As archivists at the Children’s Literature Research Collection, it’s not surprising that most of the materials we work with are children’s book materials: drafts of manuscripts, sketches for story ideas, original illustrations in all kinds of media. But sometimes we come across a few more… unusual items. A promotional matchbook, a papier mache doll used as a banquet dinner’s centerpiece, a charm bracelet. We call these objects “realia,” and they're some of the most interesting objects we have.

The first collection we processed here at the Free Library was the Tomi Ungerer papers. Ungerer gave us hundreds of beautiful and whimsical illustrations, plus a promotional matchbox for his book Allumette (1974). Making the matchbox more clever than bizarre, Allumette was a retelling of the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairytale “The Little Match Girl.” Perhaps we’re biased, but it does seem that promotional items used to be a lot more interesting  - we’d prefer an artfully designed matchbox to another branded stress ball any day.

Not all of our unusual favorites are strange promotional items. In the Carolyn Haywood papers, there is a large collection of family photographs. One of the most interesting is a gem photograph – sometimes called a jewel tintype – from around 1900. The photograph, most likely of a very young Haywood and her mother, is set into a jewelry pin about 1” in diameter. While it makes us a little sad that no one accessorizes with family photos anymore, the gem photograph made for a great find.

Another remarkable photograph is from the Marguerite de Angeli papers. It’s a panoramic group portrait from the 1937 reception for the Newbery Medal winners. While panoramic photography is quite common for landscapes, it’s more striking when used for a portrait of a few hundred people. The depth of field is flattened, so that the faces of people in the very back of the reception hall are just as focused as those in the very foreground. While examining this unusual photograph, our Special Collections Archivist focused on a woman who she thought she recognized. Maybe another author whose papers we have? With a closer look, however, we established that it was Eleanor Roosevelt, who apparently enjoyed the reception very much.

If you are a fan of the CLRC on Facebook, you might already be familiar with our recent “Weird Doll Wednesdays.” We have a few dozen dolls here at the CLRC, some more “unusual” than others. One particularly terrifying example is from the Scott O’Dell papers. O’Dell was awarded the Regina Medal Award in 1978 by the Catholic Library Association’s Children’s Library Services. In honor of his most famous book, Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960), the Regina Medal Award reception included a papier-mache doll centerpiece made to resemble the main character.

Unsurprisingly, some of the most fascinating realia in the collection comes courtesy of the Walt Disney Company. In 1938, Disney made a short animated film, “Ferdinand the Bull,” based on Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson’s book The Story of Ferdinand (1936). We’re lucky enough to have both Leaf and Lawson’s papers here at the Library, and along with drafts and art from the book we have a nice selection of Disney tie-in merchandise. There’s a candy wrapper (free of 75-year-old candy, thankfully), fabric swatches, quilt squares, greeting cards, stationery, decorative buttons, a pencil sharpener, and acharm bracelet.

As you can see, it’s not all old papers here at the archives. We’re only able to include three images with our post, but hop on over to our Facebook page to see our album of cocktail-chatter-worthy finds, including some we didn’t have room to tell you about here.

- Caitlin Goodman

Tags: CLIR Grant, Children's Literature Research Collection, archives

Scott O’Dell once summed up being an author in three simple words: “Writing is hard.” As a writer of children’s historical fiction, he excelled in creating his own story out of real events. He found inspiration in history books and in oral histories. He said, “Research is what I enjoy most. I often write of events, people, and backgrounds that I know little about, just because I want to know more.”  

Scott O’Dell was born Odell Gabriel Scott in Los Angeles, California on May 23, 1898. His father, Bennett Mason Scott, worked for the Union Pacific Railroad and the family frequently moved throughout Southern California during his childhood. At that time, California was still the frontier and still held the footprints of Spanish settlers, fortune hunters from the Gold Rush, and native Indian peoples. He would later recall, “This was a small world, but a world in microcosm. It was bounded by the deep water and wharves and mud flats of San Pedro Harbor. By the cliffs and reeds of Point Firmin and Portuguese Bend. By the hills of Palos Verdes, aflame with wild mustard in spring, lion-colored in summer.”

After graduating high school, he enlisted in the Army during World War I. He attended several colleges, but said he never learned to study and could not muster any enthusiasm for memorizing textbooks. Instead, he moved to Hollywood and taught classes in writing screenplays while working for Paramount Pictures. In 1925, he served as a cameraman on the 1925 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production of Ben Hur in Rome, where he also attended classes at the University of Rome. Returning to California, he worked in journalism and released three novels for adults. While at the Los Angeles Daily News, a typesetter transposed his name from “Odell Scott” into “Scott O’Dell” and he liked it so much that he had it legally changed. With the encouragement of his friend, the children’s book author Maud Lovelace, he decided to publish Island of the Blue Dolphins as his first children’s novel.

