The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature Read online

  Access to so many paper stocks at manageable prices (especially after paper duty was reduced in 1837 and abolished in 1861) also gave a great stimulus to the production of magazines, which were to be a prominent element in the nineteenth-century children’s book trade. Their appeal was manifold. Children liked them for their regular arrival, usually weekly or monthly – an event always to anticipate – and also for their diverse contents, for encouraging readers to send in letters or other contributions, for supplying amusements like competitions and puzzles, and above all for serial stories. The latter were also an asset both for the publisher, since a good serial helped to retain readers, and for the author who could receive payment for each number and then a further payment if the serial was turned into a book. That happened frequently and many classics, such as George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (serialised 1868–89; published in book form 1871) or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1881; 1883), or most of the stories by E. Nesbit, first appeared in magazines. Only after the Second World War was there a serious falling-away in Britain of magazines (as opposed to that altogether different phenomenon, comics), the last two examples of note both being associated, first, with individual publishers and, second, with the editorial genius of Kaye Webb: Collins’ Magazine (later Collins’ Young Elizabethan) and that peerless adjunct to the ‘Puffin Club’, promoting everything to do with children’s books and reading, Puffin Post.

  Closely associated with magazines were the Christmas annuals that could range from being bound-up versions of the weekly or monthly parts, furnished with additional leaves of colour plates, to wholly new compilations. The latter flourished most notably in the first half of the twentieth century and in many instances owed much to paper resources. A thick, soft paper, sometimes termed ‘featherweight antique’, bulked out some volumes to an impressive size, while shiny, coated papers could be used for coloured illustrations (some of which might be individually mounted on a different coloured featherweight). Cheerfully decorated or pictorial papers could be used on the board binding which was a decidedly cheaper alternative to cloth. This in its turn could be protected by a paper jacket, an adjunct to book design whose use became universal from the beginning of the twentieth century.8

  As the now prevalent term ‘paper engineer’ suggests, it can be argued that the versatility shown by papermakers in the manufacture of tough papers and thin card singles them out as the founders of ‘the movable book’, a generic term which encompasses the intrusion of modelling processes upon the conventional book-block. Very early examples of this can be found in the use of volvelles – revolving discs mounted on the leaves of manuscripts or printed books, often found in astronomical or astrological treatises – and hinged flaps, used in anatomical works to show the inner workings of body parts. While such might well fascinate children, the first entertaining exploitation of cut paper was in the turn-ups, or ‘harlequinades’, which were associated with theatrical interludes in the mid eighteenth century and which had a broad popular appeal. These harlequinades were illustrated verse texts printed from two engraved copper plates on two sheets of paper. One sheet was placed on top of the other and they were joined along the top and bottom edges. Then the upper sheet was cut to produce eight flaps which the reader could lift sequentially to reveal a development of the story on the sheet beneath.9

  Turn-up narratives were almost always preposterous, attracting their readership through the paper mechanisms rather than any intrinsic merit, and that was to be a common factor in the exploitation of paper toys that reached high peaks of popularity in the latter halves of both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Almost always, even in the comic movables of Jan Pieńkowski or the inventive and over-elaborate creations of Robert Sabuda, it is a ‘gasp’ factor that brings the praises for which a paper engineer or even a team of designers may be chiefly responsible. Such persons were rarely named when the great wave of Victorian novelties began its course, although, round about 1856, the firm of Darton & Co. placed a printed slip in their Book of Trades, Showing the Mechanical Movements in Each Trade which announced that ‘Mr Griffin, the original inventor of moveable books for children arranges and fixes the whole of [their] Instructive. . .Books’.10

  More or less simultaneously with Mr Griffin’s efforts a rival firm was producing ‘Dean’s Moveable Books’. Using a pull-tab within French-folded leaves they offered customers a crude lever through whose agency characters in the pictures could be caused to move certain limbs. From then on movables proliferated, series following series: ‘Changing panorama toy books’, ‘Scenic effect books’ (the first pop-ups, activated by pulling a ribbon), ‘Pantomime toy books’, ‘Flexible-face story books’, ‘Transforming picture books’ – thus paper was engineered to create toy books that were indeed primarily toys.11

  Paper is not, however, only important for its role in the physical make-up of books. There is also its role as a printing surface. In so far as that surface presents a given verbal text to the reader, legibility will depend more on typography and printing than the quality of paper, although the latter’s colour and texture will play some part. Demanding or unfamiliar texts are more likely to gain a readership if they have an attractive appearance; conversely, it hardly seems to matter how well or ill works of accepted popularity are presented: street literature, chapbooks, comics, paperback reprints of the adventures of Biggles or the Famous Five feeding cheaply an assured market.

