See Saw

TIBOR GERGELY

Tibor Gergely, self portait, 1935

Tibor Gergely is best known in the US as the glorious illustrator of Scuffy The Tugboat and The Five Firemen, and 70+ other well loved childrens books, most published by Golden Books. If that were his only work, it would have been enough. But that is far from the whole story.

Tibor Gergely, Gossip, from tiborgergely.com part of a large series of drawings he made in the 1920's and 30's in and around the village of Kortvelyes, Hungary.

Gergely, an Austrian Jew, had a full, rich, life as an artist and intellectual in Budapest and Vienna before he emigrated to the US in 1939. You can find his story and more images at TiborGergely.com.

Tibor Gergely portrait of Paul Robeson, signed by Paul Robeson

While Gergely was in exile in Vienna in the 1920's he worked for the newspaper Der Tag. This portrait of Paul Robeson is one of many he made for the paper.

Tibor Gergely, charcoal sketch of woman in hat.

“It often happens that the essence of a whole lies concealed in some minor, insignificant detail. To find that detail and to express with it the whole - this is the joy of discovery, and the painterly gratification of the artist.”  Tibor Gergely

Fleeing the Nazi regime, Gergely and his wife, the painter Anna Lesznai, landed in New York City, and immediately fell in love with the hustle and bustle of Manhattan.

Tibor Gergely, The Battery, guache, painted from atop the Staten Island Ferry Terminal.

Shortly after he came to the US, Gergely met Georges Duplaix, who was head of production at Artists and Writers Guild and they collaborated on Topsy Turvy Circus. In 1942 Duplaix  became head of the Graphics Department at Simon and Shuster where he introduced Gergely to Lucille Ogle. They, along with Albert Leventhal, created Golden Books. Here Gergely found the home that would bring him millions of delighted readers. He created illustrations for over seventy Little Golden Books.

 

Tibor Gergely, A Year In The City, Simon & Shuster, 1948

 

Tibor Gergely,  the right half of an original illustration for "Five Little Firemen" 1942 

Tibor Gergely, The Taxi That Hurried

Tibor Gergely, Five Little Firemen

Tibor Gergely, Scuffy The Tugboat

 

Painting by Anna Lesznai found here

 

You might be interested in this book about Golden Books.

 

Golden Legacy, How Golden Books Won Children's Hearts, Changed Publishing Forever, And Became an American Icon Along The Way.

Interveiw with author Leonard S. Marcus HERE

And here is a wonderful little documentary about Gergely by his step great granddaughter, Sabrina Jaszi, including a telephone interview with her very knowlegable father, Peter Jaszi. 

 

YouTube video about Gergely

And it give me great pleasure to be able to make some Small Equals Keepsake Boxes with Gergely images. I only use pages from books - mostly Goldens - that are too beat up to salvage. I sometimes have them in stock, sometimes not, depending on what old books I can find. Look for them at my ONLINE STORE

 

 

Small Equals Keepsake Box with Tibor Gergely illustration on lid.

If you are interested in seeing more Gergely images I have a lot of them collected at Pinterest.

OBJECTS TO PAINT: 1910 COLORING BOOK

Objects To Paint, 1910 Coloring Book, The Saalfield Publishing Co. NY, Chicago

From the vaults at the Liza Cowan Ephemera Collections (formerly known as Pine Street Ephemera Collections.) A coloring book from 1910. Enjoy.

Objects To Color, detail, girls face, cover.

 

Fire Engine

 

 

 

Fire Engine, detail

 

Ring-Round-A Rosy. 1910, Coloring Book

 

Ring Round A Rosy, girl, detail, 1910

Little Lulu, the early years

Shout out to  Ximena and Alix: the two X's who love Lulu as much or more than I do.

 
Little Lulu, by Marge, Rand McNally & Co copyright 1925-1936. 1939 edition. PSAW ephemera collections

Little Lulu Goes To College

 "The papers of Marjorie Henderson Buell—known as “Marge” to Little Lulu’s millions of fans—now live at the Schlesinger Library (at Radcliffe College) thanks to the generosity of her sons, Lawrence Buell, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard, and Frederick Buell, professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York."  source

 
Little Lulu, PSAW ephemera collections

"Buell, who was born in 1904 and grew up in Philadelphia, was the first woman cartoonist to achieve worldwide fame as well as commercial success. Moreover, she kept the rights to the Little Lulu character from its inception in 1935 until 1972 when she retired with her husband, Clarence Buell. Meanwhile, Buell presided over a merchandising empire that included Little Lulu dolls, lunch boxes, clothing, toys, puzzles, and candy, some of which are included in the exhibit."

