I don’t know if there’s some symbolism behind this year’s J.C. Leyendecker New Year’s baby that I’m missing, or if it’s just a baby knight riding a mechanical horse and using a feather as a lance. Any insights would be welcomed.
Elsewhere, Life waxes whimsical,
a skating duo rings in the new year at St. Nicholas,*
Fruit, Garden and Home (soon to be retitled, much more sensibly, Better Homes and Gardens) has a snowy scene,
and Motor magazine features the most scantily dressed Coles Phillips woman I’ve ever seen.
The Top Posts
As was the case last year, I didn’t have enough posts to fill out a top 10 list, but I did slightly better (8) than last year (7). Something must be going on with the Google algorithm, because 1) despite my lackadaisical posting schedule, my total views have shot up to unprecedented levels in recent months, and 2) almost all of the most popular posts, other than the home page (which makes up the vast majority of views), are from previous years. Pre-2023 posts don’t qualify for the Top 10, but I’ll mention the most popular ones after the countdown.
In researching my fifth annual children’s book shopping guide, I found a moral panic among magazine writers about children reading inappropriate books (Dare-Devil Dick! Seven Buckets of Blood!) and a couple of treasures: a beautifully illustrated alphabet book and an excellent poetry anthology.
In May, I announced that my friend Deborah Kalb and I were starting a podcast, Rereading Our Childhood, where, just like it sounds, we reread books we enjoyed as children. Six months in, we’ve published sixteen episodes, had a great time with our rereads, and, as I wrote this week in the top 10 countdown on the podcast blog, learned that producing a podcast is way harder than writing a blog. If you’re interested in following along, you can find us at rereadingourchildhood.buzzsprout.com.
I had a lot of fun doing this countdown of the best magazine covers of winter 1923, and discovering some not-so-artistic but still fascinating ones.***
This post was by far the most popular new one of the year. I wrote about the critical reception to McKay’s poetry and about the confusion over whether “If We Must Die” was entered into the Congressional Record, and if so, by whom. This was the second year in a row, after last year’s post on Langston Hughes, Teenaged Poet, that a post about an African American poet rose to the top.
On January 1, 2018, the day that I started this project and stopped reading anything from less than 100 years ago, I only expected it to last a year.**** (When I looked at my e-mail inbox this morning and found blog posts from Frank Hudson (talking about how Robert Frost is misunderstood) and witness2fashion (sharing some 1898 Delineator illustrations of women riding bicycles in very cumbersome clothing), I was reminded on the seventh New Year’s Day of this project of the wonderful community I’ve found along the way. I look forward to what 1924 will bring.*****
*Speaking of which, I went ice skating in Cape Town a few days ago. If you’re a skater of average ability and want to feel like Michelle Kwan, go to a skating rink in South Africa.
**I skipped 2022, apparently.
***I still love the giant pencil.
****For any new readers who may be concerned about my sanity and my status as a well-informed citizen, the part of the project where I ONLY (with a few exceptions) read from 100 years ago did only last a year.
*****A housekeeping issue: For those of you who follow me on Twitter, I’ve stopped posting there. You can find me on BlueSky at @marygracemcgeehan.bsky.social.
Welcome to the fifth annual children’s books holiday shopping guide! It’s been a hectic holiday season, including a trip from Washington, D.C., to Cape Town less than a week ago (I split my time between the two cities), so this is a pared-down edition.
My research this year started out with a big disappointment: it turns out that the 1922 edition of Publisher’s Weekly’s annual Christmas Bookshelf issue, which had been one of the highlights of my My Life 100 Years Ago year, was the last. Why, Publisher’s Weekly? Why?
In non-book news, the Times also provides some helpful advice on keeping your children healthy over the holidays, including, “Don’t overdress them with their new sweaters or furs, just because it is Christmas.”
