The Book Illustrations Of Humphrey Bogart's Mother

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1898, Baby's Record was published by Frederick A. Stokes Co. of New York. Issued in three simultaneous editions featuring one, six, or twelve color illustrations (all here), the book was by Maud Humphrey, who, in the same year, married Dr. Belmont De Forest Bogart. A year later, on Christmas Day, she bore a son. The couple named him Humphrey.

Maud Humphrey was born in 1868 to a well-to-do family in Rochester, New York. Demonstrating a precocious talent for drawing, by age twelve she was taking art classes and soon became one of the founding members of the Rochester Art Club. As a teenager she began to receive commissions to provide illustrations for children's magazines.

At age eighteen she went to New York City and enrolled at the new Art Students League, later making the obligatory pilgrimage to Paris to continue her studies at the Julian Academy. Returning to New York, her ambition and ability were rewarded by her era: it was the beginning of what is now known as the golden age of book illustration, which dawned in the mid-late 1890s with the development of improved printing techniques and color-printing processes, and set when World War I began.

She became a highly in-demand illustrator for magazines, children's books, and advertising, her idealized and highly sentimental portraits of rosy-cheeked babies and youngsters very popular. Ivory Soap was a client, as was Mellin's Baby Food. She preferred to use live subjects and master Humphrey clocked many hours as a babe posing for his mother's Mellin's Baby Food illustrations, often dressed-up in little girl's clothing. 

She ultimately became one of the most sought-after and highly paid female illustrators in the United States, her work reproduced for calendars and all manner of merchandise.

Other books illustrated by Maud Humphrey include Sunshine of Little Children (1888); Babes of the Nations (1889); Baby Sweethearts (1890); Bonnie Little People (1890); Ideals of Beauty (1891); Famous Rhymes from Mother Goose (1891); The Light Princess (1893); The Book of Pets (1893); Little Playmates (1894); Old Youngsters (1897); Little Grown-Ups (1897); The Littlest Ones (1898); Little Rosebuds (1898); Sleepy-Time Stories (1899); Gallant Little Patriots (1899); Children of the Revolution (1900); Little Continentals (1900); Little Folk of '76 (1900); Young American Speaker (c. 1900); and many more.

Maud Humphrey, along with Jessie Wilcox Smith, Bessie Pease Gutmann, Queen Holden, and Frances Brundage, was amongst the most sought-after illustrators of the late nineteenth through early twentieth century, her annual income often reaching upwards of $50,000. The average illustrator was earning approximately $4,000.

The combined income of the Bogarts allowed their son, Humphrey, to grow up in prosperity. The family lived in a large, posh apartment on New York City's Upper West Side, and retreated to an elegant "cottage" on their 55-acre estate on the shore of Canandaigua Lake in upstate New York.

Draw it again, Mom. But, please, no more pinafores.

Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, Maud Humphrey walks into mine, Café Booktryst, where the suspicious, the dubious, the imperiled, and the dispossessed read at the bar until the worst blows over.

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Virtue For Girls In The American Toilet

by Stephen J. Gertz

"Children's books joined the crusade against the prevailing 'pride and affectation in dress,' and little girls in particular were regaled with alarming examples to prove that 'prettiness is an injury to a young lady, if her behaviour is not pretty likewise'" (Kiefer, American Children Through Their Books 1700-1835, p. 94).

In 1827 a curious little book was published in New York. The anonymously written The American Toilet - a title that refers to the rituals of daily grooming and dressing, and the items used to do so - was one of the many early books for children issued to instruct them on the path to adulthood and righteousness. The book's emblematic illustrations were accompanied by moral precepts. It is one amongst the genre known as "conduct books" for children.

At this stage in their development all children's books were didactic in nature, and while great for the parents were dry and deadly to the children compelled read them. Fun was not a part of these books; fun, indeed, was frowned upon and not part of a child's education. Childhood as we now understand it did not exist.  In those days childhood was adulthood with baby teeth.

