FORGOTTEN BOOKS…
A few years ago, I acquired a couple of books.
I know what you are thinking, and you are right, I have indubitably bought more than that – a healthy amount of books pass though my hands – but these two were special. You see, they had gotten away.
When I was small, I did not have a wealth of children’s books. Of those, I recall a few at most: The Poky Little Puppy, a book done by the incredible Gustaf Tenggren (yes, he of Walt Disney’s Snow White) in 1942; Thornton W. Burgess’ The Adventures of Grandfather Frog (part of a series, if I recall correctly); Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman (originally published in 1892), Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories (the Crab and the Animal that came out of the sea gave me nightmares and I felt terribly sorry for the Elephant’s Child, as I did for Burgess’ old-timer frog stuck in the well); possibly a copy of The Wind in the Willows, and certainly a small handful more.[1]
Then, of course, there were the ones I had forgotten; it is of those I wish to write. You see, I found two of them again.
We do live in a wonderful world, where the definition of what is lost has been redefined by helpfully pernicious algorithms. Chances are that if at least one other person on the planet is interested in the same thing, your cyberpaths will eventually cross.
One of the two books, I purchased for the image on the cover. (I know, one should not be judging a book by the cover, and even worse, buying it for that very reason. I plead guilty to both counts, I am a true serial offender since my teens, when I hunted out paperbacks with covers by artists I admired in the musty aisles and paperback stacks of used-book shops.)
The artwork I rediscovered is by an American artist named Milo Winter. His Wikipedia entry is sparing to say the least: “Winter was born in Princeton, Illinois and trained at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute. He lived in Chicago until the early 1950s, when he moved to New York City. From 1947 to 1949, he was the art editor of Childcraft books and from 1949, was the art editor in the film strip division of Silver Burdett Company.” Other than date of birth and death (August 7, 1888 – August 15, 1956) and a list of a handful of titles and a few illustrations, that is all.
Winter attended Chicago’s School of the Art Institute. From 1947 to 1949, he was the art editor of World Book’s Childcraft series of anthologies for children. From 1949, he was the art editor in the film strip division of Silver Burdett Company. Winter lived in Chicago until the early 1950s, when he moved to New York City. His wife was a “notable sculptress”.[2] (Their only child, Milo Kendall Winter Jr., born in 1913, went on to attend the Chicago Art Institute and become a watercolour artist. He died in 2002.)
Winter worked extensively for Chicago publishers Houghton Mifflin and Rand McNally. Many of his titles were much-visited classics: Gulliver’sTravels (1912), Tanglewood Tales (1913), Aesop’s Fables (1916), Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales (c. 1916), Alice in Wonderland, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Three Musketeers, A Christmas Carol, Treasure Island. He also illustrated more contemporary authors: The Wonder Garden and The Book of Elves and Fairies by Frances Jenkins Olcott, and The Trail Book by Mary Austin (1918). He also created simpler illustrations for younger children with titles such as The Three Little Kittensand The Three Little Pigs. All in all, he seems to have had a versatile and long-lived career.[3]
The book that I had of his, though, turns out to be his very first book: Billy Popgun, which he both wrote and illustrated. I am looking at it now. The book was published by the Houghton Mifflin Company in October 1912; in 60-odd pages, eight chapters recount pyjama-clad Billy’s adventures with a succession of creatures and beings: bull frog, field mouse, bald eagle, sea turtle and other sea creatures, a bumble-dragon and a posse of dwarves, and of course the Bunny on the cover. I undoubtedly had a later edition when I was small.
This is the image that stuck so well in my mind. Everything in it still contains the magic it must have held when I first saw it: the beautiful dawn light, when the sky has just turned to nacre and the shadows retain their blue tint; the warm edges on the objects silhouetted against the sky; the Little Nemo-like character in his footed pyjamas; the energy of the rabbit’s leap. Everything contributes to reality and implausibility combined, the ingredients that make up fairy tales. Even though I had forgotten book and author, it is no wonder I never truly forgot that picture.
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Billy Popgun, by Milo Winter, published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Chicago, October 1912. Cover, frontispiece & dust jacket
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As for the other book, it had been completely forgotten. Totally and entirely, certainly for decades.
Then, one day, as I was browsing the net, I stumbled on an image, which I immediately recalled the instant I saw it. (Remember, I had completely forgotten its existence.) It was not the cover of the book, but an interior illustration, from a Russian folk tale about a sleigh pursued by wolves. As each wolf is shot, the pack stops to devour it, before resuming the pursuit, until only one wolf is left, having eaten the entire pack, before it is finally shot and the sleigh escapes.
I found the image troubling at the time, but it never occurred to me to wonder how one wolf could have devoured nineteen others (and the tale itself leaves the question rather patronisingly suspended, though I doubt that bothered me at the time either).
