Childhood inspired the January 2021 meeting. Collectors presented books ranging from poetry to prose and from children's books to elementary school curriculum. Many of the books were intended for children while some cross-generational books help bring out the inner child in adults. Classic and favorite books for young readers often evoke images of our own childhood, yet most books shown during the meeting were from the late 1800s to early 1900s. With only one exception, the books submitted for this blog were published between 1869 and 1913, so they were clearly not personal childhood keepsakes of the collectors.
Sadly, most adults do not still possess the books from their
childhood; for collectors it is a constant lament. For some, it is a motivation to procure the
same edition of a favorite title from one's childhood. In a similar vein, one collector found a copy
by a favorite author with a delightful, apposite inscription. Another collector obtained a copy of a book once
owned by his favorite author as a child.
These exciting acquisitions lead off our exploration of childhood.
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| Floor Games |
Wells, H. G. Floor
Games. Boston: Small, Maynard and
Company, 1912. With photographs by
the author and marginal drawings by J. R. Sinclair. First American edition. Wells begins Floor Games: “The
jolliest indoor games for boys and girls demand a floor, and a home that has no
floor upon which games may be played falls so short of happiness.” Wells was a proponent of playing with one’s
children; he adored his children and was intentional in spending time with
them, especially his two sons (pictured on the cover). He sets out in this book to provide the
reader with both a checklist of items needed and a framework for a spectrum of
games to be played in large rooms designed for play. He describes a variety of games he and his
children play with a basic set of “bricks” (cut wood), boards and planks,
clockwork railway rolling stock and rails, and toy soldiers and other
figures. Using these essentials, Wells provides
accounts and photos of some of the games he and his sons have played, with a
single game taking days, if not weeks, to set up and play. Wells concludes Floor Games with only
the briefest description of a type of floor game, war games; this inclusion
sets up Well’s companion book, Little Wars, published the following
year.
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| Little Wars |
Wells, H. G. Little Wars: A Game for Boys from Twelve Years of Age to One Hundred and Fifty and for That More Intelligent Sort of Girls Who Like Boys’ Games and Books. London: Frank Palmer, 1913. With photographs by the author and marginal drawings by J. R. Sinclair. First edition. War games were not new for either boys or men; an adult Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, kept detailed diaries of his war games written as his army general’s field journal. The invention of a working 4.7” naval gun that fired projectiles revolutionized the game, and Wells put pen to paper to create a set of rules of war and standardize the engagement of infantry and cavalry soldiers. As the subtitle of Little Wars suggests, Wells intended the game to be enjoyed by both children and adults. Photographs in the book show him and Jerome K. Jerome, a fellow author, setting up and playing war games.
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| H. G. Wells and Jerome K. Jerome playing war games |
Provenance
Graham Greene, in his memoir A Sort of Life, recounts
playing war games as a child:
My favorite toys in those days were a
clockwork train and lead soldiers. When
the soldiers had lost too many limbs to stand up we melted them down in a
frying pan over the nursery fire and dropped them into cold water as people do
now in Sweden on New Year’s night, seeking omens of the future… When I was a
bit older (about twelve) I would play with Hugh, who was six, an elaborate war
game based on H. G. Wells’s book Little Wars. In the holidays we were able to use the big
tables in the School House dining-hall.
We would push two tables together and lay out a whole countryside. There were roads marked in chalk and cottages
and forests of twigs and rivers which had to be crossed. One game might last a week, with perhaps two
hundred men on either side, quick raids by cavalry and slow advances by
infantry, measured on lengths of string, melees which led to the capture of
prisoners, and bombardments with the two 4.2 [sic] naval guns. It was 1916, but war was still glamorous to a
child.
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| Graham Greene's childhood ownership signature |
This book is Graham Greene’s childhood copy of Little Wars. He was nine years old when the book was first published. His boyhood ownership signature appears in pencil on the front inside cover (three times) and he has penciled game scores and annotated field notes in his own hand on the rear blank pages. Several stick figures, likely drawn by his younger brother Hugh, appear on several pages throughout.