Modesty, humility, cheerfulness, mildness, truth, contentment, good humor, innocence, compassionate tears, moderation, industry, perseverance, benevolence, fidelity, meekness, charity,  circumspection, discretion, piety, and regularity. These are the virtues that young girls in eighteenth and nineteenth century America were expected to cultivate. They are the virtues that many in modern America believe have gone into the toilet and down the drain. They are the virtues taught in The American Toilet. Conspicuously absent are the dubious modern virtues of gettin' jiggy and workin' your twerk.

The book illustrates various toilet articles, each accompanied by a couplet. 

"Touch with this compound the soft lily cheek / And the bright glow will best its virtue speak," reads the verse for Genuine Rouge. The lesson is bared when a hinged flap on the illustration is raised to expose the virtue. "Genuine rouge" is revealed to be not a cosmetic but modesty.

Book collectors familiar with the genre will recognize the format as a movable or transformation book, and an early one, the simplest then imagined, produced, and published, a "flap-book." It is quite possibly the first produced in America. This added a novel and fun aspect to learning virtues, noticeably absent from other conduct books. Of further interest to collectors is that The American Toilet is amongst the earliest color-plate books published in America to employ lithographs original to the United States, here hand-colored.

Lithography was developed in Europe and during the early nineteenth century all printers skilled in the process were British, French, or German. With few exceptions all early American color-plate books were reprints or piracies of British editions; there were simply no native-born American printers with the necessary skill set at this early point in the century. The plates/stones were imported; the books printed in the U.S. The lithographs in The American Toilet were, in contrast, made in New York by one of the few printer-publishers in the U.S. with the technical know-how to produce them, Imbert's Lithographic Office, a pioneer firm.

"Anthony Imbert, originally a French naval officer, learned lithography while a prisoner of war in England. He arrived in New York about 1825 and immediately undertook a series of illustrations for a Memoir published to celebrate the completion of the Erie Canal. His other work includes a series of New York views, portraits, and cartoons. He is last listed in the New York city directory in 1835, and he died sometime before 1838, when his widow Mary is listed selling boys' clothing on Canal Street" (Connecticut Historical Society Museum and Library).

Advertisement for Imbert in NY American For The Country, January, 1827.

"The American Toilet, a neat little production, sold for account
of a charitable institution, is now at its 2d edition. A few of the
1st edition are yet to be disposed of - price 50 cts."

"The price of the new edition, which has been much
 improved, is 75 cts. in black, $1 colored, neatly bound."

The concept of The American Toilet was not original to the U.S. The book was based upon a flap-book published in London in 1821.

"Small gift books were already popular in England during the 1820s, and the lithographer, Imbert, blatantly pirated a British work to produce his American Toilet. In this delicate little work, the illustrations of various cosmetic canisters have hinged flaps of paper which can be raised to see the 'true' beautifier. Thus 'A Wash to Smooth Away Wrinkles' is revealed to be 'laughter,' 'Genuine Rouge' to be 'modesty,' and so forth" (Reese, Nineteenth Century American Color-Plate Books).

Contrary to Reese, The American Toilet was not a piracy. It was, rather, inspired by The Toilet, which was anonymously written by Stacey Grimaldi, illustrated by his father, miniature painter William Grimaldi, and published in London by N. Hailes and R. Jennings in 1821. I recently had both volumes pass through my hands; the concept is similar, the execution  different, the Grimaldi version with thirty-two pages of text and only nine plates with flaps, the captions not couplets but, rather, extended verses. The American Toilet contains nineteen plates (plus title-page) and no accompanying text. Its illustrations and couplets are completely original.

"Although derivative from Stacey Grimaldi's The Toilet, first published in London in 1821, the American book was the work of the sisters Hannah Lindley Murray and Mary Murray. Neither of them is credited n the book itself, which as copyrighted by George Tracy, and the nature and extent of their involvement in its production is unclear. A second, 'improved' edition was also issued in 1827 for seventy-five cents a copy (the first cost fifty cents), and copies of each were available colored or uncolored. The publication of a second edition indicates some success, and the work was undoubtedly bought as a novelty, since it is probably the first American book to contain transformation plates. It began something of a tradition…" (John Carbonell, Prints and Printmakers of New York State: 1825-1940, edited by David Tatham, p. 24). 

Who were the Murray sisters?

