Penguin Books

    I see now that it has been over a dozen days since I wrote anything and that means the weather has been good. My last post was about an old friend, Graham Murray, and at the end of it I mentioned that he used to order books for us from the U.K. Many of them were Penguins or Pelicans, but we were younger then and had no need for Puffins for the children yet to come.

   A good description of what resulted from such acquisitions is provided by Penelope Lively. Apart from offering a peek at her library, she also mentions the child-rearing advice offered by one author and laments the loss of many of her books.

"Perhaps my most treasured shelves are those with the old blue Pelicans, over fifty paperbacks, including some seminal titles: F.R. Leavis’s "The Great Tradition," Margaret Mead’s "Growing Up in New Guinea," Richard Hoggart’s "The Uses of Literacy," Richard Titmuss’s "The Gift Relationship." And John Bowlby’s "Child Care and the Growth of Love," which had us young mothers of the midcentury in a fever of guilt if we handed our young children over to someone else for longer than an hour or so lest we risked raising a social psychopath – even the father was considered an inadequate stand-in. Pelicans were the thinking person’s library – for 3 shillings and 6 pence you opened the mind a little further. And Penguin had of course their own flamboyant Dewey system – the splendid color-coding: orange for fiction, green for crime, dark blue for biography and cherry red for travel.
I don’t have enough old Penguins. The Pelicans have survived, but the rest have mostly disappeared – read until in bits, perhaps, of left on beaches or in trains or loaned and not returned. And long gone are the days when a paperback publisher could confidently market a product with no image at all on the cover – just the title and the author’s name, emphatically lettered. Beautiful."

   When I last saw Graham he still had many books spread throughout the house where they are cared for by his wife who, you will be glad to know, appreciates them as much as he did. 

Sources:
  The quotation from Lively is found in: Dancing Fish and Amonites: A Memoir, pp.187-188.
   About Penguin Books you can easily find a lot. Up at Western Libraries there are these four books and more:
Baines, Phil. Penguin By Design: A Cover Story, 1935- 2005.
DBWSTK Z271.3.B65 B35 2005.
Greene, Evelyne. Penguin Books: The Pictorial Cover, 1960-1980, 
Storage: Z121.G726 1981
Morpurgo, J.E. Alan Lane: King Penguin - A Biography
Storage: Z325.L247M67 1979
Wooten, William & George Donaldson. Reading Penguin: A Critical Anthology
DBWSTK Z325.P42R433 2013.
Western Libraries even has a lot of Puffin Books which was the children's imprint of Penguin books. For the reason why Western University Libraries has so much "Kiddie Lit" see this post about Landmark Books.
Here is another description of the colours of the various genres:

Orange = General Fiction (F)
Green = Mystery and Crime (C)
Cerise = Travel and Adventure (T)
Dark Blue = Biography (B)
Grey = World Affairs (W)
Violet = Essays and Belles Lettres (E)
Red = Plays (P)
Yellow = Miscellaneous Penguins (M)

If you are really interested in Penguins, see: Penguin First Editions.

The Bonus: The "Penguincubator."

In 1937, "Allen Lane launched the "Penguincubator", a Penguin pocket book vending machine, which he installed in a busy street in London. By inserting 6 pence you choose and receive your book, or better, several books, as the small text under the photo indicates: "Some ingenious people noticed that a clever manipulation of the buttons of the machine made it possible to receive a pretty quantity of books beyond the 6 pence inserted. Lane hopes further testing will create a thug resistant machine".

From: "A Short History of Book Covers -3/4" Grapheine, July 12, 2017.

100 Years of Newbery Medals

Literature For Children

    I happened to receive from AbeBooks, this link which you may find useful and which is interesting to look at. It contains images of the covers of the best children's books since 1922.  We have two young grandchildren (boys) and I find it difficult to identify books to buy them and often consult various "good book" lists of which this is one. Many of the newer lists seem to contain books that are didacticized and diversified to a degree that makes it difficult to determine if they are also enjoyable.

Kiddie Lit
  The ones above are from the last few years and the ones below are from the early years of the last century. 

 It is likely the case that some of the best books found in the earlier years would not be acceptable now. Here is the subtitle of The Dark Frigate, which might be deemed too frightening these days: wherein is told the story of Philip Marsham who lived in the time of King Charles and was bred a sailor but came home to England after many hazards by sea and land and fought for the king at Newbury and lost a great inheritance and departed for Barbados in the same ship, by curious chance, in which he had long before adventured with the pirates,

   If you wanted to find out, you could read The Dark Frigate(1928) or Gay Neck, the Story of a Pigeon (1924) and assess them yourself. Interestingly enough, both of those old books are available in the the London Public Library System and, perhaps more surprisingly to you, in the Western Libraries at Western University.

