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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
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
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