 
Little Lulu, PSAW ephemera collections

 
Little Lulu, PSAW ephemera collections

 

 
Little Lulu, PSAW ephemera collections

If you are a comics fan, you'll love this vintage original Helen Hokinson ad, framed, ready to hang.

Helen Hokinson ad for Maxwell House

$95.00

Children's reading primers

I've been collecting early childhood readers and primers for ages. I love them for the typography, the illustrations and for the peek into the social life and pedagogy of the early 20th Century.

Here are a few lovely examples:

  

The Easy Road To Reading, Lyons & Carnihan 1919-25, illustrated by Mary Louise Spoor and Gertrude Spaller.

  

The Easy Road To Reading First Reader. Illustrated by Mary Louise Spoor. For more on ML Spoor

 
Champion Arithmetics, children's math primer, 1937, Evanston IL

 
Champion Arithmetics. Illustration by Nell Hulke Compton. 1937

  

Happy Days, Quinlan Readers. 1949 Allen and Bacon Publishers

 
Happy Days Children's primer. Quinlan readers. 1949. Illustration Constance Heffron

  

Down Our Street. McMillan 1939.

 
Down Our Street. Children's reader. 1939

  

Health Stories and Practice, 1931, Lyons & Carnahan publisher, illustrations by Vera Stone Norman and Irene Dorcy

 
Health Stories and Practice. 1931. Illustrated by Vera Store Norman or Irene Dorcy

 
Health Stories and Practice. 1931. Illustrated by Vera Store Norman or Irene Dorcy

 
Journey to Health Land. Ginn & Co. 1924, illustrated by Blanche Fisher Laite

 
A Journey To Health Land. Illustration Blanche Fisher Laite 1924

  

Childhood Readers, City and Country, Scribners,1932, illustrated by Florence and Margaret Hoopes and Margaret Freeman.

 
Childhood Readers, City and Country. Illustrated by Florence and Margaret Hoopes and Margaret Freeman. 1932

 
Childhood Readers, City and Country. Illustrated by Florence and Margaret Hoopes & Margaret Freeman, 1932

 
Childhood Readers, City and Country. Illustrated by Florence and Margaret Hoopes & Margaret Freeman, 1932

 
Meet Our Friends, Bobbs Merrill 19500. Illustrated by Janet Ross and Raymon Naylor

 
Meet Our Friends. 1950. Illustrated by Janet Ross and Raymon Naylor

William Steig: Poor Pitiful Pearl

Poor Pitiful Pearl. Photo ©Liza Cowan 2008. Print of this photo is available at my online store

William Steig, author, cartoonist, illustrator, famous for Shrek, Dr. DeSoto, Sylvester and The Magic Pebble, zillions of New Yorker Covers, and a reluctant advertising illustrator, was also the creator of my favorite doll: Poor Pitiful Pearl. Pearl was my first and my only true doll love. She was made in 1958, and stayed in production in various incarnations throughout the sixties.

A print of this photo of Poor Pitiful Pearl, signed and without the printed text, is available at my online store HERE.

A couple of years ago I was putting together an exhibit of  20th Century Posters and Works on Paper, and had just purchased this poster:

 

Wm Steig, We Clean 'Em. Shell Oil, 1944. Collection of Pine Street Art Works.

This gorgeous, huge lithograph was made for Shell Oil in 1944. As I was researching the poster and Steig I came across the fact that Poor Pitiful Pearl was a Steig creation. Of course! But I hadn't realized it as a kid, even though our family subscription to The New Yorker was a favorite of mine, and I poured through it weekly looking at the cartoons.

 

William Steig, The New Yorker, 1935. Liza Cowan Ephemera Collections,

We had enough New Yorker magazines and New Yorker cartoon collections around the house that I could have been, should have been was familiar enough with the Steig canon to have been able recognize his style on my darling doll. But I didn't. The New Yorker...dolls? Nuh uh.

 

 

 

Poor Pitiful Pearl and We Clean 'Em. Not to scale. I made this collage in Photoshop. Pearl is much smaller than the man in the poster.