  Where the quality of paper does matter, however, is in the printing of illustrations, one of the most prominent among the defining elements of children’s literature. As well as being – for adults as well as children – a feature of immediate interest, a book’s illustrations can also be the subject of an analytical debate far more complex than that applied to the printing of texts, and one in which questions of illustrative technique are inseparable from those of paper surfaces.

  At the heart of this debate is the disjunction between origination and result. Authors may dispatch their manuscripts to publishers hand-written, or typed, or as computer print-outs, or as electronic files on disk or attached to emails, and, although there may be arguments and changes made before the manuscript is finally put into pages, the transfer will have little effect on the substance of the author’s discourse. With the illustrator, however, the gap between conception and final appearance is wider and is filled by several incommensurables.

  The simplest procedure is that over which the illustrator has most control. This will occur in autographic methods of picture-making, such as etching or lithography, where the artist is not only working on the surface from which the illustration will be printed but overseeing at least some part of the print-run on as hospitable a paper as is obtainable. Thus, the etcher-engravers preparing the plates of text and pictures for the harlequinades of the 1760s, or, as already mentioned, those creating all-engraved picture books at the start of the nineteenth century would be able to proof their plates to their satisfaction and expect to see them printed on a finer-grade ‘plate paper’ suitable to their graphic detail. We know nothing of how decisions were made as to the choice and positioning of tints in the hand-colouring process, but plate paper was very hospitable to watercolour pigments.

  In similar fashion, the lithographic illustrator will work directly on the stone (or equivalent surface) as, say, Edward Lear did in his Book of Nonsense of 1846 (fig. 4), or Kathleen Hale in her ‘Orlando’ books 100 years later.12 Such work might call for experienced assistance in preparation for publication, but the artist would be far less dependent on the intervention of other parties than the many illustrators who worked on the multitude of illustrated books that were engendered by the stimuli of the machine-press period.

  Figure 4. Edward Lear, A Book of Nonsense. London: T. McLean, 1846, ‘There was an old Derry down Derry’.

  Much of the illustration during the early decades of this period was from engraved wood blocks which could be printed alongside letterpress texts in the same press. As
an artistic medium in the hands of its first great exponent, Thomas Bewick, and of the many creative artists who have delighted in it (and still do), it calls for very careful presswork on a responsive paper which usually needs to be damped in order to take a good impression from the block (fig. 13). Yet the adaptability of wood engraving to many illustrative purposes made it a popular medium and publishers of books and magazines put most of the work in the hands of commercial engravers who copied the artist’s original drawings. (Some artists drew on the blocks before passing them to the engravers and, from 1861 onwards, their drawings could be photographed on to the blocks, allowing them to retain the originals.) No special provision was made for the paper on which monochrome blocks were to be printed, publishing decisions on that score being determined by the total costing of the book or magazine in question, and illustrators (unprotected by copyright) were apt to suffer various indignities from poor engraving of their drawings, illogical placing of them in the text, poor presswork on unresponsive paper, and the re-use of (sometimes worn) blocks for reprints or for quite other purposes than those intended. Illustrators rarely had much say in these matters but, in one famous instance, John Tenniel’s complaints to Charles Dodgson over the printing of the blocks in the first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland led the tyro author (who was paying for the job) to withdraw the finished copies and have the book done over again by a different printer.

  The coming of the camera revolutionised the craft of illustration in more ways than allowing the simple transfer of image to block and thence to page, and it eventuated in the demise of the commercial hand engravers. Photography allied to chemical etching enabled the exact replication of a line drawing as an electrotype block while also permitting reductions or increases in the size of the original, and, with the invention of the half-tone process, it became possible to print photographs and drawings with continuous tone without having to resort to the linear cross-hatching required in wood engravings.

  Even more momentous was the role played by photography in colour printing. To begin with, this too had been a hand craft, albeit one subject to various attempted refinements. Essentially, it relied on the printing of separate colours from wood blocks (or, later, the use of lithographic surfaces) in such a way that a range of tints could be achieved by overlaying one colour upon another: blue upon yellow to make green, for instance. Very often a linear key-block was used to lay down the outlines of the illustrations but the mixing of colours depended largely on the skill and experience of the colour-printer. Edmund Evans, probably the most famous representative of that craft, has described his cutting of the colour blocks for Randolph Caldecott’s picture books (1878–86) (fig. 8) once the artist had supplied him with models coloured on to a proof of the key-block:

  I would engrave the blocks to be printed in as few colours as necessary. This was settled, the key block in dark brown, then a flesh tint for the faces, hands and wherever it would bring the other colours as nearly as possible to his painted copy, a red, a blue, a yellow, and a grey.13

