Witness China’s New Love: The Changing Landscape of Chinese Children’s...
Posts over the last two years have highlighted trends in American children’s book publishing industry. As a new class of liberal gatekeepers have trained their eyes on the output of trade publishers...
View ArticleA Tribute to Norton Juster (1929-2021): The Phantom Tollbooth’s Classic Cover...
This week marked the passing of one of America’s great fantasists, Norton Juster, the creator of The Phantom Tollbooth, the wickedly punny allegory about how to wake up a wasted mind, illustrated by...
View ArticleA Nigerian Thorn Carving of a School Room
Above is a classic example of a modern Nigerian thorn carving from the early 1990’s. Made principally by the Yoruba people since the 30’s, these miniature folk art pieces (sometimes more appropriately...
View ArticleThe Staying Power of Beverly Cleary (1913-2021)
Early in her career Beverly Cleary said “universal human emotions” were what she wanted to write about, but the idea that there exist emotions all readers can relate to, regardless of race, gender, and...
View ArticleScholastic and Dav Pilkey Send Ook and Gluk Packing: A Post-Mortem
Dyslexic and disruptive as a boy, Dav Pilkey has great sympathy for children who find learning to read overwhelming. He prefers a visual format like the graphic novel because the disaffected and...
View ArticleRewriting Aesop: From Beatrix Potter to Jerry Pinkney
Some stories are so good that they are reimagined every generation. As a kind of twice-told tale, the fable can be quite difficult to make one’s own: the plot unfolds rapidly in very few words and...
View ArticleThe “Plays” of 17th-Century Boys Recorded in Francis Willughby’s Book of Games
Francis Willughby (1635-1672), the gentleman naturalist and member of the Royal Society, left a manuscript about games, sports, and pastimes among his papers when he died at age 36 (University of...
View ArticleSchoolboy Print Collecting Described in W. P. Scargill’s Recollections of a...
William Pitt Scargill (1787-1836), turned occasional writer and novelist after a twenty-year career as a Unitarian minister. He tried his hand at a children’s book once with Recollections of a...
View ArticleHere’s a Ball for Baby
Cleaning house during the Firestone Renovation led to the discovery of treasures like this one. To be truthful, Ian and I didn’t know what it was. But it couldn’t be described more fully until we...
View ArticlePirate Stew: Neil Gaiman Updates The Cat in the Hat
Pirate Stew, written by Neil Gaiman and exuberantly illustrated by Chris Riddell, is a new addition to the corpus of quirky stories about adventures in babysitting. One of the funniest is Alan and...
View ArticleJim Kay’s Wizarding World: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
The premise of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is simple: He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, weak as a newborn, is powerless to reassert his will on the wizarding community. He schemes to obtain a...
View ArticleIntroductions to Jane Austen for the “Savvy Parent’s Nursery Library”
“Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other writers aspire” –J. K. Rowling It was a fact universally acknowledged that twelve was the age to attack the novels of Jane Austen until the mid-1990s,...
View ArticleDrum Cake for the Fourth of July from Betty Crocker’s Classic 1957 Cook Book...
“If you use your cook book often I can promise you real fun and lots of good things to eat,” Betty Crocker told her young readers. And she was as good as her word. The last chapter, “Rules,” which...
View ArticleStudents, Teachers, and Classrooms from 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 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 ArticleWood Blocks for the Illustrations of Newbery Children’s Books Acquired
Simon Lawrence, the proprietor of the Fleece Press in Upper Denby near Wakefield (above), is the descendant of Victorian block makers. For over forty years, Mr. Lawrence has been printing handsome...
View ArticleFloyd Cooper (1956-2021): Picture Book Historian of Black Americans
Three-time winner of the Coretta Scott King Award for the most distinguished portrayal of African American experience in literature for children or teens, Floyd Cooper passed away July 16 2021 from...
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 ArticleHalloween: It’s Not Just for Pumpkins
Recent design trends in Halloween pumpkin carving fly in the face of tradition. The purpose of the lantern is to frighten away the mischievous spirits that will walk abroad on the night of October...
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 ArticleBarbie’s Little Sister Skipper’s Growing Pains: A Toy Story for the Holidays
Mattel’s Barbie dolls project toxic stereotypes that have shaped American girls’ ideas of body image since the 1960s. Although the actual dolls are out of scope for the Cotsen collection, it does...
View ArticleMattel’s Happy Family of Black Paper Dolls
The toy manufacturer Mattel joined forces in the mid-1960s with the publisher Whitman to bolster the popular Barbie and Skipper brands with sets of paper dolls, a speciality of Whitman’s since the...
View ArticleThe late Floyd Cooper wins a 4th Coretta Scott King Award for Unspeakable
In honor of the 2022 Coretta Scott King award given posthumously to Floyd Cooper by , here is the tribute to Mr. Cooper posted this summer. Three-time winner of the Coretta Scott King Award for the...
View ArticleJ. K. Rowling’s The Christmas Pig: An Instant Classic?
Crowning a classic upon publication is a pretty speculative business. This has not stopped Scholastic from touting J. K. Rowling’s new chapter book as a children’s book icon to-be: From one of the...