But check this out. How much more alike could they be? Even the clothing matches.

Pearl even came with her own little Steig book:

Click the smaller images and they will pop up.

 

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Poor Pitiful Pearl booklet by William Steig. Liza Cowan Ephemera Collections

 

The We Clean 'Em poster is for sale through Pine Street Art  Works. It is linen backed and in perfect condition.

 

INSIDE THE HUMAN BODY - DETAILS OF DETAILS

Copyright 1955. The Human Body by Cyril Bibby and Ian. T. Morison, illustrations. Puffin Books.

Closeups of cells and nerves and skeletal structures make up the body of this illustrated human anatomy book for children, although not every one of the fine drawings by Ian T. Morison is at a microscopic level. For your enjoyment I present some of the illustrations full page size, and then at a microscopic level, details of the pages themselves. That is, through the amazing technology of scanner and photo crop tool, we can delve into the smallest detail of the ink color, line and typography of the page itself.

The Human Body. Bibby & Morrison 1955. Puffin Picture Book. Cover detail.

The Human Body p. 4

 

Abstracted detail of a cell. The Human Body p. 6

 

The Human Body, p. 6, detail. This one could easily be a wallpaper design.

 

The Human Body, page 9

 

Detail, The Human Body, p. 9

The Human Body, p. 17

 

The Human Body, detail p. 17

The Human Body, detail p. 17
 

The Human Body p. 21

 

The Human Body. Page 21. Detail of blood cell.

For more on the Puffin Picture Books including more images and a wonderful essay see this post on the blog Quad Royal 

COLOR SEPARATIONS

I was browsing around the website COLORlovers, looking at how they analyze color trends in magazine covers and blogs and I was inspired to take a look at the color trends in some of the art I've been looking at and posting lately.

The last time I did something like this was when home computers were a gleam in their inventor's eye, during my first (and only) year at The School Of Visual arts in New York City in 1968. We used Color-aid paper. Yumm.

Now I use a design software that I love but almost nobody I work with has heard of. It's called Swift Publisher, and although it has only a fraction of the horsepower of Adobe Illustrator, which everyone recommends, I find it flexible and, best of all, I actually know how to use it.

Like most design software, it has a way to copy color from one place and put it in a designated location. Nifty. I depend on this feature for most of my digital color choices.

I did this mainly as a color exercise, but it turns out they're fun to do and quite nice to look at. I hope you enjoy them.

colors in Jello recipe booklet.

This Jell-o booklet was printed by chromolithography, which separates (and combines) colors in many many layers of printing plates, often dozens of layers. The way they combine, and the way the light hits the colors and the eye decodes the message is both subtle and tricky - think of a pointillist painting. So in this Jell-0 cover, it looks like there's lavender, but there isn't an actual lavender ink. These are the colors that separate and combine to make the final impression.

Diamond Dyes booklet. Circa 1890's. Wells Richardson & Co. Burlington, VT

This is a detail from a Diamond Dyes chromolithographed booklet, circa 1890. The colors I've defined don't necessarily reflect the colors of ink that were used to make this chromo. I'm sure there's a way to figure that out, but darned if I know it. The colors I've extracted are from a digital scan, as all of these images are. The colors, at least on my screen, are faithful to the original, but they are still digitized. So if two layers of ink are superimposed - layered on on the other, they will read as a third color. Even to the scanner. Still, its quite interesting, I think.

Ad for American Gas Association, Saturday Evening Post 1940

This 1949 ad uses different printing technology. Using a four color printing process, the inks combine to create colors from only four colors: cyan, yellow, magenta and black. The finished print, of course, is defined by the original work, in this case a painting, probably guache.The colors of the kitchen are a simple yellow, blue and white palette. The greens are only in the out doors. I've written about this ad before in this blog. It's one of my favorites and I keep coming back to it. Also, the American Gas Association has a google notifier, and last time I posted this ad I got a really nice note from them, so if you are reading this from AGA, hello!

Liza Cowan aka Liza Leger from FAKE!Paintings by Liza Leger et. al.

This is a digital photo (by Dok Wright) of a painting by me, Liza. The colors are paint in the original, and they look pretty faithful to me. I paint using mixtures of only five colors: Cadmium yellow medium, cadmium red medium, cobalt blue, titanium white and black. I get my neutral grayish greens and etc. by mixing all three colors plus white.