  In the hands of craftsmen of Evans’ distinction, the procedure was often very impressive, but also laborious. At the end of the century, however, the half-tone process, as applied to black-and-white images, was adapted to colour. With the use of graduated colour screens, it became possible (as noted in the description of Peter Rabbit) to photograph coloured drawings so that they could be reproduced by printing in only three colours: yellow, blue and red (although sometimes black was added). The resultant printing demanded careful control of the registration of the three printing plates and a careful selection of ink, but an inescapable drawback was the need to print on a glossy coated paper. Full-colour picture books would be printed entirely on such paper, books with only a selection of colour plates would have them bound or tipped in alongside the standard paper used for the letterpress. Nevertheless, the principle of three-tone photography was adaptable and lent itself happily to more advanced colour-printing methods where sophisticated, electronic colour analysis can occur and where developments in lithographic printing and the production of paper can result in almost perfect reproduction of an artist’s work.

  Thus it is that, through an ever more complex sequence of technological changes, the physical representation of an author’s work makes its way to the reader. A final point to consider though is the outer dress in which it appears, a feature of special interest for the makers of children’s books since the look of the book may influence the initial desire of a potential reader to buy and open it.

  The importance of the binding was not lost on the early purveyors of children’s books and Thomas Boreman and his mid-eighteenth-century contemporaries deserve a place in bibliographical history as perhaps being the first to bind complete editions of their books in a manner designed to attract buyers. Paper again was an essential element, these early traders using a variety of coloured papers, or even wallpapers, to cover their productions and imply (not always very truthfully) the colourful delights within.

  That precedent was never relinquished. Throughout the hand-press period, ideas for paper bindings abounded: decorated paper on its own or covering thicker boards, coloured glazed paper with printed or pictorial labels, simple (but often dowdy) sugar-paper covers with full letter-press elaborations of the title descriptions. And with the advent of cloth binding at the start of the machine-press period, children’s books were also in the forefront of developments, John Harris publishing cloth-bound books as early as 1824. There were even casings for the casings. John Marshall, followed by a number of competitors, made up wooden boxes with sliding lids (some painted to look like elegant book cases) filled with miniature, but readable, story books or simple instructive books in coloured paper covers, while the firm of S. & J. Fuller, trading at ‘The Temple of Fancy’, published paper-doll books which were sheathed in printed card wallets with a wrist-ribbon attached. Subsequent technical developments would be exploited by bookbinders and publishers (who gradually established specialist designers or design departments) so that, right up to the Second World War, an immense range of plain, decorative or pictorial covers in various combinations of materials is to be found.

  As an adjunct to the attractions possible for the outer covering of children’s books came also a playfulness in the transition point formed by the book’s endpapers, the double leaves facing each other at its front and nether ends which helped to attach the covers to the text-block. Having these plain, coloured or decorated, and usually of a different paper-stock, was a common occurrence, but, especially in the twentieth century, the endpapers could become part of the narrative contents. They could be symbolic of events in the story: the jungle endpapers of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963); they could be maps, either repeated front and back as in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930), or changing in detail as with ‘Thror’s map’ in the front of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) and ‘Wilderland’ at the back; they could offer information, as with the simple mechanical definitions in Virginia Lee Burton’s Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel (1938); or they could make a ‘before-and-after’ joke: the dowdily illustrated ‘Wonder Books’ of the 1920s and 1930s probably sold beyond their merits because of the endpapers where various homunculi going about practical jobs at the front are shown to meet with cataclysmic events at the back. In In and Out of Doors (1937), by the Williams-Ellis family, endpaper overkill takes place: a pictorial grid at the front is brought to life through a ‘magic carpet’ which is inserted in a pocket cut into the book’s back cover.

  From 1945 onward, however, staider conventions prevailed in the physical make-up of children’s books, partly because of economic and manufacturing constraints and partly because of the dominance of the library market, for whom gimmicks appealing to the public at large took second place to demands related to durability and conservation. (Tiny books, pop-ups, rag-books and the like found no favour among librarians.) At the same time the irresistible rise of the illustrated book jacket
obviated the need for fancy cloth, or cloth substitutes, and the even more irresistible rise of the paperback brought a concomitant shift in publishers’ marketing. ‘Hardbacks for libraries, paperbacks for bookbuyers’ may over-simplify this shift, but it summarises a ‘democratisation’ of the product – the cheapness, the unformidable nature, the informality of paperbacks encouraging a notable growth in bookshop sales. Kaye Webb’s ‘Puffin Club’ (from 1967) brought soaring print-runs for many titles – the Club was arguably the chief motive force behind the popularity of C. S. Lewis’ Narnia – and the subsequent rise of ‘young adult’ fiction was mediated through paperbacks. Indeed, it is said that manufacturers of jeans had to increase the capacity of pockets to accommodate the customary small crown octavo. In recent years shrink-wrapped teenage paperbacks may incorporate samples of lipstick and other fashion products de rigueur for the sensitive reader.