View ArticleA Shaggy Dog Story’s Best for Winter: Neil Gaiman’s Fortunately the Milk
More dreary weather forecast for the Northeast this week… Time for a tale to lift the spirits that’s completely unbelievable with illustrations to match, a pretty rousing collaboration between Neil...
View ArticleLaura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter Imperfectly Remembered
On snowy weekends, details from The Long Winter, my favorite Little House book, often pop into mind. But I haven’t reread it for years, perhaps because I wanted to remember the story as I thought it...
View ArticleMarks in Books 13: A Drawing of a Rose in Mrs. Sherwood’s The Re-captured Negro
It’s easier to find doodles, scribbles, and inscriptions in children’s books than polished drawings. When I discover one, I always hope that it will provide some insight into the artist, who...
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 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 ArticleParty Line! Listen in on Gianni Rodari’s Telephone Tales
Allow me to introduce you to the greatest Italian children’s book author of the twentieth century—Gianni Rodari, a journalist, life-long Communist, educator, and winner of the 1970 Hans Christian...
View ArticleAlligators Everywhere in Alphabets
If few people consider cold-blooded beasts cuddly, how can authors and illustrators of children’s books make them more appealing? Last summer, the blog ran a post to try raising the profile of...
View ArticlePooping, Mewling and Puking: Iona Opie’s Babies: An Unsentimental Anthology...
“A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.” Carl Sandburg, Remembrance Rock (1948), chapter 2. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in his nurse’s arms.” Shakespeare, As You Like It,...
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View ArticleChristmas Made in China
If you are beginning the frantic countdown to Christmas Day, take a few minutes to read this lovely and thought-provoking post Minjie Chen wrote three years ago about China’s role in making our holiday...
View ArticleMarks in Books 11 : Hanukkah Gift Inscriptions
To celebrate the eight days of Hanukkah in 2022, here’s a post from a few years ago about books that a mother gave as gifts to her children during the Jewish holiday in 1966… The gift exchanges, which...
View ArticleAn Image of Japan and its People in 1920s Soviet Children’s Literature
Polina Popova, our roving correspondent on Russian- and Ukrainian-language children’s books, has written a new essay for the Cotsen curatorial blog based on her research when she was in residence at...
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 Article“All the Fun of the Fair as if You were There:” A Writing Sheet from the...
Fairs and their attractions have always been a destination for entertainers, gawkers, pickpockets, prostitutes, children, vendors of food, drink, and cheap trinkets. The carnivalesque atmosphere has...
View ArticleReading Gender in Children’s Literature Mathematically: An Award-winning Thesis
For her senior thesis, AnneMarie Caballero ’23 went through more than a thousand children’s books published during the 19th century and analyzed the pattern of topics in relation to the gender of...
View ArticleBarbie: The Doll Who Will Live Forever?
Cultural commentators have had a lot to say about Greta Gerwig’s smash summer movie, but no one I’ve read has considered Gerwig and Baumbach’s clever script as a post-modern take on a classic doll...
View ArticleTwo Worlds: Yet Another Piece of Genius Social-Realist Propaganda
This week the blog features a new post by Polina Popova, our guest expert on Russian- and Ukrainian-language children’s books, on a picture book for Ukrainian children published in the early 1930s....
View ArticleWhat Could You Be This Halloween? Costumes Ideas from Cotsen
In the count down to October 31, a post from 2016 might help the desperate eliminate the myriad possibilities for dressing up and settle on something unique but within the capabilities (and/or...
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,...
View ArticleTesticular Tanuki Tales: Japanese Folk Humor with a Ribald, Satiric Twist
Have you heard of the tanuki, the wonderfully weird “racoon dog” of Japan? If you haven’t, here’s practically everything you need to know. This gorgeously illustrated post by Tara M. McGowan, who was...
View ArticleThe Noble Life of Moretto, A Venetian Dog of the Eighteenth Century
Do you spoil your dog? Be honest… If you worry that this is a modern phenomenon, read the 2016 post by Ian Dooley, then the Cotsen Curatorial Assistant, now hard-working doctoral student. It should...
View ArticleMade by A Child: “Un Crime Effroyable”: A Murderer Brought to Justice in Six...
This wall hanging (or poster, if you prefer) was purchased back in 2016, a little ahead of the rise in scholarly interest in children’s creations as outsider art, whether found in illustrated...
View ArticleFirst Gather Your Eggs, then Boil and Decorate Them: Some Easter Bunny...
The featured illustrations of hard-working Easter bunnies were not taken from a picture book, but from a group of children’s handkerchiefs in the collection. These four, along with forty-eight more...
View ArticleA Traditional April Fool’s Joke: Wanna Wash the Lions at the Tower of London?
In the 1680s antiquarian John Aubrey was the first Englishman to mention the observance of April Fool’s Day. He stated that it was celebrated all over Germany, but folklorists assume that the holiday...
View ArticleEclipses Made Easy to the Minds and Capacities of the Young–and Anyone Else...
In anticipation of the solar eclipse in August 2017, Minjie Chen delved into the collection to see what there was about the subject. She found some wonderful things to share with our readers and it’s...
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