Island of the Blue Dolphins is based on the legend of “The Lost Woman of San Nicholas Island.” O’Dell adapted the true story of a native woman from the Channel Islands who was left behind in 1835 when the dwindling populations of Indians were removed from the islands. Subsequent rescue parties were unsuccessful in locating her until 1853, when Captain George Nidever arrived on the island to find a 50-year-old woman who smiled and talked in an “unintelligible” language. She was taken to the Mission Santa Barbara and given the name “Juana Maria.”

When Scott O’Dell published Island of the Blue Dolphins in 1960, it became a worldwide success and went on to win the Newbery Medal and was adapted into a motion picture. He continued writing historical fiction for children, winning the Newbery Honor for his next two novels, The King’s Fifth (1966) and The Black Pearl (1967). O’Dell would later write the sequel to Island of the Blue Dolphins, called Zia, in addition to 25 novels over the course of his career. In 1982, O’Dell established an award to honor authors, especially new authors, of historical fiction for children and young adults. The Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction is given annually and seeks to continue O’Dell’s efforts to create interest in the genre.

A manuscript for Island of the Blue Dolphins is part of the Children’s Literature Research Collection here at the Free Library of Philadelphia. The opening page of the manuscript is handwritten by Scott O’Dell. The remainder of the document is a typescript that includes notes between O’Dell and his editor at Houghton Mifflin. Though it only highlights the end of the creative process, this final draft includes supplemental pages and revisions that allow researchers to understand the amount of work that goes into each book. This collection, though small, represents the best of children’s historical fiction. For more in-depth information about the Scott O'Dell papers, please see our online finding aid!

For more about Scott O'Dell and all of our other authors and illustrators, visit our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter for more updates from the Children’s Literature Research Collection.

-Lindsay Friedman

Tags: Children's Literature Research Collection, archives

Hi! I’m Garrett Boos, the most recent archivist to join the “Milestones in 20th Century American Children’s Literature” project at the Free Library of Philadelphia. My particular part of the project involves reformatting finding aids for already processed collections. Since the beginning of November I have been reformatting the information in an old Rare Book Department Access database into easy-to-use finding aids produced with Archivists’ Toolkit. The three collections I have been working on are all Free Library collections of British children’s illustrators, chosen as a natural expansion of our project. They are the Free Library collections of Arthur Rackham, Beatrix Potter, and Kate Greenaway.

The first collection I worked on was the Free Library collection of Kate Greenaway, simply because it was the smallest. Since it is a small collection, even if we had to start over from scratch, I still wouldn’t need to redo too much work. Luckily everything went according to plan and the finding aid was completed relatively easily. With this collection, we worked to establish standards for how the information in the database would be repurposed as a finding aid. While the Access database containing information about these collections was available only to librarians working in the department, our online finding aids can be readily accessed by the public. (You can see the Kate Greenaway finding aid on our website here.)  We want to make these collections easier to find, search, and use; the converted finding aids are joining the findings aids for newly processed collections on our website.  After Greenaway, I was able to finish the The Free Library collection of Arthur Rackham relatively quickly, and now I am finishing up the humungous Beatrix Potter finding aid.

While I was earning my MLIS I did similar work for another Philadelphia area project sponsored by CLIR, the PACSCL/CLIR “Hidden Collections” Project, but I rarely had the chance to see the material I was writing about.  I am very happy to say that at the Free Library I can actually see the items I am writing about in the finding aid.  So far some of my favorite on the job experiences include flipping through a large set of original drawings by Kate Greenaway for Brett Harte’s Queen of the Pirate Isle, and seeing original watercolors by Beatrix Potter, particularly those you wouldn't normally associate with her, such as spiders.  By far my favorite collection has been the Free Library collection of Arthur Rackham.  I found everything from doodles on a menu to an elaborate painting that was used as an illustration in the book Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens to be equally fascinating.  The materials hit home with me when I discovered that the original drawings Rackham did for Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which I saw when working on the finding aid, were the same illustrations in my edition of the book at home.  You can check out our Facebook page to view some of his other sketches, including the hilarious “Sketch of a soldier and a dog going around a corner,” as well as other works by Potter and Greenaway. 