"Hannah Lindley Murray (1777-1836), translator, born in New York City…Her father was a native of Pennsylvania, who settled in New York before the Revolution and was a successful merchant of that city for more than fifty years. The daughter'was an accomplished linguist, and with her sister, Mary, translated Tasso's 'Jerusalem Delivered,' the "Fall of Phaeton' from Ovid, a 'History of Hungary' from the French of M. de Sacy, Massillon's 'Discourses,' and a variety of operas from different languages. She also painted, wrote verses and hymns, and, aided by her sister, composed a poem in eight books on the 'Restoration of the Jews.' None of her writings were published until after her death, when a few of her miscellanies were included in a 'Memoir' by Reverend Gardiner Spring, D. D. (New York,1849)" (Appleton's Encyclopedia).

The first edition of The American Toilet was, apparently, published in 1825. There are five copies in institutional holdings worldwide, all in the U.S. It is scarcely, if ever, seen in commerce. The volume under notice is the second edition, issued without date but, according to the deposit notice verso to the title-page, published on January 11, 1827. It appears that the Murray sisters began the project by producing hand-made copies of the book that they sold to raise money for charity groups. They and their book, it seems, came to the attention of Imbert, who printed it based upon the Murrays' homemade version.

The British version was reprinted more than once. So was The American Toilet. Imbert published a third edition in 1832, and editions, presumably piracies, were published by Kellogg in Hartford, CT in 1841 and 1842 under the title The Young Ladies Toilet. In 1867 another edition was issued, in Washington D.C. by Ballantyne, under the title, The Toilet. There was a crudely produced piracy of The American Toilet published in Charleston, N.C. during the 1830s. "A garish and inferior version on a much larger scale is My Lady's Casket, published in Boston in 1835 [i.e. Lee and Shepard, 1885]" (Muir) with forty-eight recto-only leaves and new illustrations by Eleanor Talbot. The 1827 Imbert edition is typically found with damaged or missing flaps.

Percy Muir, in English Children's Books, discusses the original 1821 version under the rubric, "Toilet Books," a sub-species of conduct books.

If you've been waiting for the toilet-training joke, sorry to disappoint. However flush the possibilities, modesty, discretion, circumspection, meekness, and, in all things, regularity preclude further comment.

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[MURRAY, Hannah Lindley and Mary]. The American Toilet. New York: Printed and Published at Imbert's Lithographic Office, n.d. [January 11, 1827]. Second edition. Twentyfourmo (4 5/8 x 3 5/8 in; 118 x 85 mm).  Hand-colored lithographed title page with deposit notice to verso, and nineteen hand-colored lithographed plates with hinged flaps; a total of twenty hand-colored lithographs. Original full straight-grained morocco, rebacked at an early date, with gilt-rolled border and gilt lettering.

Not in Bennett.  Gumuchian, Les Livres De L'Enfance du XVe au XIXe Siecle 334. Rosenbach, Early American Children's Books 683. Reese 51.

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.

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Dr. Seuss, Political Cartoonist

by Stephen J. Gertz

Seuss's Uncle Sam.

From 1941 through 1943, Theodore Seuss Geisel (1904-1991) created political cartoons for PM Daily, wartime propaganda for the left-leaning newspaper issued in New York by Field Productions, ultimately contributing 400 to PM's editorial and front page.

A complete run of PM featuring all of Geisel's wartime cartoons - all 146 issues - has just come into the marketplace. Each of the cartoons is highlighted by his pro-American, anti-isolationist views, and signed "Dr. Seuss," long before Geisel became the beloved Dr. Seuss, grand master of children's literature.

The Saturday Evening Post had published his first cartoon under the name Seuss in 1927. He subsequently became a successful advertising artist and writer, and, in 1937, had the first of his over sixty children's books published, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street.

The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins followed in 1938, The King's Stilts and The Seven Lady Godivas in the next year, and Horton Hatches the Egg in 1940.

The crisis in Europe troubled him deeply. Mussolini irritated him and Seuss drew a cartoon lampooning Il Duce, submitted it to PM, which accepted it and then kept him busy warning of Fascism and isolationism, taking particular glee against American hero, isolationist, and Nazi-sympathizer Charles Lindbergh. He attacked wartime prejudice against Jews and black Americans. He took shots at anyone who criticized President Roosevelt's handling of the war, including Congress and the press; criticism of aid to the Soviet Union; anti-Communist paranoia; rumor-mongers; and anything and anybody he considered to be giving aid to the Nazis and Japanese, sowing disunity, and undermining the war effort.

