I have a cabinet full of children's books. Most of them are books from my own childhood.
Some were my own childhood books or those of family members that made their way into my collection.
Some are books I had to hunt down over the years because I had borrowed them from the city or the school library, but wanted them for myself. Obviously the internet helped immensely with that, even for the few whose titles I didn't remember correctly.
Just a few I got at fleamarkets although I had not read them before, they just seemed to fit the collection.
I had my first own library card at the age of about six if I remember that right. Well, it was in fact not a card back then, it was like a booklet in which the details were noted and then stamped with the due date. Fines were 10 Pfennig per day at the time. That was a lot of money, just the thought of being overdue made me feel bad.
My booklet had the number 5542, isn't it funny how you still remember details like that forever?
Something else I will never forget is the sound of the stamp, one of those big old roller date stamps. I wanted to use one so badly myself.
Every time I walk by the building that used to be the city library - just an ordinary house of flats now since the library moved to the "Adelberger Kornhaus" in 1981 - I have flashbacks of how it felt to open the entrance door, the circulation desk, and the rooms dedicated to different topics, which books stood where and how they looked on the shelf. I even dreamed about it every, now and then.
It really was a happy place for me, and although the new library was so much more beautiful, modern, with open levels instead of individual rooms, and definitely much more practical for the staff (something I only learned to appreciate when I became a librarian myself), I never got the same feeling from it and visited it less and less.
Sometimes I grab one of my children's books for a quick read, a quick escape from reality, a quick memory.
For the coming week's film post I looked for my copy of 1,001 Nights. It was actually not my personal copy, it belonged to the family like our old edition of Grimms'. It had beautiful illustrations one of which I wanted to use for the post because I had always loved it so much. It was a picture of four colorful fish along the side of the text, I remember it so vividly.
However, the book is not in my collection. I remember it was missing at least part of its cover, so maybe it was finally thrown away, and you can imagine how hard it would be to find that exact edition among the many there are.
Looking for it, I got lost in memories as it can happen when you are going through your books, and this time specifically in memories of other illustrations from my favorite books.
There was the "old Parre", the wise cavewoman from "Rulaman", Detective Teffan Tiegelmann (his German name) who couldn't pronounce the s right, a picture that shows that kids can be rather bloodthirsty - the T. Rex bringing down the Triceratops - Michael from "Mary Poppins" on the Cat Star (not colored in by me, this was an Internet find), Half-and-Half (I guess that was his name in English) the Shetland pony foal (not a horse girl, but these drawings are too cute for words), Kästner's Little Man and Little Miss, Sir Oblong Fitz Oblong painting Easter eggs with his friends, The Witch Family, and Andersen's Thumbelina.
And these are just a few examples I pulled out. I could easily have kept going, with authors from Germany, the UK, the USA, Denmark and elsewhere.
If you are anything like me, you may remember the illustrations from your childhood and stubbornly refuse new editions with new, maybe more modern ones because these characters are so familiar to you that it's not possible for them to get new faces just like that (here I have for example a video about a very modern edition of Alice in Wonderland in mind which didn't work for me at all, and from the comments I wasn't the only one).
On the other hand, though, I know of course - and it also makes sense to me - that illustrations for classics evolve and that they can add an interpretation of their own to fairy tales, novels or short stories.
It might be interesting to have a collection of children's books in which there are several editions of the same books to see what different illustrators made of them.
It would even be interesting to see if one artist would change his or her own illustrations for the same book over the years.
My little collection, however, is not for research, it represents a part of my personal childhood, and looking at these images never fails to bring back moments of it which make me smile - yes, even the poor Triceratops.
Do you have favorite book illustrations?
If you are interested in the history of illustration in children's books, here are a few sources. I have to admit that so far I have only browsed through them myself.
- Cynthia Burlingham: Picturing Childhood: The Evolution of the Illustrated Children's Book (1997)
- Corryn Kosik: Children's Book Illustrators in the Golden Age of Illustration, posted June 26, 2018 on Illustration History
- Kelsi Colman: History, Methods, and Psychology of Illustrations in Children's Literature (2023). Honors Theses 863, Scholarly Commons @ Ouachita