For Young Readers
From The A B C Book by Charles B. Falls
A piece of all-around good news: there are more pictures, and in particular more color pictures, in books for young children than there were just a few years ago. There’s even a book with color illustrations on every page, the first I’ve seen: Charles B. Falls’ The A B C Book, a book of woodcuts with an animal for each letter. (If you’re wondering what he did about X, it’s for xifius, which turns out to be Greek for swordfish.) It’s a favorite of Moore’s, and of mine.
From The Six Who Were Left in a Shoe by Padraic Colum
The New York Times recommends Padraic Colum’s The Six Who Were Left in a Shoe, and, although I found the story kind of silly, their praise for the endpapers is justified.
For Middle-Grade Readers and Older Children
There was a bit of a moral panic going on regarding children’s reading in 1923, including in an article in the October 1 issue of The Library Journal by librarian Wilhelmina Harper. Harper’s bottom line: children are reading too much sensational adult literature, like Daredevil Dick and Seven Buckets of Blood (neither of which, sadly, I was unable to find),* and should be directed to high-quality children’s literature instead. I wondered whether Harper was being excessively prim and proper until I found The Alaskan: A Novel of the North, a 1923 novel by James Oliver Curwood, whose books, Harper tells us with concern, fifth- and sixth-grade boys have been asking for. Flipping through it, I found the following sentence: “He hurried back, seized a loaded gun, and sprang to the window, knowing that he must continue to deal death until he was killed.” Maybe Harper has a point.
So what does Harper think children should be reading? Books published before 1923, mostly, which doesn’t do me much good. She speaks highly of Lucy Fitch Perkins’ series about twins from around the world, but I had a bad feeling about the 1923 installment, The Filipino Twins,When I skimmed through the first few chapters, though, I found it surprisingly lacking in racism. Unfortunately, the same thing can’t be said for the 1931 installment, which is about a pair of African American twins. So I’ll pass on Perkins.
I would have been more impressed by Annie Carroll Moore’s positive write-up about Nicholas, A Manhattan Christmas Storyin the October 1923 Bookman roundup if the book hadn’t been written by…Moore herself.** Then, in the December issue, she waxes lyrical about writing Nicholas. According to my research for my post about Moore, it is not exactly a forgotten classic. Luckily for present-day me, though, it wasn’t actually published until 1924, so I can wait until next year. Cool Art Deco cover, though.
The Christ Story for Boys and Girls, featured in the New York Times roundup (which not very inclusively refers to Jesus as “our Savior”), is described as attempt by Abraham Mitrie Ribhany, a Lebanese Christian who moved to the United States as a young man, to draw on his own childhood experiences with Palestinian traditions to give children an idea of what Jesus’ life was like. I was intrigued by the premise, but I’m leery of a book that refers to Jesus repeatedly as Syrian*** without ever mentioning that he was Jewish.
From A Child’s Story of American Literature
The Times raves about A Child’s Story of American Literatureby Algernon Tassin and Arthur Bartlett Maurer, although the reviewer calls the title “deplorable,” since it’s for older readers who would turn up their noses at the word “child.” Also, they think Tassin and Maurer have assigned insufficient importance to the works of Sidney Lanier. I’m okay with that, but, skipping through the book, I found a number of things to give me pause. For example, this passage:
You are a child of culture. Is it not your affair to make sure that, a hundred years hence, the story of which you are the first chapter will not have the same regrettable thing to record?
My hundred-years-hence ears perked up. It turns out that the regrettable thing is how, just as America has not made enough of an effort to Americanize her aliens, there has been insufficient appreciation of the United States of America’s own literature. I took issue with the first part, since, whatever you think of Americanization as a concept, my own experience of the world of 100 years ago is that people never shut up about. I do agree about the low self-esteem regarding American literature, though. Be that as it may, I’m not adding this book to my gift list.