What did trouble me was the wounded wolf, curled on its back, with a handful of other wolves abandoning pursuit of the sleigh to turn to devour it. There are a few spots of blood on the snow.
It did not take long to locate the book, author and illustrator. (Thank you algorithms.)
My forgotten book: The Book of Animal Tales, told by Stephen Southwold, with illustrations by Honor C. Appleton. It was published in London by George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd, in 1929.
Naturally, I dug one up and ordered it. (How often can you buy a piece of your childhood at such a modest price, postage included?) But first, a word about the illustrator, Honor C. Appleton.
Honor Charlotte Appleton is typical of the multitude of turn-of-the-century women who were just as talented, creative and original as their male counterparts, and who, with far too few exceptions, remain largely forgotten under their shadow. Appleton was born to parents Georgina and John Hoblyn Appleton in Brighton, on February 4th, 1879. She grew up with two older sisters, Rachel and Alice Mary (known as Sissy), and a younger brother named John. It is very likely that she and her sisters were encouraged to pursue drawing and painting by her mother Georgina.
She began her art studies at the Kensington Schools, before attending Frank Calderon’s School of Animal Painting[4] and the Royal Academy Schools in London from 1901 to 1906. Her first book, The Bad Mrs. Ginger[5], was published in September 1902 by Frederick A. Stokes Company, as part of the Dumpy Books for Children series, at the end of her first year at the Royal Academy. He next book would wait until well after the end of her studies, in 1910: Songs of Innocence, by William Blake.
Her most popular books were those in the Josephine series, written by Mrs. H. C. Cradock. Josephine is an only child, with a rich imagination and a big family of dolls. In the four decades of her artistic career, she illustrated over 150 children’s books.
Appleton seems to have lived for most of her life near Hove, on the coast of East Sussex, not far from her sister Sissy. During the war, she was a nurse for the Civil Defence. Honor Appleton does not seem to have married. She died on the 30th of December 1951.[6]
Artistically, she is invariably compared to her more famous peers: Kate Greenaway and Jessie Willcox Smith, and considered to be “influenced” by Arthur Rackham and W. Heath Robinson. Quite honestly, I fail to see in what way, other than the fact that they were outstanding artists, so the assumption is that clearly they musthave influenced someone of less renown like Appleton. This, alas, is standard filler text for want of something more serious to write. There is little to determine Appleton’s influences other than those of the times, of her studies, and her professional contacts with London publishers. She is very much her own woman as an artist; her sense of layout and use of space is in no way inferior to Dulac or Booth, her command of black and white stands the comparison to the Robinsons, her drafts(wo)manship is equal to any of the former and her choice and treatment of themes in her illustrations original and often striking.
As for the author of The Book of Animal Tales, Stephen Southwold, he seems to have been a prolific author writing a variety of genres, from horror and science-fiction to children’s books, under a variety of pseudonyms.[7]
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Of course, I sat down with the book as soon as it arrived, and while I cannot pretend I recall all the illustrations, I certainly remember all the colour plates and 9 out of 10 black and white drawings. I am moved by the same sentiment of pity I felt at the time for the dead Minotaur and the dragon of Lango, struck by the struggling savagery of the chapter heading vignette of Gehert and Llewellyn, felt the air beneath me as the Black Bull leaped over the Moon. I found the lion cut in half disconcerting, but not so much as Munchausen’s indifference to the halving of his horse, which was unconcernedly drinking at a pool… Upon seeing them again, all those connections were remade afresh. (I do not recall the cover of the book; there were many editions, and I may have had a different one than the one I have now.)
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A wholly arbitrary section of images from the book. So many of them troubled me, others mystified me and all of them must have enchanted me. Only a very small handful, all innocuous chapter tailpieces, escaped my recall.
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Ultimately, the images are there, it is simply the connection that is lost. This may mean that our brains are a vast storehouse of dormant memories, all waiting for the flick of a switch to come back into the light. How much of it is actually there, in other worlds, how perfect is our memory of anything? Or are they zipped, in a sense, and stumbling on the same or a similar image playing the same role as Stuffit expander, restoring the abbreviated image to its old self? How much space does an image take in our brains? Can it be somehow quantified, like bytes on a drive? What form do they actually take, is there the cerebral equivalent of the jpeg or the pdf?
One helpful note: it seems we recall images more efficiently than we recall words. (I imagine we have evolution to thank for this, we have been processing the abstract much less longer than we have been dealing with the concrete.) Positron emission tomography has shown that the memorising, or encoding of pictures results in greater activity of bilateral visual and medial temporal cortices, whereas encoding of words is associated with increased activity in prefrontal and temporoparietal regions. In other words, images might be more intimately linked to emotions, and distributed more evenly across the brain.
