Mayetta Pioneer Days 2024

 

I had a rather eventful trip to Kansas last weekend, for the Oct. 5th Mayetta Pioneer Days celebration. My family was supposed to meet up and share a booth space, but my parents didn't make it there due to surprise health issues (all appears to be well now, but not in time to make it to the party). The rest of us managed to have fun anyway. Here's a picture of me that morning at my newly-set-up book table, wearing my sunbonnet because it was Pioneer Days. The sun came out later on, but so did the wind. I tried taping my book stands in place, but in the end I had to take about half of them down and just lay the books flat so they wouldn't keep blowing over. I did sell several books, so that was nice, and I gave away a lot of advertising bookmarks.

Here's a picture of my kids watching the rope spinning demonstration. None of my still shots from that turned out--maybe because I didn't realize my flash was on, which slowed down the shutter speed--so I took a screenshot from the video I recorded. The rope spinning demonstration is always my favorite activity at Pioneer Days.

The battery for my phone didn't last through the day very well, so I couldn't use it to take photos of the parade at the end. My aunt let me borrow her phone to get a few shots, though, and I like this one of my kid waving at a float. It was a busy day that didn't exactly go as planned, but I was definitely glad I went. 

Temple of Fancy Paper Dolls--Frederick, or The Effects of Disobedience

 

Here's another one of those early 1800s paper dolls from S & J Fuller at the Temple of Fancy. Frederick, or The Effects of Disobedience was published in 1816. In this story, Frederick is a fourteen-year-old boy who runs away from home because he is too lazy to study Greek and Latin. Of course the first thing he does is dress as a sailor and get on a ship, which doesn't work out nearly as well as he expects it to. You can read Frederick's story on the Internet Archive here. He manages to get captured by pirates not once, but twice (well, once by "a Barbary corsair" and once by "an American privateer," but... those are both pirates) and have a few other awkward adventures. Some of these involve dressing in women's clothing as a disguise, so the two incongruous-seeming outfits with dresses really do belong to this set. Eventually Frederick meets up with some English soldiers, fights in one battle, and is sent home heroically wounded to apologize to his parents--and to his Greek and Latin teacher. You know, good 1800s morality tale drama.

The Bryn Mawr College was kind enough to share a printable version of Frederick online, but their copy is missing his head and all his hats. Their solution to that problem was to throw Little Henry's head on the scanner with Frederick's clothes, which technically would make it possible to play with the set. I had already constructed a Little Henry set, though, and I didn't want a Frederick with the wrong head. So I set out on a quest to find out what he was actually meant to look like. Eventually I found scans of an old book from 1899 called Pages and Pictures from Forgotten Children's Books, and on page 255 was a black and white picture of Frederick's head! If poor Frederick was "forgotten" by 1899, no wonder I had trouble finding him in 2024. By this time I was resigned to having to colorize the black and white image, but a while later I found pictures of a different doll in the series with an incorrect head--and since I had seen the picture of Frederick in black and white, I knew who he actually was when I saw him in color. So I am quite sure that my version of Frederick now has the correct head. The hats I decided to give him, however, are wild guesses. 

Frederick and Little Henry have matching sailor outfits, though in completely different poses. The hat I've put on Frederick was supposedly Little Henry's, though it can't actually be Henry's because all Henry's hats are otherwise accounted for. That doesn't mean it was originally Frederick's, of course--the copy of Little Henry that it was seen with appeared to have swapped heads with a doll named Hubert, so I suppose the hat could also have belonged to him. It does look similar to the hats on the background characters behind Henry's sailor suit, though I'm not completely sold on the feather. 

Frederick's "peasant" clothing isn't really a beggar outfit, but the stick and bundle makes him fit in pretty well with Fanny, Henry, and Ellen in their beggar clothes. He could have had a hat to go with it, but I have not managed to find one that I think fits. Maybe he could wear the possible sailor's hat with it.