Dr. Seuss's experience as a wartime political cartoonist influenced his later books for kids. Horton Hears a Who (1954) is a parable about post-war relations amongst the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Japan. Yertle the Turtle (1958) warns of the dangers of those who wish to rule the world, Yertle standing in for Hitler. Seuss later admitted that when he first drew Yertle the turtle had an Adolf brush mustache.

The faces, figures, creatures, and backgrounds we associate with Geisel's children's books are on display in these cartoons, which share remarkable similarities to the unique worlds he created for children, Dr. Seuss before he became DR. SEUSS.

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Images courtesy of Royal Books, currently offering this collection, with our thanks.
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Of Related Interest:

Lost, Unpublished Dr. Seuss Manuscript Surfaces.

Lost Dr. Seuss Manuscript Sells For $34,004.

Rare, Unpublished Dr. Seuss Original Artwork Comes To Auction.
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An Unrecorded And Incredibly Rare Dean & Son Movable Book Is Discovered

by Stephen J. Gertz

  
Dissolving Views is volume of extreme scarcity, unrecorded anywhere, and with no auction records whatsoever. It is comprised of seventeen movable leaves with tabs which when pulled reveal another image. The first six are identical to those found in Dean's New Book of Dissolving Views (1862) but are here printed on off-white paper; in New Views... the paper is pale violet.

Of New Book of Dissolving Views, Percy Muir in English Children's Books noted, "Three volumes with this title were issued…The first volume appeared in June 1860 in an edition of 2,000 copies. The first picture in it is of a windmill, which 'dissolves' into a three-master at sea. The second volume…appears to have contained scenes from the Harlequinade. The third volume, with no indication that it was a sequel, appeared in November 1862, in an edition of 6,000 copies.. The first picture is that of a woman nursing a child, which changes to a piccaninny" (p. 234).

It appears that the seventeen movable leaves (I'm told that there were actually a total of eighteen) in Dissolving Views were divided into three volumes of six views each for the New Book of Dissolving Views series.

 

We can only conclude that the volume under notice precedes Dean's New Book of Dissolving Views series by a few years. Why this edition contains so many more views than subsequent issues remains a mystery but perhaps it was a case of too much of a good thing and, expensive to produce, the subsequent editions limited the views to six per volume.

It may also be that this was a transitional volume for Dean and Son from movables marketed to adults - it is bound in cloth with elaborate blindstamping and a gilt vignette as centerpiece, not in pictorial boards as one would expect for juvenalia and typical for Dean and Son - to movable books aimed at children who were, ultimately, the logical target audience.

And it is surely early: the cloth, blindstamping and vignette design are typical of the 1840s/early-mid1850s.

Whatever the truth, this is most certainly amongst the rarest of all Dean & Son movable books.

"The first true movable books published in any large quantity were those produced by Dean & Son, a publishing firm founded in London before 1800. By the 1860s the company claimed to be the 'originator of childrens' movable books in which characters can be made to move and act in accordance with the incidents described in each story.' From the mid-19th century Dean turned its attention to the production of movable books and between the 1860s and 1900 they produced about fifty titles" (Montanaro, A Concise History of Pop-Up and Movable Books).

"Dean and Son was the first publisher to produce movable books on a large scale. Thomas Dean, who founded the firm sometime before 1800, was one of the first publishers to take full advantage of the new printing process, lithography, which was invented in Germany in 1798. His business was devoted exclusively to making and selling novelty books, or 'toy' books, a term publishers began using in the early nineteenth century. His son George became a partner in 1847, and their toy books took over the market from the 1840s to the 1880s.

"Dean opened studios in London where teams of artists worked to design and craft all kinds of new and complex movables. Around 1856, Dean released a series of fairy tales and adventure stories under the title New Scenic Books. The scenes in the books were crafted in a "peep show" style. Each was illustrated on at least three cut-out sections. The sections were placed one behind another and attached by a ribbon running through them. This way, they could stay together and be folded flat as flaps, face down against a page. When a readers lifted a flap, a three-dimensional scene would actually pop-up!  A later, but good example of this technique is McLoughlin Brothers' The Lions' Den (ca. 1880), which is held together by a piece of board across the top instead a a ribbon.

