard for the covers and pages (at least 2-ply thickness, often more). Usually they are brilliantly colorful, easily read (minimal amount of text), and hinged with an extremely sturdy spine or with the pressed paperboard leafs folded and glued. The first board books appeared in the late 1900s and grew in popularity throughout the century. Today they are a staple feature of any bookstore’s children’s section.

The book in question is The Year Around Book, published by McGraw-Hill’s Education Games & Aids Division in 1965 and intended for children ages 2 to 4. The text was written by Helen Jill Fletcher, author of numerous children’s books from 1948 through the early 1990s, and the illustrations are by 2010’s Caldecott winner Jerry Pinkney, legendary children’s book artist and recipient of numerous awards. The Year Around Book was Pinkney’s third children’s book -- very early in his career -- and looking at how much his work has changed over the decades is a clear demonstration of how much the artistic style of children’s book illustrations have evolved since the mid-1960s.

Apparently The Year Around Book was only issued in one edition (rather peculiar for a children’s book), making my copy of the 1965 printing a first. It is not, however, a true first: on the final page, inside the back cover, a printer’s code runs “4 5 6 7 8 9”, indicating that this copy belongs to the fourth printing of the edition.

The pages are made of white 2-ply pressed paperboard and measure 18.25cm x 31.5cm. The binding is a white plastic comb of twelve teeth. There is some modest bumping and splitting of the paperboard -- especially beneath the comb binding -- but nothing very extreme; there are no owner’s marks. For a 45 year-old children’s book it is in rather fine condition.

The book is organized around the months of the year. Each page presents a brightly colored scene in a slightly cartoonish style depicting each successive month. A brief prose passage highlighting the main points of each month accompanies the illustrations. Tying the book together is the motif of a large, circular object above the scene; in each illustration, the object is different (for example, a giant sunflower in April, fireworks in July, a witch flying past the moon in October, etc.).

These circular motifs fill a space on the oblong boards that is used, on the cover, for a representation of the sun; the smiling face of the sun includes five holes cut into the board, allowing the smiling face of a balloon in the first scene (children celebrating New Years in January) to show through. On some pages, the black ink of the text is regrettably hard to read against the dark illustration beneath it -- a simple design flaw that suggests the text and artwork were developed separately by the writer and artist -- or at the very least that the designer did not confer adequately with either after the proof was prepared.

There is a particularly strong emphasis on patriotic events and holidays in the various months (even Election Day makes an appearance in November). The book manages to steer clear of explicit religious content (Easter in April and Christmas in December are presented in their primarily secular forms -- the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus presiding) until you turn to the back cover.

The text on the back is given to “Days of the Week” and presents a variation on the traditional fortune-telling nursery rhyme “Monday’s Child”, meant to suggest what a child’s personality will be like based on the day on which they are born (see last image below). This tradition of reductive predictions relating one’s day of birth to one’s character can be traced back at least to the writer Thomas Nashe in the 1570s, but this particular rhyme’s first appearance in approximately its modern form was recorded by A. E. Bray in his 1838 Traditions of Devonshire.

Throughout the 1800s it went through various permutations, with the version appearing in the September 17, 1887 Harper’s Weekly becoming perhaps the most prevalent. This is the version given in I. and P. Opie’s Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (second edition, 1997) and it speaks particularly well (I think) to the social mores and cultural priorities of nineteenth-century England in the raising of children (that is, it emphasizes those qualities the English considered both ideal and undesirable in its youth):

Monday's child is fair of face,

Tuesday's child is full of grace,

Wednesday's child is full of woe,

Thursday's child has far to go,

Friday's child is loving and giving,

Saturday's child works hard for a living,

But the child who is born on the Sabbath Day

Is bonny and blithe and good and gay.

Obviously the fortune for Wednesday’s child (the source, according to pop culture legend, for the name of Wednesday Addams) and the negative connotations for Thursday’s child were inappropriate for a children’s book in the 1960s, so the poem was changed for The Year Around Book. What was not changed, however, was the reference to the religious alter ego of Sunday:

Monday’s child is kind and sweet

Tuesday’s child is clean and neat

Wednesday’s child is tall and fair

Thursday’s child will take a dare

Friday’s child is wise and frank

Saturday’s child will play a prank

But the child that’s born on the Sabbath day,

Is good and loving, blithe and gay.

So, to return to the initial premise of this post, on what day of the week will my niece or nephew arrive? And will The Year Around Book be correct? We can only wait and see...

Lynd Ward: Two Epic Novels, Without a Word of Text...

