Daddy Fox

Last summer I chanced upon an interesting edition of the tale of Reynard the Fox in the free stuff shed in our local dump, and strangely enough this week I came across an account of one of his decendants in the same place. Bertha B. and Ernest Cobb's Allspice, originally published in 1925, was one of a series of books designed not just for children in general but specifically for classroom use, as what we might now call "easy readers." They were sturdily bound, printed in a large-size font, and made use of repetition and a somewhat limited vocabulary. The Cobbs were a husband-and-wife team who operated their own publishing firm (the Arlo Publishing Company) in the Boston suburb of Upper Newton Mills. The illustrations, which we'll get to, are by L. J. Bridgman.

When we first meet Daddy Fox, he has played a cruel trick on Roland Rabbit involving a hive full of hornets. Roland complains to the King (in this case a human, not a lion), who puts a bounty on the fox's head. A miller and his wife scheme to capture him and win the bounty, but with the help of a friend Daddy Fox escapes and miller and wife get their comeuppance. Daddy Fox isn't very honest or very nice, but of course we cheer him on. The title comes from a weak joke about putting salt — or spice — on an animal's tale to subdue it.

As childen's literature goes, Allspice is frankly pretty thin stuff; most kids would probably nod off if it was read aloud to them. The illustrations, however, are quite wonderful. I only wish their sharpness came through better in these scans.

Lewis Jesse Bridgman (1857-1931) was an accomplished artist based in Salem, Massachusetts; an article on the Streets of Salem blog has a brief bio and selections of his work. He's received less attention than some of his peers from the Golden Age of Illustration, but judging from his work for the Cobbs he's ripe for rediscovery. He managed to combine intricate naturalistic detail with a real feel for motion and expression; I particularly like the tenderness with which Ginger Bear rescues his friend from the box in which he is trapped, minus, alas, a bit of his tail. I didn't immediately notice that you can see the feet of the dozing miller and wife just beyond the base of the tree.

Stasys Eidrigevičius

There are some disadvantages to living in the shadow of a cultural capital, and one of them is not being sufficiently exposed to work by artists who may have long been well-known in their own countries and elsewhere but who through whatever whim of the art circuits never seem to earn comparable notice here.

Stasys Eidrigevičius is a Lithuanian-born artist who now resides in Poland. His work first came to my attention sometime in the 1990s, when at least three of the children's books he illustrated were published in the US by NorthSouth Books. Those titles, all of which now seem to be out of print, were Johnny Longnose, The Hungry One, and the best of them, Puss in Boots. (At least one other children's book, Little Pig, has been published by Viking Press; it too appears to be out of print.) Children's books, however, represent only a tiny fraction of Eidrigevičius's output, which includes painting, drawing, posters, political art, sculpture, photography, theatre design, and performances. As far as I can gather from the list of exhibitions on his website he has never had a significant show in New York City.

The images below are, respectively, from Puss in Boots, Johnny Longnose, and Little Pig. The images in the last-named work aren't paintings but photographs centering on painted masks.



There is a distinctive Eidrigevičius look in his picture books, and much of it has to do with the eyes, which are nearly almost wide-open but alarmingly expressionless. As in the films of the Quay Brothers, the worlds of animate and inanimate objects blur disturbingly into one another. Many of his subjects are being held against their will -- perhaps a reflection of his childhood under Communism -- although, as in the images below, it's not always clear exactly who is the captive and who the captor.



It's a fair question whether or not Eidrigevičius's work was ever really marketable for children. I suspect that it may well be in Europe, but perhaps not in the US (though my daughter enjoyed Puss in Boots). It would be nice if the full range of his work could get fuller exposure here.

A Journey Round My Skull has some additional images, and there are many more at the artist's own website. For those with the wherewithal there is a new retrospective collection of his work, Stasys 60, which can be obtained from ABE Marketing in Poland.

I'm not sure what the original purpose was of the image shown at the top of the page, which I found through image searching on the web. The cat's eyes are so mesmerizing that at first I didn't even notice the beaks of the birds, but I think it's the mouth, at once so realistic and so alien, that is the most unnerving.

Margaret and Alexander Potter

This Puffin picture book, which was published in the mid-1940s, is by the husband-and-wife team of Margaret and Alexander Potter. The human figures are almost unbearably crudely done (the cover is by no means the worst example), which is a shame because some of the colored spreads inside are quite appealing.

I don't know how the Potters divided their duties, but they were capable of sophisticated work, at least in terms of architectural draftsmanship (Alexander was an architect by profession). The following three images are from Houses (1948) and are reproduced from the page devoted to the Potters from Chris Mullen's web project called The Visual Telling of Stories.




Chris Mullen incidentally also has some scans from A History of the Countryside, but his images are evidently from a different, perhaps later printing, as they lack the background colors seen in the two-page spread below.


I rather like this layout, which is accompanied by a simple but intelligent discussion of urban planning. Here are close-up scans.



The Independent has an obituary of Margaret Potter, who died in 1984.

Chris Mullen reports that many of the early Picture Puffins, of which he reproduces a number of examples, were lithographed by the printing firm of W. S. Cowell of Ipswich. According to an interview he conducted with a former CEO of the firm, much of the Cowell archive was eventually discarded and burned.

Swallows and Amazons

I'm not big on boating and I've never had much of an urge to read any of these children's adventure stories, although I confess I am intrigued to learn that their author, Arthur Ransome, may have been a Soviet spy. One of these days I really should at least give the first one a shot. I do love these covers though. Ransome himself was responsible for both the jackets and their interior art; some of the books say "with help from Miss Nancy Blackett," but that's the author's little joke, as "Nancy Blackett" is in fact one of the characters in the series. (Ransome also named a yacht after her.)


The Godine editions in the US, which used to be the only ones I had seen, employ different cover art, very handsome in its own way, but the original hardcover jackets are still available in the UK; the full set can be seen [link no longer active] on the website of the Arthur Ransome Society. Some of the colors are more subtle on my copies, which are from the 1950s, by which time the books had already been reprinted dozens of times.