 -Garrett Boos

Tags: CLIR Grant, archives

We are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the classic Life Story by Virginia Lee Burton. First published in 1962, this wonderful book tells the tale of life on Earth from the beginning to the present with intense color and detail. In 1968, Burton gave the drawings for this book to the Children's Literature Research Collection at the Free Library. The collection contains hundreds of illustrations that Burton created over eight years. Every aspect was drawn and redrawn until each was just right and the final product contains striking illustrations that jump off the page. The story of Earth from the Big Bang right up to today is presented as a stage play, starring creatures ranging from giant dinosaurs to tiny plants. Burton herself is the narrator in the last act, telling the story of her own family as it grows over time. Life Story was her final book, and is an amazing piece of art. We were lucky to be given the funds to catalog it as part of a CLIR-funded “Hidden Collections” grant, and we are especially happy to be able to share it with you. An exhibit showcasing Burton's beautiful art is now on display on the ground floor of Parkway Central, outside of the auditorium. Come see it before the curtain closes!

-Lindsay Friedman

Tags: CLIR Grant, Children's Literature Research Collection, archives

With 2011 coming to an end, we want to recognize the 75^th anniversary of one of our favorite children’s books: Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson’s The Story of Ferdinand. Published by Viking Press in 1936, the book has been translated into more than 60 languages (including Latin!) and the rights have recently been acquired by Fox Animation Studios, who plan to make a full-length animated film. Of course, we’re partial to The Story of Ferdinand here at the Free Library since we are lucky to have the papers of both author Munro Leaf and illustrator Robert Lawson in our Rare Book Department.  The Munro Leaf papers were donated by his wife Margaret Leaf in 1977-1983 and the Frederick R. Gardner collection of Robert Lawson was donated by the avid collector Gardner in 1969-1977.  Both collections are the largest source of materials for both Lawson and Leaf, and thanks to a CLIR-funded “Hidden Collections” grant, we were able to process these amazing materials and make them available to researchers.

Munro Leaf wrote The Story of Ferdinand for his friend Robert Lawson. Lawson had already received some recognition for his children’s book illustrations, but complained about the lack of artistic freedom inherent in illustrating other authors’ books. Ferdinand was to be a showcase for his incredible talent with pen and ink.  One of the most popular items in the Munro Leaf papers is the original handwritten manuscript Leaf claimed to have dashed off in twenty minutes.  While the book was an immediate hit in September 1936, it was not without controversy. Coincidentally published in the early days of the Spanish Civil War, the story about the Spanish bull who would rather smell the flowers than fight was interpreted by some as a pacifist fable.  More elaborately, letters to Leaf accused him of “the laissez-faire theory of economics seconded by the bourgeois ideology of utility,” “Red propaganda,” and “Fascist propaganda” (New York Times November 20, 1937). Leaf had a simpler motive: “It’s a happy-ending story, about being yourself” (Washington Post June 25, 1967).  As time passed and Ferdinand became a permanent part of the culture, the controversy wasn’t the only thing to fade. In 1968, a friend sent Leaf a clipping from the Washington Post which recommended buying The Story of Ferdinand at Brentano’s Book Store, which had “a version by Munro Leaf” (December 17, 1968).

While we are excited to see what Fox Animation Studios produces, it will not be Ferdinand’s first time on film.  In 1938, Walt Disney Productions released the short film “Ferdinand the Bull” (you can find it on YouTube) which won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoon) the following year.  Unsurprisingly, the film release included a diverse array of merchandising opportunities for Ferdinand.  Among the Walt Disney Enterprises ephemera in our collection, there is a Ferdinand pencil sharpener, fabric swatches, a charm bracelet, and some adorable decorative buttons memorializing Ferdinand and the unfortunate bullfighters.  We also have two original painted animation cels from the Disney film which really put into perspective the enormous undertaking of a classically-animated film, even one only seven minutes long.

Disney may have been the highest-profile adapter of The Story of Ferdinand, but it was hardly alone.  Our favorite unexpected adaptation is the program from “The Ballad of Ferdinan’: A Folk Rock Opera” from 1972.  For slightly more historical interest, we also have a number of materials, including photographs and the script, from the 1939 marionette play adaption done by the WPA Federal Theatre Project. Another puppet-related highlight is the Puppet Theatre of Ljubljana’s “Zgodba o Ferdinandu” (produced in 1978), and while Slovene fluency would be helpful to anyone reading the program, the photographs require no translation.

We can’t help but get carried away with all of the exciting Ferdinand materials here at the Free Library, and we hope you’ll check out our Facebook page for updates or make an appointment to come visit the collections at the Rare Book Department.  We’d be remiss not to mention one last masterpiece: the dummy of The Story of Ferdinand, made by Robert Lawson in 1935. The dummy, which is a mockup of the future book, includes the full text and elaborate graphite sketches that Leaf and Lawson used when shopping the story to various publishers.  In fact, the copyright page credits “So-and-So Press,” waiting for the lucky publisher to recognize a masterpiece. While the dummy includes some corrections to the text, it is no surprise that the end remains unchanged: “He is very happy.”

-Caitlin Goodman

Tags: CLIR Grant, Children's Literature Research Collection, Exhibitions, Rare Book Department, archives