I was having so much fun with my color game that I introduced it to my children. I showed them how to do it and they each came up with one.

Photo by Liza Cowan 2002

Older daughter, WG, decided to do this photo I took of her many years ago. It was a digital capture, so the image was pixilated in it's inception. She chose to design her page with the colors right up against one another in different sizes.

detail from Alphabet Of Country Scenes. 1875, McLaughlin Bros. NY.

Younger daughter GW did this one, another chromo, and I love how she made the colors different sizes. Lively composition. I didn't discuss options of box sizes with the children, nor did we explore using different shapes or placement. We'll save that for another time.

MARY LOUISE SPOOR & CHARLIE CHAPLIN

Mary Louise Spoor, Baby Bunting, chromolithograph 1917. Liza Cowan Collections

Collecting is an adventure. The civilized version of big game hunting. You never know where the chase will  will lead, what roads you will follow. Here, we go from nursery illustrations to the early history of cinema.

A couple of years ago I was hunting at an antiques show. I was fast- walking the aisles, which is how I always do my first scan. I stopped abruptly at  a huge chromolithograph schoolroom poster published in 1917 by Congdon Publishers in Chicago. I immediately fell in love with the Japanese - or Japonism - inspired design. The dealer knew the name of the illustrator, Mary Louise Spoor, but not much about her. 

I immediately began searching for more of her work. I have subsequently found three of the school room posters. Hickory Dickory Dock, Little Bo Peep  and Baby Bunting Went A Hunting.

Mary Louise Spoor, Hickory Dickory Dock, 1917 Chromolithograph. Liza Cowan collections. Available here

Internet searches revealed scant information on Spoor.  An interesting conversation among collectors and descendants reveals that Spoor (1887-1985) worked for a brief shining moment from Chicago, publishing illustrations for Rand McNally and Lyons & Carnihan.

Mary Louise Spoor, Hickory Dickory Dock, 1917 Chromolithograph. Liza Cowan

By 1917 she was married and pregnant with her first child. She moved to Massachussets to raise her family. And that, as far as I can tell, ended her professional career. She continued painting and drawing private works that would end up in family collections but those works have not yet entered into public circulation. Nor may they ever. What a shame to have access to so small a piece of a life's work

 

ML Spoor from schoolroom poster triptychs, 1917, Liza Cowan Collections. Each image is 15'" square.

Before she left Chicago, Mollie, as she was called, went to The Art Institute  and shared a studio with Gertrude Spaller, another young illustrator. Together they illustrated at least two children's readers. The Easy Road To Reading Primer editions one and two.

ML Spoor illustrations, The Easy Road To Reading- Cowan Ephemera Collections

Here's where the road forks:

Mollie's brother was George K Spoor. In 1907 George founded Essany Studios in Chicago. Essanay was one of the first movie production studios in the US during the blink of an eye when Chicago was the center of US movie production. A couple of years later Essanay built studios in Niles, CA, but kept offices in Chicago.  George Spoor's partner in Essanay (S&A) was Max Aronson, aka Gilbert Anderson, aka  Broncho Billy, the very first film cowboy star .

Broncho Billy And The Essanay Film Company by David Kiehn. Farwell Books 2003

That's right. The first cowboy star was Jewish. Aronson/Anderson appeared in the first great narrative film ever, The Great Train Robbery, then went on to direct and star in hundreds of films for Essanay.

When it began, Essanay depended on, and discovered, local Chicago talent, many of whom went on to become some of the biggest stars and directors in the industry, including Ben Turpin, Alan Dwan, Louella Parsons, Francis X Bushman, Gloria Swanson.

They made 2,000 movies in their ten year span, out of which only about 200 survive.

 

Charlie Chaplin in drag in Essanay's The Woman  from 1915

Charlie Chaplin was an Essanay star too, one of the first to be hired from outside the neighborhood. He had a contentious relationship with the studio, and left after a few years. His first version of The Tramp was an Essanay production.

It seems not unlikely  that the George Spoor would have asked his illustrator sister to design movie posters for his studio. She did design the Indian Chief logo for them. So far, I haven't discovered any but the hunt is on.

references:

conversation amongst relatives and collectors at Antiques and The Arts

essay on essanay from Chicago Magazine May 2007

Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, Niles CA