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| Scores and field notes recorded by Graham |
Despite Wells’s simple yet detailed rules, they were apparently insufficient for Graham and Hugh. Graham added two rules pertaining to the firing of the naval gun and the carrying of sandbags by soldiers. The additional rules are written in ink in Graham’s hand in the bottom margin of the text covering rules.
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| Additional rules written by Graham |
The copy appears to have been well used by Graham. The binding is loose at the spine, with several pages completely detached and some pages holding on by a single thread. Despite being well worn and in fragile condition, it is complete with all pages and tipped-in photos present.
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| Snoopy and His Sopwith Camel |
Schulz, Charles M.
Snoopy and His Sopwith Camel.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969. First Edition. A sequel to Snoopy and the Red Baron,
tales of Snoopy’s World War I flying ace adventures. This copy is inscribed, “For John - Charles
M. Schulz,” and with an original full-page hand-drawn portrait by Charles
Schulz of Snoopy smiling and wearing goggles, a scarf, and a flight cap.
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| Charles Schulz inscription with drawing |
The collector was fortunate to acquire the book inscribed to “John” even though Charles Schulz passed away in 1999. The collector’s first name is John!
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| Noah Webster and Charles Pooler spellers |
Spelling matches became popular in the United States in the 1800s, with the first documented spelling match occurring in 1808. By 1850, the contests became known as spelling bees and were held in schools and towns throughout the country. Their advent coincided with the publication of spelling books introduced a few years earlier. Noah Webster’s first spelling book was published in 1786. Webster’s spellers quickly became the standard for both spelling bees and elementary classroom instruction, though other spelling books such as Pooler’s Test Speller were widely available. The first national spelling bee was held by the National Education Association during its annual conference in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1908, the same year Webster’s then-newest edition speller was published.
Webster, Noah. The
Elementary Spelling Book, Being an Improvement on the American Spelling Book. New York: American Book Company, 1908. First published in 1786 as The American
Spelling Book, Webster’s speller was colloquially known as “the Blue-backed
speller” and was an essential part of the curriculum for elementary school
children. Because the nickname stuck,
later editions such as this copy of The Elementary Spelling Book were
also bound in a blue cover, even as the name of the book changed with new
editions. The publication of this 1908
edition coincided with the first national spelling bee.
Pooler, Charles Thomas.
Pooler’s Test Speller for the Use of Teachers’ Institutes and Other
Spelling Classes. New York: American
Book Company, 1875. At only 79
pages, Pooler’s Test Speller—compared to Webster’s 174-page The
Elementary Spelling Book—was a less comprehensive spelling list, focusing
on words which are harder to spell correctly.
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| Poems of Childhood and A Child's Garden of Verses |
Field, Eugene. Poems of Childhood. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904. Illustrated by Maxfield Parrish. First American Edition. Bound in 3/4 leather with raised bands and gilt tooling on the spine, matching the following title.
Stevenson, Robert Louis.
A Child’s Garden of Verses.
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905. Illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith. First American Edition. Binding matching the above title.
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| Our Soldier Boy |
Fenn, George Manville. Our Soldier Boy. Philadelphia: Henry Altemus Company, 1900. With original dust jacket, bearing advertising for other titles by the publisher. Fenn was a prolific English writer, authoring 161 children’s books as well as several short stories, biographies, plays, and other works. His most notable children’s books are Young Robin Hood (1899) and The Bag of Diamonds (1887). His last published book was George Alfred Henty, a biography of a fellow juvenile writer, published in 1907.
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| Kardoo, the Hindoo Girl, and Other Stories |
Brittan, Harriet G., et. al. Kardoo, the Hindoo Girl, and Other Stories. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1869. From the publisher’s Series for Youth, eight stories on the social life and customs of Hindu children for the purpose of educating children with the hope that “American children will pity and pray for heathens in other lands.” The title story, “Kardoo, the Hindoo Girl” by Harriet G. Brittan was republished from the London Religious Tract Society. Brittan was a British-born American missionary to Liberia, India, and Japan; in India, she served with the Zenana missionaries. Zenana missionaries were female missionaries sent to British India to convert women to Christianity, beginning in 1854. The missionaries would meet with the Indian women in the zenana, a private part of the house where men were not allowed. Tracts such as these were written to inspire girls and encourage them to become missionaries themselves.