A number of poetry anthologies for young people are on offer. I summarily disqualified The Boy’s Book of Verse, edited by Mary Gould Davis, which is the follow-up to her 1922 volume titled, you guessed it, The Girl’s Book of Verse. Moore and the Times both recommend This Singing World: Modern Poems for Young People, edited by Louis Untermeyer. “Hardly any boy or girl in the teens, or even for a few years earlier, but will find much in the volume to enjoy,” the Times raves.****
I wouldn’t bet money on that, but it is a nice selection, featuring poets including William Butler Yeats, Carl Sandburg, H.D., and, um, Louis Untermeyer and his wife, Jean Starr Untermeyer. This one’s going on my list. And the great thing about getting a poetry book as a present is that you don’t have to pretend to have read the whole thing.
**The only reason that Moore even kind of gets away with this is that she only mentions the illustrator in the text of the article, with her name listed as the author in the list of books at the end.
***The Christ Story for Boys and Girls is based on Ribhany’s influential 1916 adult book The Syrian Christ.
****It took me a while to get my head around that syntax.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Or, to be more precise, happy day after Thanksgiving. As I was cooking yesterday, I was mildly stressing out about whether I would have time to post this on the actual day. Then it occurred to me that it was highly unlikely that anyone would stop in the middle of cooking, eating, watching football, or whatever and say to their loved ones, “I have to check to see if there are any late-breaking blog posts.”
J.C. Leyendecker is best known for his New Year’s babies, but his Thanksgiving covers were also a regular feature at the Saturday Evening Post. This one is titled “Trading for a Turkey.” Thanksgiving is a more fraught holiday than New Year’s, though, and, even though the story about the Dutch buying the island of Manhattan from the Indians for $24 worth of beads turns out not to be true, this reminder of it still made me uncomfortable.
J.C. Leyendecker, December 1, 1923
Speaking of the New Year’s babies, this J.F. Kernan Country Gentleman cover recalls Leyendecker’s 1922 cover, also featuring a bird’s tail being salted.
J.F. Kernan, November 14, 1923J.C. Leyendecker, December 31, 1921
For those of you who haven’t been following along, salting a bird’s tail is supposed to render it temporarily incapable of flying. So the New Year’s baby is trying to make sure the dove of peace doesn’t fly away. The Country Gentleman boy is presumably, more prosaically, trying to get the bird to stay still so he can eat it for Thanksgiving dinner. Or maybe he’s just pre-salting it.
With Leyendecker doing the honors at the Saturday Evening Post, Norman Rockwell was over at Life depicting a svelte Pilgrim in the stocks for gluttony.
Rival humor magazine Life took a more risqué approach to the holiday with an Enoch Bolles cover titled “Turkey with Very Little Dressing.”*
Enoch Bolles, November 24, 1923
That was all I could find as far as actual Thanksgiving covers go, but this Fruit, Garden and Home cover has a nice autumn feel.**
And last but not least, happy 50th anniversary to St. Nicholas magazine! “Is there any doubt that in the thoughts of thousands and thousands, old and young, who have read and to-day are reading its pages, ST. NICHOLAS will be numbered among the blessings for which they are grateful on Thanksgiving day?” the magazine asks, not stopping to wait for an answer.***
As for me, I’ll take a moment to give thanks for the wonderful magazines of 1923–yes, including you, St. Nicholas!
*When I was working on the post on summer 1923 magazine covers, I went down a research rabbit hole about Enoch Bolles (whose Judge cover I didn’t end up using) and learned that we were once neighbors of sorts—he was a long-term patient at a psychiatric hospital a few miles away from where my family lived in New Jersey in the 1960s.
**Again for those of you who haven’t been following along, this excellent title was changed to Better Homes and Gardens in 1924.
***Speaking of rabbit holes, I tried to figure out the vintage of the magazine (presumably from her own childhood) that the woman is reading, and therefore whether she is Mom or Grandma, but I couldn’t find any covers that resembled this one.
The podcast on children’s books that I’ve been cohosting since May has been taking up all of my social media energy, but I’ve finally gotten sufficiently on top of it to return to the world of 100 years ago and revisit San Francisco, where I spent a few days in July.
Like everyone else, I’d heard the horror stories about what’s happened to the city, which I had last visited in 2004. Since my trip, I’ve seen some articles along the lines of “it’s not really as awful as they say,” or at least “it’s more complicated,” but at the time my expectations were along the lines of “urban hellscape.”*
So, as I strolled with my husband around neighborhoods like Nob Hill, North Beach, and Chinatown, I was pleasantly surprised to see a totally normal city. Not a utopia, but the same mix of commerce, bustle, and urban problems that I’m used to in Washington, D.C. If tourists were staying away in droves, no one had told the throngs of people at Fisherman’s Wharf or on the twisty-turny street.
After a week in Sacramento, with its downtown full of empty storefronts and sidewalks empty of people aside from the homeless, San Francisco seemed positively vibrant.**
On the bus from Sacramento to San Francisco, I had prepared for my visit by doing some reading from 100-year-old magazines. In an article in the January 1922 issue of Illustrated World called “San Francisco Fifteen Years After the Fire,” Charles Geiger recounted the city’s impressive recovery following the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires that destroyed much of the city. “When one gazes about and observes the new and beautiful city of San Francisco, which fifteen years ago was a barren desolate waste following the catastrophe which befell it,” Geiger wrote, “he is filled with admiration for the bravery and the daring of the people of this great western city who at a cost of half a million dollars have made a remarkable record of achievement.”
Illustrated World, January 1922
The most notable of these achievements, Geiger says, is the reconstruction of the Civic Center, which includes the City Hall, the city’s “chief architectural adornment,” the Exposition Auditorium, and the Public Library.
Illustrated World, January 1922
I couldn’t wait to check out this marvel of civic rebirth. My husband agreed to come along. I would have felt more comfortable with a Lonely Planet guidebook, with maps orienting you by neighborhood and text warning you of dangers. Bookstores in San Francisco turned out to be surprisingly few and far between, though. I did go to the legendary City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, but when I asked the young man at the checkout if they had guidebooks he looked at me like I’d asked for the Colleen Hoover fanfiction section. Guidebooks for where, he asked.
“San Francisco,” I confessed, unmasked as a tourist.***
“There might be some over there,” he said, pointing to a nearby shelf. And there were a few, but they were all along the lines of A Guide to San Francisco’s Ghosts. I didn’t want a visitation from the dead! I just wanted to go to City Hall!
So, on a Saturday morning, I put City Hall into Google Maps and got a route that went through Union Square and along Market Street. That sounded okay. Market Street was famous, right? Plus, I’d read on a blog post that one of the best bookstores in San Francisco was in the area.
Union Square was buzzing. Tourists and locals were enjoying the beautiful weather and pouring in and out of stores and restaurants. We continued along Market Street.
It didn’t take more than a block or two for us to see that something was very, very wrong. Since it was a weekend, I wouldn’t have expected a lot of foot traffic in this downtown area, but it didn’t seem like anyone came here, ever, other than the people standing around on the sidewalks, seemingly on drugs. We didn’t feel threatened, exactly. We just felt uneasy, like we had entered some postapocalyptic landscape. I don’t have any pictures. It wasn’t a place where you wanted to stand around messing with your phone, and, in any case, how do you photograph nothing? Suffice it to say that the wasteland of empty glass buildings didn’t at all resemble this photo of the area in Illustrated World.
Illustrated World, January 1922
Fortunately, it didn’t take long to get to the Civic Center area, which, while not exactly bustling, at least showed signs of life. Kids played at a playground in the square, and I wasn’t the only tourist snapping photos of City Hall.
The buildings Geiger had marveled over resembled their 1922 selves, although the new public library he wrote about is now the Asian Art Museum.
The current library, which opened in 1996, is nearby, and we paid a visit. It was a pleasant space, though fairly empty on this sunny Saturday.
The bookstore, disappointingly, turned out to be a corner of the library where used books were for sale. No Lonely Planets here. I was ready to get out of Civic Center. Let’s go to Haigh-Ashbury, I said to my husband, and put the address of a highly recommended bookstore in that neighborhood into the Uber app.
When we got to the address, though, there was no bookstore to be found. I was starting to take this personally. Luckily, it turned out that the store—The Booksmith—had recently moved a block or so down Haight Street. I spent a happy hour browsing, and added The Booksmith to my list of favorites. And I finally got my Lonely Planet, which belatedly warned me that the Civic Center area is “best avoided without a mapped route to a specific destination.”
The rest of the trip was more reminiscent of 1960s than 1920s San Francisco. We chatted with tie-dye-dressed servers at a Haight-Ashbury creperie, who told us about the throngs the previous week, when the Dead had been in town, watched drummers drumming on Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park,
and visited Berkeley, a first for me.
I took in some sensational views, praise that we Cape Town residents do not dish out lightly.****
Outside the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, there’s a statue of Tony Bennett, who first sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” there in 1961. He had died a few days before we arrived, and I stopped by twice to look at the floral tributes. Both times I saw a young hotel employee—maybe the same one, but I’m not sure—sadly paying his respects.
A few days after we left, I learned that, on August 2, 1923, a hundred years minus a week before our visit, Warren Harding had died at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. The hotel, built in 1909 after the 1875 original burned in the fire, is still there. It’s on Market Street, in a less desolate area than where we walked. If I’d been more up on my history, I could have paid a visit.
Palace Hotel ballroom, 1920, promotional material (via Wikipedia Commons)
Oh, well. If I was going to memorialize someone, I’d pick Tony Bennett over Warren Harding any day.
As for San Francisco’s future, it would be tempting to loop back to Geiger’s glowing account of the city’s rebirth and say, “If they could rebuild then, they can rebuild now.” A closer look at the reconstruction, though, reveals that, while impressively rapid, it was marred by corruption, violence against alleged looters, and an attempt by city leaders to move residents of Chinatown, which had been destroyed by the fire, to mud flats on the outskirts of the city.
I did find one source of inspiration: the Chinese community, along with Chinese government representatives, successfully fought the relocation plan. Chinatown was rebuilt, with the new buildings featuring architectural flourishes like pagodas and dragons that still define the neighborhood today. It was a local businessman named Look Tin Eli who had the idea for the design of the new buildings, but some critics have called them a fantasy of China by western architects aimed at turning the neighborhood into a tourist attraction. Still, the community activism, business acumen, and resilience that led to Chinatown’s rebirth is a story I’m glad to have learned about.
Dupont Street, now Grant Avenue, San Francisco, ca. 1910 (Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)
*Heads up that these articles are from the New York Times and New Yorker, respectively. Both publications have a monthly quota of free articles for non-subscribers. I’m a Times subscriber, but it always irritates me when I unknowingly click on a link to a New Yorker article and belatedly realize that I’ve used up one of my six articles.
**Of course, Sacramento might have been more vibrant if the state legislature had been in session and/or temperatures hadn’t been hovering around 100. Also, a shout-out to the wonderful downtown bookstore Capital Books.
***Except who really cares? I’ve never understood why you’re supposed to be embarrassed about being a tourist, assuming you’re acting like a normal person and not an ugly-American stereotype, in which case you probably wouldn’t be embarrassed anyway. Is everyone just supposed to stay in the place they come from all the time to avoid this shameful label?
****If you’re new to this blog and thinking, “But you just said you live in Washington, D.C.,” I spend part of the year in each city.
Belated happy summer, everyone! I’ve been so busy working on Rereading Our Childhood, the podcast that my friend Deborah Kalb and I launched back in May, that I’ve been woefully neglecting the world of a hundred years ago. But I’ve missed it. Summer is peak nostalgia season, so this feeling intensified after I left an especially cold and rainy Cape Town winter for summer in California, Colorado, and, now, Washington, D.C. I missed the trips to the beach of years past,
but as far as artistry went I was underwhelmed. I worried, as I occasionally have, that magazine covers had peaked sometime in the 1910s. My fears were unfounded, though—the summer 1923 covers revealed summer, and magazine artistry, in all their colorful glory.