What is clear, is that our brains are formidable memory machines, and can house vast amounts of either pictures, or cues sufficiently elaborate as to reconnect to our memories of them should we encounter them again. What is also clear is that we are often woefully inadequate at maintaining the connections to those images.
Imagine an image is stored in a group of neurones. Parallel to that, in another group of neurones is stored the emotion associated with it. So, if the visual cortex stores an image, neurones in the amygdala store the associated emotion, and so on. These varied files related to the same memory are stored in the regions of the brain that initiated them, and those helpful clumps of neurones are programmed to fire away simultaneously when we recall something. This results in a series of engrams, or memory traces – basically the Finder on your computer, which can allow you to retrieve the image you seek. If one engram is lost, chances are that another, closely associated with a different sensation related to the image, will allow you to find that alternative pathway. (Everyone is familiar with the flood of memory and sensation that can occur when a long-forgotten smell or taste is encountered again.)
Conversely, the augmented disembodiment that is often a feature of digital accessibility, banalisation of circumstance or decontextualisation of image encoding means that less paths are created, increasing our chances of losing that memory.
This interior entropy has for result that we lose that access to the stored imagery, ample reason to cultivate and work at our use of images and how we acquire and treat them. Ultimately contemplation is a passive act, there is little physical participation in observing a fixed image. Additionally, the inherent disconnect of the internet, (despite those helpful, and I repeat, pernicious, algorithms) means that the number of attendant actions that frame any image are soon lost in our browsing history, itself hardly an easily retraceable path.
To me, this is a call to look at real things, whether printed or original, whether in books or on walls, in order to maintain the context that will allow us multiple paths to retrace our steps and keep those images present. The danger of the infinitely repeated jpeg is that not only is it often stripped of context on the net, simply being available to us principally in that form strips it of all context whatsoever.
This is not the luddite speaking, by the way, our digital connectedness is a wonderful tool if used properly. It is the best resource ever made available to prepare for the encounter with the actual thing itself. Unfortunately, we too often content ourselves with the ersatz, eschewing the real. In expanding our horizons digitally, we risk impoverishing their physicality. While the image may be ultimately disembodied, the context, which allows a strong connection with that image, should not be ignored.
Imagine Leonardo da Vinci had worked digitally. If identical Mona Lisas were in infinite supply the world over, would you make the effort to go farther than three clicks and a keyword or two to see one? But there is only one Mona Lisa, just as there is only one of you. To get there to see it means work, actually seeing it may be a disappointment – crowds, distance of security cordon, lighting – but you have experienced seeing it. To the image itself are attached all the physical events surrounding it. (The Mona Lisa may be a poor example, but the same thoughts apply to any piece of visual art.)
It is all about the encounter to two unique things: you and what you are looking at. Those events, humble or moving, can only take place by contriving for those two unique entities to come face to face, whatever the circumstances. The internet is there to help, not substitute itself for the experience. Do your homework first (that is what the net is for) so that you make it a memorable exercise. You cannot weave a tapestry with only a handful of threads.
Art is all about connections. The more we can establish, the richer the experiencing of that art and the world that produced it will be. Art should be memorable. It is up to us, as viewers, to make it so.
As to how we can be in the world in a meaningful way, whatever our roles as creator or viewer, is material for another newsletter. See you there.
Footnotes:
[1] There were loads of non-fiction books, encyclopedias, atlases, Time-Life books, National Geographic magazines and more.
[2] This is typical of the somewhat frustrating biographical notes on the Winters. His wife was a “notable sculptress” but I have as yet been unable to find either her name or examples of her work.
[3] All of the biographical information I can find does seem surprisingly bland. One regrets, as always in the case of many admirable artists, that they did not leave us a memoir or two.
[4] The school was established in 1894. It was located at 54 Baker Street, where it remained until 1911. Quick and deft sketching was certainly encouraged, as animals are undependable models. It must, though, have been quite exciting. Appleton probably attended classes for ladies only for painting the human figure from the nude (held on Tuesday and Friday afternoons: similar classes for men students took place on Monday and Thursday afternoons.) Male and female students attended the costume and portrait painting class or in the composition class on Wednesdays. (At the time, allowing female students to draw nudes was little short of revolutionary.)
[5] The story is about Anne, a six-inch high girl who lives with a cat, Mrs. Ginger, and is friends with butterflies, cats, birds and mice. She stands up to Mrs. Ginger, when the cat wishes her to catch her friends as food for her kittens. Anne is later spirited away to fairyland.
[6] Hove Library organized a retrospective of her works in 1952
[7] Stephen Southwold was itself a pseudonym; he was born Stephen Henry Critten, in Southwold, Suffolk, in 1887. He died in 1964.