Having missed last week’s entry, I have decided to cover two books in one posting this week.

One of the dirty secrets of most libraries is that they frequently discard duplicate or out-of-date, out-of-demand books. Sometimes these deaccessioned volumes are sold or given away free in book sales, sometimes they are donated to other collections, and sometimes they are simply thrown out. This week’s books were rescued from this sad fate by a quick-thinking librarian who knew their worth; fortunately, she’s also closely related to me and knows of my bibliophilia. Thus they’ve found a safe and permanent home in my collection -- your local library may deaccession books in their collection, but as anyone who knows me will attest, I never do.

These two volumes are from the famed, award-winning American graphic artist Lynd Ward (1905-1985) and represent two early works from the career of this visual and narrative master. The first is the sixth edition of his first “novel in woodcuts”, God’s Man, published by Peter Smith of New York in September, 1933, and printed by the Colonial Press of Clinton, Massachusetts. The other book is the first edition of his second book, Mad Man’s Drum, published by Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith Inc. of 139 East 46th Street, New York (it was published simultaneously by the firm’s offices at 91 Wellington Street, West Toronto, Canada and Cape’s own office at 30 Bedford Square, London). The book was printed by the Plimpton Press of Norwood, Massachusetts. Both books are in black hardcover -- God’s Man in cloth with a paste-on print on the cover and title label on the spine, Mad Man’s Drum in boards with a pictorial patterned cover and title label on the spine.

The pages in both books measure 14.5cm x 25.5cm and are a heavy stock, rough cut to the edges and slightly fading with age (the final leaves of Mad Man's Drum, both blank, are still uncut). Both books are bound in octavo. The sixth edition of God’s Man -- which had first appeared in 1929, arriving in bookstore’s the same week as the great stock market crash -- is relatively rare on the market and is valued at approximately $75 to $100, though an oddity in my copy makes me suspect that it is more peculiar (and thus perhaps more valuable). Though it came from a library, it has none of the typical ex-library markings. The first edition of Mad Man’s Drum is ironically more common on the market because, by the time of its appearance in 1930 Ward was a well-known and well-loved artist, which encouraged the publishers to release multiple issues of the first edition. The true first (or “first first” as the jargon goes) was bound by Plimpton Press with pictorial boards (as mine is); subsequent issues of the first edition reverted to cloth boards. The first first of this book is valued at approximately $150 to $250. Individual original engravings, usually inscribed by the artist, are still available for sale from some art dealers as well (they typically go for between $300 and $500 apiece). My copy has the typical ex-library markings on the spine and inside the front cover.

My copy of God’s Man has 144 leaves, including the standard preliminaries (blank flyleaf, half-title, title page with publication information on the verso, and dedication); with one image per leaf that comes to 140 illustrations (the engravings on the chapter heading pages are all the same). The story tells the heartwarming tale of a young artist whose idealistic soul is crushed by the brutal, capitalist machine of urban life, a gray world in which beauty and love are mere soul-less cash commodities.

At the start of the tale, the young artist comes to the city expecting to make a living; his hopes are bolstered when he meets a shadowy gentleman who pays him dear for his paintings and who then sells him a paintbrush guaranteed to make him as great the masters of the Renaissance -- in exchange, the shadowy gentleman (obviously meant to be the Devil) demands the artist’s soul upon his death.

The young man’s fortunes do indeed seem to rise and rise, until love for a prostitute brings him crushing despair; when he goes to the woods to try to kill himself he is rescued by a farm girl. The two fall in love, marry, and have a child. Rather unsurprisingly, one day a shadowy figure arrives and asks to have his portrait painted on top of a nearby mountain; when he poses for the painting he removes his cloak and reveals himself to be, of course, the Devil, and the young man falls to his death from the mountain-top. The chapters are, in order: “The Brush”, “The Mistress”, “The Brand”, “The Wife”, and “The Portrait”. The artistry in the book draws from numerous springs of inspiration, ranging from Gustav Klimt’s 1908 "The Kiss" to tarot card symbolism and from medieval iconography to Soviet-style architecture.

As noted above, the 144 leaves are bound octavo-style into 18 gatherings of 8 leaves apiece (both this book and Mad Man’s Drum are without either signatures or pagination). Bizarrely, the book’s penultimate gathering in my copy -- consisting of the final 8 illustrations of the sequence involving the artist going to the mountain-top and discovering, fatally, that he is painting the Devil’s portrait -- are repeated as the final gathering of my copy (with the exception of the last leaf which has been cruelly ripped out of the book). I have no idea whether or not another gathering was intended to follow these 8 illustrations (though it would not seem logical since, with the artist’s death, we have lost the protagonist from whose point-of-view we’ve followed the entire story thus far), nor do I have any idea why the printers (Colonial Press did both the printing and the binding) bound this duplicate gathering in or how common this mistake is in extant copies of the book.