  The reasons for this are discussed in my post about the children's book series, Landmark Books, in the section about "Kiddie Lit." Although the books are in storage in the university libraries, it is good to see they are still there.  I hope they will find good homes if they are discarded.

Sources:
For other university collections of children's books and the reasons why they have them, see my post about Landmark Books. 

There is a good Wikipedia entry for the Newbery Medal. 

The Caldecott Medal is awarded for the best illustrated children's books. 

LANDMARK BOOKS

      A while back the author Bill Bryson was asked a question, the answer to which provides me with an opportunity to discuss another Book Series. The question posed: “Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?”  

     Given that Mr. Bryson is so good at writing books one figures he will also be good at knowing which ones to read. Here is his answer: “I was completely devoted to an imprint called Landmark Books when I was growing up. I don’t know whether anyone remembers this series anymore, but they were nonfiction hardback books, on historical subjects, written for children or adapted from adult books. They made you feel that you were taking part in a grown-up activity but at a level that you could handle. A good deal of what I know about American history came from Landmark Books. I used to spend nearly all my pocket money on either Landmark Books or, if I was feeling rakish, Hardy Boys books. I am hugely indebted to both.”

     I did read some Hardy Boys books, but I was unaware of the Landmark ones and I know nothing about the current reading habits of children, assuming some still read. Still, given Bryson’s endorsement I thought it worth having a look at Landmark Books. (One has to remember, by the way, that he not only writes good books, he chooses good titles. A recent one, for example: The Road to Little Dribbling ( a path, by the way, down which a lot of gents my age seem to be heading)).

    Landmark Books were published in hardback by Random House during the 1950s and 1960s. They were works of non-fiction that were written for children by well-respected authors. Robert Penn Warren, for example, wrote one about the Alamo. I could go on and I was fully prepared to spend far too much time doing research about Landmark which would have resulted, at some far distant point in time, in a report that was far too long.

    It is the case, however, that one of the people who responded to Bryson’s answer is a professor of history at Furman University, who taught a course utilizing the Landmark Book series. He wrote an excellent account of Landmark which you can find here and which tells you all you need to know: See: “Generations Past: The Story of the Landmark Books,” David Spear, Perspectives on History, Oct. 17, 2016.

KIDDIE LIT

     Having been scooped by Professor Spear, I will turn our attention to ‘Kiddie Lit’, which is a slightly derisive term that was applied to those courses in a college curriculum which considered children’s literature. I recall that Western University has (or perhaps had) a solid collection of books related to children. They were, at one point, in the library of the Graduate School of Library Science, where it was realized that it would be a good thing for those aspiring to be librarians for children to know something about them. There is also a college of education which housed a good collection. As well, there is even material in the humanities library to support courses offered in the English Department. Now, much of this material is in a storage facility and clearly the collection(s) are strong. Among them, for example you will find these Landmark titles.
   

        A Baker’s Dozen of Landmark Books in the Western Libraries

 

Adams, Samuel Hopkins, General Brock and Niagara Falls. (1957)

Daugherty, James, The Landing of the Pilgrims. (1950)

Fehrenbach, T. R. The United Nations in War and Peace. (1968)
Hill, Ralph Nading, The Doctors Who Conquered Yellow Fever. (1957)
Holbrook, Stewart H., The Golden Age of Railroads.(1960)
Hume, Ruth Fox, Great Men of Medicine. (1961)
Kjelgaard, Jim, The Explorations of Père Marquette. (1951)
Lamb, Harold, Chief of the Cossacks. (1959)
Neuberger, Richard L., Royal Canadian Mounted Police.(1953)
Owen, Russell, The Conquest of the North and South Poles. (1952)
Reynolds, Quentin James, The F.B.I. (1954)
Walsh, Richard John, Adventures and Discoveries of Marco Polo. (1953)
White, Anne Terry. Prehistoric America (1951)

Sources:
Bryson's remarks are found in: "Bill Bryson: By the Book," New York Times, Jan. 14, 2016.  The letter from Professor Spear is found in the Jan. 29th issue.

Western does have sizeable collections of material relating to children. Apart from searching 'Childrens Literature' don't forget to look for the 'Ontario Textbook Collection". As well, see this specialized bibliography: An Evaluation and Comparison of the Children's Historical Collections at the London Public Library and in the Special Collections of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (UWO), Deanna C. Wolf.

It is not uncommon for institutions of higher learning to lower their focus to the little ones. See, e.g.
The Children's Literature Collection at the UBC.
The Margo Sandor Children's Literature Collection, U of T.
The Northeast Children's Literature at the Univ. of Connecticut.

The Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature at the University of Florida

(For the story of how it got there, see the chapter on "Obsessed Amateurs" in Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Gentle Madness...)

Post Script
Parental guidance is advised. If you are thinking of getting some of these books for your children you should be aware that some of those who were the biographical subjects in the Landmark series may have recently had their statues removed. You might also want to scrutinize these titles: