Gifts
Gift Books: Visual Splendor
Children's books become gifts of choice wherever an educated middle class is on the rise. In England, the juvenile trade formed in the 1740s when London bookseller-printer John Newbery latched on to the surging demand for children's fare that mingled instruction with delight, as John Locke had recommended. By the early 1700s, a comparable juvenile book trade had developed independently in Edo Japan.
As advances in color printing upped the ante on visual splendor, sumptuous gift editions of children's classics illustrated by noted artists Arthur Rackham, Ivan Bilibin, and others became holiday staples, increasingly on an international scale. Juvenile magazines proliferated as national distribution via rail became an option, and proved another popular choice; in 1870, there were 60 children's monthlies in America alone. Amid this clamoring for gift-worthy reading matter, even a homegrown bit of nonsense or narrative might catapult to far-reaching commercial success, as Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and A. A. Milne, among others, would all discover to their initial astonishment.
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Japanese Fairy Tale: Princess Splendor
llustrated by T. Hasegawa
Translated by E. Rothesay Miller
1880
Kerlan Features
The Poky Little Puppy
Written by Janette Sebring Lowrey
Illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren
1942