Mad Man’s Drum is broken up into several untitled chapters. The graphic style of its woodcuts is similar to that of God’s Man and, like its predecessor draws liberally and creatively on a range of well-researched inspirational sources (such as Edvard Munch’s 1893 “The Scream”, indigenous African ritual patterns, and even early nineteenth-century Anglo-American fashion trends), but the scale of the story has changed considerably. Whereas God’s Man centered on a single main character, Mad Man’s Drum is almost epic in its narrative. The story begins with a shady looking white sailor coming across a native drummer in the African wilderness; fascinated by the drum, the sailor steals it and, with his crew, enslaves the drummer’s town. The legacy of this barbarism haunts the sailor and his family over the next two generations, emblematized at key points in the tale by the eerie drum. As with most cursed-item sagas, the sins of the father are visited (to a modern reader’s view, somewhat unjustly) upon the children, when his wife dies young, his son grows up to be a scholar but finds his views scorned and harshly rejected by the academic community, and his three granddaughters end up entangled in rather horrible, depressing sexual relationships with men as moral-less as their grandfather. It’s a testament to Ward’s sense of visual pacing and imagery that he is so successful in placing at the core of his silent novel a musical instrument of considerable sound.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to do full justice to the remarkable story of Lynd Ward in the space of a single blog entry. Raised by an itinerant radical preacher father (who helped found the ACLU), Ward inherited his hybrid brand of ascetic Protestantism and Marxist communism. However, ever since he realized, in first grade, that his last name spelled “draw” backwards, Lynd determined to be an artist. He studied fine arts at Columbia Teachers’ College in New York and, in 1927, graphic design (including book design -- hence the similarities between these two books, despite coming from different printers) at the National Academy of Graphic Arts in Leipzig. During his studies he was inspired by the work of Belgian woodcut artist Franz Masereel, who had published an entire novel told exclusively through woodcuts.

Upon returning to the United States the next year, Ward published the first edition of his own woodcuts novel, God’s Man. As Christopher Capozzola notes:

The book’s subject matter—an allegorical fable about an artist who sells his soul for worldly success—was timeless. But its artistic innovations were unprecedented; its visual structure and pacing owed as much to silent film and mass-circulation comic pages as they did to artistic predecessors like Kollwitz or Honoré Daumier. Wordless novels were political interventions, too, meant to take advantage of what Ward called the “great asset of the book’s thousandfold duplication of contact with people.” Ward wanted to get art out of stuffy museums and snooty galleries and into the hands of an international community of readers who shared the language of images.

Ward's political opinions, including his brutal honesty about America’s shameful heritage of racial injustice, sharpened as the dismal years of the 1930s accumulated misfortunes upon the people of the working classes. However, with the rise of anti-communistic furor in the 1940s and 1950s he found himself increasingly in trouble with the FBI and the Congressional House Un-American Activities Committee.

In his later work he turned increasingly to illustrating existing novels (including a now highly collectible edition of Shelley’s Frankenstein), many volumes of the long-running Heritage Press series (including a gorgeous rendition of William Ellery Leonard's translation of Beowulf) and children’s books (including his own 1953 Caldecott Medal winning book The Biggest Bear). His cover-art graces the boards and dust-jackets of dozens upon dozens of highly sought-after books. His legacy, appearing in over 200 published works, persisted beyond his own material, however, as his keen eye, artistic vision, and talent in multiple media (including woodcuts, watercolor, oil, ink, lithography, and mezzotint) inspired the generation of modernist Art-Deco artists -- in love with angles, linear forms, and evocative grades of shading -- that took the national art scene by storm in the 1950s and 1960s.

Ward's work continues to inspire artists today, such as John Coulhart and Eric Drooker. And for us literary types, the debt we owe to Ward is equally considerable: in 1955, a young poet in San Francisco pulled a copy of God’s Man from the shelf and drew inspiration from its narrative and images, later sharing the work at an event called “Six Poets at the Six Gallery” held on October 7th of that year. The poem’s title was “Howl”...

(l-r) Allen Ginsburg, book artist Michael McCurdy, and Lynd Ward in front of Ward's house in Cresskill, New Jersey in 1978