"The books in new scenic series are probably the first that today's readers would consider pop-up books, although the term "pop-up" was yet to be used to describe such books. 'Movable' or 'toy book' was usually the choice for description. In 1860, Dean actually claimed to be the 'originator' of movable books.

"During the 1860s, Dean can be credited with inventing another first: the use of a mechanism that moved or was animated by pulling a tab. Dean advertised the new mechanisms as 'living pictures.' The Royal Punch & Judy is one of these early publications with tabs, which are located on the bottom of each page. In it, Punch and Judy are animated in their miniature theatre and act out all the violence and abuse that a Victorian audience would have expected from the couple" (University of North Texas, A Brief History of Early Movable Books). 

Miraculously, only one tab has been repaired to this copy; the others are all original and in fully functioning order suggesting that, indeed, this was a movable meant for adults otherwise it would have been a wreck secondary to book abuse of the child kind.

The Views:

1. Land. Sea.
2. War. Peace.
3. Day. Night.
4. Summer. Winter.
5. Fire. Water.
6. Earth. Air.
--
7. Fair. Dark.
8. War. Peace. (alternative images).
9. The Ocean Way. The Iron Way.
10. Outside. Inside.
11. Danger. Safety.
12. Saturday Night. Sunday Morning.
13. A Goose Hunt. Who's The Goose?
14. Fruit Search. Fruitless Result.
15. Sausage Meat. All Alive, O!
16. Pork Pie. Its Contents.
17. Curious Cabbage. Fighting Tailor. 

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[MOVABLE BOOK]. Dissolving Views. To look at these Views effectively, keep the Book flat on a Table, - pull the shaft from the bottom, for one View, and from the top for the other. London: Dean & Son, n.d. [c. 1856-59].

First edition (?). Tall octavo (10 3/8 x 7 in; 263 x 177 mm). Seventeen movable leaves as hand-colored woodcuts. Publisher's original deep purple cloth, elaborately blindstamped, with central gilt vignette of title spelled out as tree branches.

Cf. Osborne, p. 417.

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One of the Great Rare Books of Children's Literature Is Back

by Stephen J. Gertz

Hurrah for Peter Parley
Hurrah for Daniel Boone
Three cheers sir, for the gentleman
Who first observed the moon!
 - Emily Dickinson, from Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Daniel  Boone,  check. The  gentleman  who  first  observed  the  moon  (presumably, Adam),  check. 

Peter Parley. Who?

One of the great and legendary rarities of American children's literature, with only seven copies found in library holdings worldwide and only three copies appearing at auction within the last thirty-six years, has come to market after a sixteen year dry spell.

The Tales of Peter Parley About America was the most important American children's book issued up to its time of publication, 1827, and a major, highly significant influence upon children's literature in the English-speaking world  forever afterward, soon drawing otherwise adult-oriented authors to the field. Samuel Griswold Goodrich, a Boston publisher writing under a pseudonym, wrote it to remedy the sorry state of contemporary juvenile  literature. At the time, juvenilia was a heavy-handed, pedagogic, moralistic, dull, drab, and dreary branch of literature; otherwise unremarkable tracts remarkable only for their soporific qualities.

"Though I was busily engaged in publishing various works, I found time to make my long meditated experiment in the writing of books for children. The first attempt was made in 1827, and bore the title of The Tales of Peter Parley About America. No persons but my wife and one of my sisters were admitted to the secret - for in the first place, I hesitated to believe that I was qualified to appear before the public as an author, and in the next place, nursery literature had not then acquired the respect in the eyes of the world it now enjoys. It is, since that period, that persons of acknowledged genius - Scott, Dickens, Lamartine, Mary Howitt, in Europe, and Abbott, Todd, Gallaudet, Miss Sedgwick, Mrs. Child, and others, in America - have stooped to the composition of books for children and youth" (Goodrich, Recollections of a Lifetime, pp. 279-80).

