Boone on the altar

The Wilderness Road

Hagiography is the only word for this biography of the patron saint of our ever distant frontier past. In contrast to the samples posted previously these illustrations vault the reverence and heroism of the subject even higher by aligning it with fine art and situating Daniel Boone in compositions evocative of the work of Regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton. Four illustrations by James Daugherty are reproduced as color plates with Struggle also doubling as the cover art. The book is copyrighted 1922 so it is not a stretch to connect Daugherty's work with Benton's or Regionalist work in general. Compare The Wilderness Road (above) to the 1920 painting The People of Chilmark by Benton (below). The same sculpted forms range across each mural-like drama. As an aside it is interesting to note that Benton is also classified as a Social Realist among whose key tenets was the intentional distancing from idealism encouraged by Romanticism. From today's perspective I see a work like People of Chilmark as having distinct Romantic qualities, especially in its overall atmosphere, and not so distant from an arch Romantic work like Gericault's famous painting pared below.

 People Of Chilmark

The Raft of the Medusa

Daugherty's illustrations continue below weirdly working into his palette Fauve-ish hues. The contemporary portrait of Native Americans is jarring. You can almost feel your adrenalin rush imagining the purpose of those war clubs should the savages discover our subject in Escape. And no less remarkable is the choice of Struggle to emblazon the book. The image says it all: kill or be killed - " the only good Indian is a dead Indian". Boone's life spanned the American Revolution and he famously pushed the frontier forward and although he died in 1820 twenty-five years before Manifest Destiny articulated the readily apparent and inexorable expansion across the continent he clearly represents the nascent force to behold, encompass and usurp the land and that force is effectively imbued in these pictures. I hope the reader will understand, as I do, these armchair impressions are very, very simplistic within the complexity of American History, race relations, capitalism and doggone fate.

Escape

Vision

Struggle

Book cover

Maple Sugar

Cabin in the Clearing

Taken together these posts on books about Daniel Boone offer glimpses into different ways the subject and the larger topic of frontier times have been treated from the fanciful to the textbook to the canonical. In addition to these are the flagrantly commercial and the downright cartoon, examples which we'll see later.

Davey Crockett From Classic Series

Back cover

Endpapers

Davey Crockett

Frank L. Beals, Jack Merryweather 
Wheeler Publishing Co., 1941

Also in the American Adventure Series by Wheeler Publishing, Davey Crockett exemplifies still another facet of the great frontier mythology this country nourished itself with. Disparate historical persons, places and events, milled as they were into such robust fictions and often conflated always bore as much fatal flaw as they did any benevolence borne of the hagiography around them. The phenomenon for frontier accoutrement and ephemera spurred by the 1950's Disney Davey Crockett features is well documented. Coonskin caps flew off the racks as did myriad toys, rubber knives, lunch boxes, etc. Disney pre-emptively shorted the source of their gains by truncating the feature to only a few episodes before killing off the lead in the Alamo fiasco. They had not anticipated such a colossal hit. This backdrop is one of the major contexts in which frontier heroes are understood, especially by boomers. The Wheeler books precede this though and present a more subtle iconography although no less reverential.  

Considering how insidious and virile these topics and their depictions were in the golden age of American children's books it's startling to think that they are virtually off the map now. The real and imagined events they fleshed out are receding to the point of irrelevance in kids imaginations and certainly don't weather well the brunt of that pesky hobble, political correctness, either.

Of note, nice endpapers ( as with the D. Boone).

Daniel Boone From Classic Series

Daniel Boone

Edna McGuire, Jack Merryweather 
Wheeler Publishing Co., 1945

Presented here is a more typical Daniel Boone biography originating from the American Adventure Series by Wheeler Publishing. The series presented classic subjects ranging from our nation's beginnings through manifest destiny but curiously topped with a few anomalies e.g. anomalous airplane pilot bio's attesting, I suppose, to the eminence of WW2 heroes and the myth-making handiwork cobbled them into our national pantheon. This volume and the companion Davey Crockett constitute, at present, my small collection. Regrettably, there might have been more but for some reason I passed on several others in that dusty Brooklyn book nook that day. A subsequent trip there digging deep into the stacks did not turn them up. Alas, one of those tough lessons.


The illustrations in this biography are typical of myriad books on Daniel Boone. A sturdy and chiseled romantic iconography peoples the book in full page illustrations and spot vignettes. Work like this takes it's cue from preceding pictures and cements their primacy by duplication.


I'm not 100% sure of the target age of this series but young readers from 12-16 seems a reasonable guess. However, these American Adventure books are consistent with a general post-war phenomenon of book series, not necessarily children's, that are explored in depth in Series Americana by Carol Fitzgerald. As exhaustively researched as her previous work on The American Rivers Series and like those titles this voluminous array also was given exhibition form by the Bienes Museum of the Modern Book at the Broward County Public Library in Florida. The contents of that exhibition and survey may be viewed here:
Series Americana exhibition 

Enpapers

Daniel Boone

Cover

Title Page

Beginning page

Sample page

Spot illustration

Daniel Boone

Esther Averill, Feodor Rojankovsky  

Harper & Row, 1945 



This is the first of several posts featuring books about or ephemera related to Daniel Boone, a subject that fascinated me from an early age: something about getting to carry around a knife just seemed cool. Plus other accoutrement: pouch for musket balls, powder horn, buckskin clothes ... a whole generation cut their consumer teeth on myriad facsimiles and renditions of such things vis-a-vis Disney's Davy Crockett in the 1950s - but we'll get to that later. Daniel Boone, it is reported, loathed coonskin caps and did not wear one in spite of an iconography begun in his lifetime that persists to this day.


This is the library binding of one of the more interesting Daniel Boone books I've seen. The illustrations are particularly noteworthy, evoking Russian constructivist print designs, as, for example, in the spot illustration of the cabin in the woods opposite the beginning page. The illustrator, Feodor Rojanovsky was fine art trained and after World War 1 studied in Paris under the author. He is more well know for illustrations of animals, a classic example of which is forthcoming here. In this edition Rojanovsky's pictures are enhanced by the brilliant inks of post-war American offset lithography production. They almost leap off the page. Nevertheless, possessing little or nothing of a woodsy spirit they are a curious match for the quintessential icon of woodland lore and the early frontier.

Jan 29, 2012 addendum: a post on the blog Collecting Children's Books has additional information on the origins of this book and original Domino Press cover. Click link, scroll about 1/3 of the way down the post: Domino Press original cover design for Averill's Daniel Boone

Lazy Fox and Red Hen

Lazy Fox and Red Hen

Pictures by Suzanne

1957 Western Publishing


Published by Whitman Books, a subsidiary of Western Publishing (home of Little Golden Books) Lazy Fox and Red Hen is one of my oldest - meaning in possession of - children's books and was among my earliest exposure to fox/ wolf iconography which always mesmerized me and of which I hope to explore more on this blog. And to this day fox's tumble down shack is the indelible imprint of the meaning of "rickety" for me. 

Just What the Doctor Ordered

Just What the Doctor Ordered

Samuel Lowe Co., 1954

Identified on the cover as a Bonnie Book this is another of the Little Golden book-like size and format publications attesting to the latter's market success. Just What the Doctor Ordered is presented here for its notable front cover feature, the die-cut window revealing an Rx (medical prescription). And what of the emblazoned "hafta"? How does that figure into our nation's education challenges; harbinger or result?

The various games, puzzles, riddles etc. seem culled from sources or a sensibility predating the Fifties, in some cases going back to, like, the twenties. Odd.

Hiawatha

Hiawatha

Marion Gridley, Irma Wilde

Rand McNally, 1950

Rand McNally Elf Books and Junior Elf books echo Little Golden Books as compact, uniform publications with tried and true subjects such as animals, folklore and anthropomorphised things like tugboats or what have you. Here we have their rendition of Hiawatha suggested by Longfellow's epic poem presented sans trochaic tetrameter! A slightly more naturalistic presentation characterizes these illustrations versus those of Little Indian.

Cover

Back

Title page

End papers

Illustrations

The Little Indian

Cover

Little Indian

Margaret Wise Brown, Richard Scarry

Simon & Schuster, 1954

Little Indian is a Little Golden Book authored by Margaret Wise Brown of Goodnight Moon fame (plus numerous other works) and Richard Scarry who also probably needs no introduction if you've made it to this site out of affinity towards children's books. The book is posted out of my general interest in Indian and woodland cultures and especially their depiction in mid-century illustration. More of that to follow.

Title page

Welcome to Waterwall's Vintage Kid's Books

From my own collection, this blog presents a comparatively narrow selection of children's literature from the golden age, namely the 20th century. Most of the books presented here share common themes or common graphic features of personal interest and the relevant details of which are commented on in short posts. If any of these titles are familiar to you I hope you'll enjoy rediscovering them and if they are new to you I hope they'll be as interesting a discovery as they were for me. Some of the books presented here are favorites from my own childhood; others are more recent discoveries, mostly through trolling used bookstores or flea markets here and there which is to say this later group is made up of real-life, real-time surprises and not internet auction sales.

Occasionally other vintage objects may make their way into the blog if they have some relation to the books, themes or graphics.

This blog was partly inspired by other great blogs about children's books. For example, Vintage Kid's Books My Kid Loves  http://www.vintagechildrensbooksmykidloves.com// is a heap of work by a passionate and dedicated author who has posted hundreds of books and if you're a boomer or post-boomer like me it is one heck of a trip down memory lane. Sites like VKBMKL are distinctly more all-inclusive than my modest blog. Here I'm targeting a more nuanced type of material and whether hunting down one of these esoteric books has brought you here or if if you've just stumbled here along the www  welcome ~ and enjoy!