Alphabet Books - ABC du Père Castor

For an illustrator a pictorial alphabet book presents a number of challenges, not least of which is the shortage of words beginning with q, x and z. Today’s example follows a thematic approach based on wild animals - a popular approach that focuses on groupings such as Flora, Fauna, Aquatic Life, Astronomy, Travel etc.  Père Castor illustrated books for children first appeared in France in the 1930s, English language versions were published by George, Allen and Unwin after the war in a series of 8 as Père Castor’s Wild Animal Books. In each volume the lively illustrations are the work of Latvian born illustrator, Feodor Rojankovsky (1891-1970), known professionally as Rojan.  Born as a Russian citizen and educated in St. Petersburg, he was conscripted into the White Army in 1919 and ended up as a p-o-w in Poland, by 1922 he was officially stateless. He found his way to Paris in 1925 and established himself as a commercial illustrator with a speciality in expensively produced volumes of suavely visualised erotic encounters before finding a niche in the world of books for children.  The drawings he produced for the Père Castor series have a wonderful sense of spontaneity achieved by a rich tonal range of closely controlled mark making on lithographic plates. As the blurb on the back of one volume nicely puts it - the book is “gently ablaze with Rojan’s lithographs”.  After arriving in the US in 1941 he began an almost 30 year career as an illustrator for children’s books.

Rojan’s cover design is a minor compositional triumph I can’t recall seeing elsewhere. The group of animals on the front cover are drawn again on the back as if viewed from behind. Each creature has a page to itself with the only exceptions at the end of the alphabet (from w to z) to cope with the limitations imposed by the problematic number of 26 letters. The placing on the page and the lightness of touch are a delight throughout the book. Another alphabet book (Off By Train) can be seen by following this link. The last image is my collection of Père Castor Wild Animal books.

 

Leslie Carr illustrates "By Road, Rail, Air and Sea" (1931)

Fourteen years have passed since I last wrote about the illustrator and poster artist, Leslie Carr and noted the lack of online biographical information. That situation has changed and a lot more detail has emerged about his life and work. We now know he died in the town of his birth, Hove, in 1969 and in his last decade was employed as Art Director for The Motor magazine. In the First World War he served in the Tank Corps and during the Second World War he was a member of the Auxiliary Fire Service. Carr painted a series of paintings of wartime subjects based on his experiences, one of which sold at auction in 2018 for £16,000 after a pre-sale estimate of £200 to £400.

Today’s images come from a Blackie picture book for children published in 1931 titled By Road, Rail, Air and Sea for which Carr supplied the cover art and the majority of illustrations. The cover is a busy dockside scene in which all four transport types are combined in a single image in which areas of unmodified colour are enclosed by crisply incisive contours. In the spirit of the time he mostly employs a sachplakat style, to which he occasionally (and sometimes incongruously) adds some vigorous cross-hatching. Drawings are considered and precise with a subtle and inventive colour palette and at their most radical (the paddle-steamer) display a near-Japanese quality of repose. Examples of his poster work can be seen at Art UK and the Science and Society Picture Library.

 

Lilian Rowles (1893-1953)

Stanley Charles Rowles (1887-1979) was a landscape painter, printmaker, professional illustrator, poster designer (follow this link to see his Penzance poster for the Great Western Railway) and educator appointed as Headteacher at the West Bromwich Municipal School of Art where he married one of his students, Lilian Hall.  Lilian took her husband’s surname and pursued her own career as a commercial illustrator, specialising in books for children. There’s an account of her life’s work written by a relative at theclothshed blog.  Her proficiency in drawing children can be seen in her advertising artwork for Hovis Bread in the 1920’s that exploit the visual power of a silhouette suggesting some awareness of the work of contemporary illustrators like Coles Phillips.  When The Children’s Hour was published in the 1940s Lilian was credited as both author and illustrator.  The presence of a radio on the cover signalled its relationship with the BBC programme of the same name and played its part in evoking a cosy vision of childhood reinforced by the wonders of modern technology. The internal illustrations are saved from banality by some well observed and lively figure drawing and an educated eye for the untidiness of childhood hair.  Not a hint of dissension to be noted in these exceptionally well behaved children.  The format of the book is very much the same as the example shown on theclothshed blogspot.  For the most part Lilian’s work is featured alongside other illustrators in compendium volumes - opportunities to publish her own books were few and far between. It’s not that unlikely that her career was persistently disrupted by the arrival of children and she never had the chance to fully develop her potential. 