Though starting slow, sales soon ran wild.

"I published my little book, and let it make its way. It came before the world untrumpeted, and for some months seemed not to attract the slightest attention. Suddenly I began to see notices of it in the papers, all over the country, and in a year from the date of its publication, it had become a favorite. In 1828, I published The Tales of Peter Parley About Europe; in 1829, Parley's Winter Evening Tales; in 1830, Parley's Juvenile Tales, and Parley's Asia, Africa, Sun, Moon, and Stars. About this time the public guessed my secret - it being first discovered and divulged by a woman - Mrs. Sarah J. Hale, to whom, by the way, I am indebted for many kind offices in my literary career - yet I could have wished she had not done me this questionable favor. Though the authorship of the Parley books has been to me a source of some gratification, you will see, in the sequel, that it has also subjected me to endless vexations" (ibid).

Other books were written for the series, many reprinted in England, and many more books issued by unscrupulous publishers who co-opted the Peter Parley franchise that Goodrich had established.

"In the USA, one of the most active writers in the field of children's literature...was Samuel Griswold Goodrich (1793-1860), universally known by his pseudonym 'Peter Parley', a name soon appropriated by publishers in Britain for works by other authors. His first book using this name was Peter Parley's Tales of America, 1827, published in Boston...The contents of his Tales of America, as with his other books of history and travel, were 'designed to give to the child the first ideas of Geography and History,' for which reason he was careful to research thoroughly, and to present what was then considered to be a factual background, although today his bias is obvious. The secret of his success was...the use of simple language coupled with an interesting text, full of action, and a real-life atmosphere, in which the heroes occasionally ended up dead and the wicked escaped justice...

"The solid fare of fact was sugared with instant drama and excitement of a real-life (or backwoods-fiction) hair's-breadth escape from death at the hands of the Redskins. Youthful attention had seldom time to flag...

"By the mid-1830s the name Peter Parley was a household word with the juvenile reading public of the United States of America" (Quayle, Collector's Book of Children's Books, pp. 57-58).

The Tales of Peter Parely About America  "was followed by more than 100 other volumes with the Parley name. In these books a kindly and omniscient old gentleman is represented as talking to a group of inquiring children and instruction is given a thin sugar-coating of fiction. They met the educational needs of the time and sold by the million" (Dictionary of American Biography).

"I shall not weary you with a detail of my proceedings at this busy and absorbed period of my life. I had now obtained a humble position in literature, and was successful in such unambitious works as I attempted. I gave myself up almost wholly for about four years - that is, from 1828 to 1832 - to authorship, generally writing fourteen hours a day. A part of the time I was entirely unable to read, and could write but little, on account of the weakness of my eyes. In my larger publications, I employed persons to block out work for me; this was read to me, and then I put it into style, generally writing by dictation, my wife being my amanuensis. Thus embarrassed, I still, by dint of incessant toil, produced five or six volumes a year, mostly small, but some of larger compass" (op cit., Goodrich).

Millions may have been sold but few copies have survived; they were literally read to bits by children, who were utterly captivated.

"This neat little volume is very happily adapted to the class of readers for whose use it is intended. It furnishes a very entertaining narrative, embracing a good deal of useful information. Books of this kind, we hope, will soon become more numerous than now; and the author of this volume will doubtless find it worth while to proceed with the series which he has so successfully begun. The same neatness of execution which characterises the present will be a valuable recommendation to subsequent publications" (American Annals of Education, 9 : 512 [August 1827]).

For all his achievements, however, with children's books, Peter Parley, alas, never picked a pack of pickled peppers. That honor lies with and shall forever remain the property of that other mainstay of juvenilia, Peter Piper.
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PARLEY, Peter (pseudonym of Samuel Griswold Goodrich). The Tales of Peter Parley About America. Boston: S.G. Goodrich, 1827.

First edition. Twelvemo (5 1/4 x 3 3/4 in; 133 x 95 mm). [2, blank], iv, [1, blank], 5-142 pp. Thirty-six black and white wood engravings on thirty-two plates.

Publisher's original rust-red leather spine over blue boards.

Blanck 1. Grolier American 35. Morgan, Children's Literature 49.
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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.

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