The turban and also the dashing plumed hat in the first picture above were spotted with a different doll from this series called Young Albert. Young Albert's head is facing the opposite direction from Frederick's, and while it's hard to tell the front of a turban from the back, the plumed hat absolutely cannot have originally been Albert's. Once again, that doesn't mean it was Frederick's, but it fits his pose and looks pretty good with one of his outfits, so he might as well wear it. And of course he can't reasonably pass for a French girl without something to cover his hair, so I made him a lace bonnet by combining the basic shape of an unknown hat in a blurry picture of the Ellen paper doll (wrong pose for Ellen, and anyhow all her hats are otherwise accounted for) with the texture of a lace bonnet in an old painting. So that explains the hats I've given him; if you want your own printed Frederick to have only verifiably correct pieces, just discard those, but if you want fun hats to dress him with, I've done my best. 

Here's a school scene I set up with my modern copies of the Temple of Fancy paper dolls, just for fun. Little Fanny is reading aloud as Ellen and Frederick sit at their desks and listen. Since Little Henry is the only one who doesn't have either a book or a desk, I made him borrow Ellen's dunce cap so he would fit into the scene somehow. 

Download PDF files of the Frederick paper doll (two pages) here and here. The previous post about the Ellen doll is here, and the one about Little Fanny and Little Henry is here. Cinderella will be coming soon. 

The Butterfly's Ball--Early Children's Book Reprint

 

 

Here's an unusual little project I put together recently. I found an amusing book from the early 1800s and did a silly amount of research about it, and in the end I reprinted not one combination volume but two. 

The Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast, by William Roscoe, was unusual for its time in that it did not focus on morals or education--it was just good fun. It describes, in poetry, a party given by a butterfly and a grasshopper. Many of the guests are described in amusing detail; for example, the snail is mentioned as being exhausted after traveling a relatively short distance to attend. It is estimated to have been written for Mr. Roscoe's children around 1802, but it was first published as a poem in November 1806, in both The Gentleman's Magazine and The Lady's Monthly Museum. There are a few slight differences in the poem as printed in each magazine, and the Gentleman's Magazine version is a little closer to the first edition printed as a picture book in 1807. 

That first edition has very whimsical illustrations, in which each insect or animal character is represented by both its realistic form and a human-looking figure wearing or riding on the insect or animal. Above is a picture of the tired snail. The book would have originally been sold with a choice of either black and white or hand-colored illustrations, and of course I chose the colored version to reprint.

The human-looking figures appear to represent each character's spirit and personality--in the only sequel I could find that imitated this convention, the 1808 The Butterfly's Funeral, the butterfly herself is shown without a human figure, as she is dead. The Butterfly's Funeral, like many other sequels--The Butterfly's Ball was massively popular and had a lot of imitations--was written by a different author than the original. If it's meant to teach anything, it might be about how to conduct a funeral; that seems like an odd topic for an illustrated children's book, but I guess that would have been a more common part of everyday life in a time with higher mortality rates. More likely it's just a game of imagination, though, like the once-common doll's funeral. Maria Flaxman's illustrations, though not as amusing as William Mulready's from the earlier book, are still charming in their own odd way. My reprint of these two books together can be found on Amazon here, but you can also read The Butterfly's Ball on the Internet Archive here and The Butterfly's Funeral here.

In 1808 The Butterfly's Ball was reprinted with a few additional lines of poetry and other small improvements. This second edition was given completely new illustrations in a more realistic style, also done by William Mulready. These aren't as weird and fun as the earlier ones, but they are pretty. This was the version that was considered the definitive one and reprinted in facsimile in 1883.

When I realized there was an 1810 "sequel" written by the original author, I had to hunt that down and reprint it also, and since it didn't fit with the 1807 illustrations I made a companion volume of the 1808 version with the 1810 The Butterfly's Birth-Day. I can't be completely sure if William Roscoe was familiar with The Butterfly's Funeral, but The Butterfly's Birth-Day certainly makes an interesting contrast with it. Both books are bluntly about death, but instead of describing a funeral The Butterfly's Birth-Day uses the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly as a metaphor for the hope of resurrection. It has only six illustrations, but they are lovely and dramatic. The one below is my favorite, with the children being studied by angels in the same way in which they are studying the caterpillars.

My reprint of the 1808 version of The Butterfly's Ball with its 1810 sequel The Butterfly's Birth-Day can be found on Amazon here.

