Nostalgia, Elegance of Language and Incomparable Ilustrations

by Joan L. Cannon
 
Reading “A Trip to New York City: The ABC of It; Why Children’s Books Matter” about the New York Public Library’s exhibit of children’s books, and one from a recent The New York Times article bemoaning the departure of pleasure horses from Central Park has brought back almost too many memories — if there are such things as too many.
 
Nostalgia engulfed me as I read. Having learned to ride at summer camp, I spent many happy hours on horseback in the park. I’d save up my allowance, take the subway up to Aylward’s Riding Academy somewhere above Columbus Circle, and have a dream hour on one of their rather good mounts. How sad to think that no one at any age level can do that any more, and that most who might want to could never afford it now anyway. Then, it cost me $5 an hour.
 
Then I read “A Trip to New  York City…” Another surge of happy memories.
 
How those books do matter.  Not least for their illustrations. I noticed the second example for the article was by Henry Ford (not of auto fame) who illustrated  many of the Longmans Green & Co’s series, referred to as the ‘Coloured’ Fairy Books by Andrew Lang and The Book of Romance (from the morte d’Arthur) that my cousin and I read and reread as children. We had the Crimson, Orange, Olive, and Blue True Story books. Our grandmother was a certified Anglophile, and she would get us another in the series whenever Wanamaker’s book department in Philadelphia received a new one. Unfortunately, she gave them to us both, so that the day finally arrived when we quarreled over which belonged to whom. I got the Crimson and the King Arthur tales. Ford could make even the Questing Beast look attractive, as you can see from that incredible monster in the lower foreground of the picture accompanying the article.
 
Those books were presented with both elegance of language and with such incomparable illustrations — like Howard Pyle’s and the Wyeths’ later on — that we were hard put to decide if we liked what we read better than what the illustrations showed us. When I later saw Arthur Rackham’s work, it seemed less precisely and realistically rendered than Ford’s, but more mysterious and evocative.

Henry Justice Ford’s (1860–1941) illustration, Rumpelstiltskin, from Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book
 
Naturally, I thought of my father’s two children’s books. The first was published, I think by Doubleday, in 1925.  Alice in Orchestralia later appeared in several foreign countries, some in English changed the title unfortunately. The English version was published by a company that sounds unreal to modern ears: The Bodley Head which is now part of the Random House Group.
 
The illustrations for none of the editions were outstanding, but the book remained in print for quite some time after its author’s death. It was made into a series of radio broadcasts, recorded with music by Don Gillis conducted by the author more than two decades later. It showed its usefulness in teaching children about the instruments of a symphony orchestra for three generations. Alice in Orchestralia was followed by Marching Notes, in which Alice learns the rudiments of music writing and reading from the clefs and notes themselves, ranked like soldiers from the generals down. I remember the dust jacket of Alice, but both my copy and my mother’s have evaporated over the years. I keep meaning to acquire a second-hand copy some day.