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