 

The Princess and the Goblin and Curdie--Before and After Book Covers

 

When I need a break from my own writing projects, I sometimes practice my skills on public domain books, reprinting things that I want to have on my own bookshelf. One book I fixed up in 2021 turned out particularly well. Kindle Direct Publishing did not offer a hardback option at that time, but that has changed in the meanwhile, so I thought it would be nice to make a hardback available on Amazon. Unfortunately the document was five pages over the limit for hardback! Eventually I decided to remove five of the blank pages I had put in to make sure all the chapters started on the righthand side, when I had some spare time. Anyway, it's George Macdonald's The Princess and the Goblin, printed in one volume with its sequel, The Princess and Curdie. It has a lot of pictures, too, collected from two or three separate public domain editions of each book--though I unfortunately had to make the colored ones grayscale because it's just not practical to print 550 pages in color. The new hardback edition can be found on Amazon here. What I want to show off on my blog, though, is a before-and-after comparison of the book covers. 

When I realized that Maria L. Kirk had done pictures for both books, with illustrated covers, I wanted to reuse that art for my project. But the scans I could find were of book covers that weren't exactly in pristine condition. I think they were originally matching red covers with gold lettering and pictures done in black ink and white paint, but the white paint had rubbed off quite badly. The single scan I could find of that cover for The Princess and the Goblin had only a few traces of paint left, so in the end I had to copy a bit of paint texture from the other book cover to restore the image. And the red scratches all over Curdie and Irene and the birds looked simply ghastly. It was quite a lot of work to make that old artwork beautiful again, but I thought it was worth it. The picture above shows the covers as I found them, and the one below shows the images restored for the front and back of my combination volume. I chose to add teal to the color scheme, as Princess Irene's peacock-feather fan is more convincing in teal than in red. 

Stereo Photo--Eclipse Totality

 

I'm sure everyone knows there was a total solar eclipse last week. It was harder than I expected to make it into the path of totality--my planned ride had car trouble--but it was totally worth it (pun intended). We did have clouds, but they cleared up enough to give a great view. My phone camera wasn't really up to the task, but I tried to take a 3D photo during totality. We could see Venus and Jupiter. Four minutes feels like a really long time when the sun has just gone dark in the middle of the day! I'm posting the same photo with and without the moon edited darker in Photoshop, since the light shining around the edges confused the camera focus and washed it out. The edited photo looks more like it did in real life. It's as close as I could get to bringing totality home to show my friends and family members who weren't able to travel there. 

Life of Christ Stereo Cards--The Last Supper and the Appearance to Mary Magdalene

 

Happy Easter! Today I thought it would be fun share a few more of the Life of Christ stereograph cards from my collection. I've already shown the full set of twenty-four that were printed in color, but it's interesting to see the difference between those and the hand-colored ones. Those twenty-four pictures can be found in both versions (as well as in black and white), but there are also a number of pictures that don't seem to have been reprinted in color. The hand coloring is a bit garish to the modern eye, but some of the scenes are quite interesting. Among these are cards showing Jesus washing the disciples' feet, the Last Supper, and the post-resurrection appearance to Mary Magdalene. It is easier to tell on the hand-colored cards that they were originally photographed from beautifully detailed dioramas. Unfortunately, they also seem to fade more easily. These have been color-corrected to be less yellow, but there's nothing I can do for the fading. They do look better in 3D, though.

Life of Christ Stereo Cards--Between Christmas and Easter

 

Since it's almost Easter, I thought it would be a good time to share the last three of the twenty-four colorful Life of Christ stereograph cards I posted a while ago. These are the ones that didn't fit easily into either an Easter or a Christmas post. I used Photoshop to remove a couple of blotches that I found distracting, but otherwise these didn't need a lot of alteration. One shows Jesus at age twelve, talking to the teachers in the temple, and the other two show the wedding at Cana and the Sermon on the Mount. Earlier posts about this set are related to Christmas, Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), and Easter. These cards appear to have been generally sold in a set of twenty-five (the box advertises twenty-five, and many different-themed sets of twenty-five cards were available in identical boxes) but the twenty-fifth card could be any of a fairly wide variety with some relevance to Jesus or the holy land. I think that means that these twenty-four were a proper set, but an additional card was added to give the original purchasers their money's worth; that would be easier than printing separate boxes for a set with one less card. These same views can also be found in black and white, sometimes colored by hand. There are actually several more scenes in the black and white set that I wish had been printed in color!