 

Walt Disney’s Family Album (1937)

It’s impossible to over estimate the extent to which the emotional life of every child exposed to the output of the Disney Corporation is formed and shaped to create an insatiable demand for the irresistible embrace of the Disney Universe. For almost a century, children have been at the centre of what has grown into a global grooming project as an entertainment portfolio that began with the moving image has expanded to include mass merchandising, retail stores, theme parks and dedicated streaming services.  There’s an acute understanding of the juvenile appetite for sentiment and spectacle layered over eternal themes of sibling rivalry, jealousy, cruelty, suffering and redemption.  Every feature is attached to a bulging package of ancillaries - models, dolls, princess costumes, soundtracks, illustrated books, sticker collections, action figures, backpacks, board games, stationery and customised clothing - entirely designed to separate fools from their money. It’s a massive corporate presence that generates enormous revenue streams and yet, despite this long performative diatribe, two things must be conceded.  To begin, some of the products are undeniably ingenious, amusing, sensitive, compassionate and offer cunningly contrived entertainment that can be appreciated on many levels, enough to undermine the most curmudgeonly resistance.  And secondly, with very little effort, the company has roused the intemperate fury of the ineffable Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, triggering a feud that is currently grinding its way through the US legal system.

All this was a long time in the future when this book was published in 1937.  The colour illustrations were supplied in the form of stickers to be pasted in the book by the young reader. The star of the book was only 9 years old but the process of brand characterisation was well underway. Disney’s first full length feature (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) released at the end of 1937 marked the emergence of Disney as a major studio, even so, dreams of future world domination would have seemed implausible in those early days. But it was the end of the Disney age of innocence and a sign of what was to come.

 

Airways 1939

This is a slim pictorial board covered, large format picture book for children published by Blackie in 1939. There are 13 colour illustrations (including the cover) and most of them bear the signature of T E North who has been identified as Thomas Edward North (1916-1985), a lifelong resident of Hull - his career has been well documented at Bear Alley Books. Airways is the earliest example of his illustration work I’ve seen, all the more remarkable for having been produced at the age of 23.  How North broke into the world of book illustration is an unknown story but he did well to find his work published by the illustrious firm of Blackie. Unlike most of his contemporaries, North was unafraid to experiment with unusual angles and unorthodox compositions in search of visual dynamics.  There’s a formal crispness and clarity that wouldn’t be seen in his post-war production.  When his career resumed after war service in the RAF he seems to have specialised in transport related material in ever smaller formats, mass produced pocket sized books for children. The illustration style is conventional for the period - descriptive but nothing more. At the end are two examples of card covered illustrated books and a jigsaw - whether the latter were based on new material or recycled images from books would be interesting to know.

 

Off the Shelf - The Airship in Animal Land

This is the second collaboration between the children’s author, Clifton Bingham and the illustrator, G H Thompson to be featured here. A predecessor, The Animal’s Trip to Sea, can be seen here.  The Airship in Animal Land follows the same format and formula with 8 full-page chromolithographed plates and dates from around 1910.  In a reckless endeavour, a family of bears take to the sky in a home made aircraft, spreading alarm and consternation before crash landing after an unlikely encounter with two elephants in a balloon. The charm of the book is almost entirely due to Thompson’s lively anthropomorphic drawings, packed full with detail to engage the observant child.  Perhaps there’s a not so well hidden message to young readers about the perils of overreaching oneself, in tune with the advice of experts of the time.  But the visuals display a swaggering good humour from which no amount of preaching could seriously detract.