Summer kicked off in June with a “school’s out” celebration
Norman Rockwell
and graduates taking wing.
Percy Crosby
There were dips in the sea
Anna Harriet Fish
and fishing at the lake
Pierre Brissaud
and flowers galore.
Georges LepapeGeorge Brandt
Also, chickens.
J.C. LeyendeckerFrank Walts
July
July started off with a celebration of the Glorious Fourth,
B. Cory Kilvert
and then we got in the car
Ruth EastmanWalter Beach Humphrey
and headed off to the beach
George Wolfe PlankRobert Patterson
and then to the countryside.
Frank Walts Bradley Walker Tomlin
In August, we’ve been savoring the last few weeks of the season—spending time with the kids,
Thomas WebbR.B. FullerJ.C. Leyendecker
enjoying the last peaches of the season,
Katherine R. Wireman
and wishing that summer would stay with us for just a few more weeks.
It’s been a long time since my last post, but I have an excellent excuse. I’ve been preparing for the launch of Rereading Our Childhood, a podcast where my friend Deborah Kalb and I revisit books we read as children.
Deborah and I met in college and have been talking about books ever since. We’ll continue this conversation on the podcast, revisiting our childhood favorites (and sometimes not-so-favorites) and assessing how well they hold up from our present-day vantage point. We’ll delve into the lives of the writers, discuss what the kids in the books are reading, and weigh in on whether we’d recommend the books to children today (not always an easy call, even for some books we loved as children).
Deborah is the author of the series The President and Me, in which children travel in time and meet early American presidents. I’m not a children’s writer myself,* but children’s literature is a longstanding interest of mine, reflected on this blog with holiday children’s book roundups from 1919, 1920, 1921, and 1922 and my post on pioneering children’s librarian Annie Carroll Moore.**
We’re launching this podcast at a moment when, in the name of protecting children, books dealing with gender identity, race, and other “controversial” topics are being removed from the shelves of public libraries and school libraries around the United States. Most of the banned children’s books are relatively recent, but some date from our childhood. (A recent PEN America report provides an overview of the situation.)
On the positive side, children’s literature has become much more diverse since our childhood, when, as we’ll discuss, almost all children’s authors and almost all characters in children’s books were white. The recent graphic above shows that much has changed since that time, but that book characters are still (once you take “animals and others” out of the equation) mostly white. The lack of representation in the books of our childhood will inevitably be reflected in the books we talk about, but we’ll seek out the exceptions.
During the period when Deborah and I were growing up—the 1960s and 1970s—the shelves of school libraries and the children’s rooms at public libraries*** included a higher proportion of books that had been published a decade or more ago than seems to be the case today. Our childhood reading went back to the 1920s and 1930s, with an occasional pre-1920 classic. This gives us access, in this project, to books spanning half a century or more.
On our first episode, we discuss Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume’s 1970 classic of adolescence. We talk about our opinions of the book then and now (preview: I was and am a big Blume fan but not such a big fan of Margaret herself) and its impact on our lives. We look into the Blume moment currently underway, with a feature film of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret in theaters now and other film and TV productions in the works. We discuss Blume’s advocacy against book banning, which her own books have been subjected to.
Preparing for the podcast has been quite a learning experience. Starting a podcast turns out to be way harder than starting a blog, although my memory of the challenges that presented may have dimmed. There’s editing**** and distribution and artwork and music and show notes and—something I never used to think about at all and now think about all the time—getting your chair not to squeak.
The world of a hundred years ago and the world of twentieth-century children’s books are different, but I imagine that there’s a lot of overlap in terms of people’s interest, so I hope some of you will join Deborah and me on our latest adventure. I don’t want to give away too much in terms of specific books, but I can tell you that spying and witchcraft and crime solving and dancing and haunting will be involved!
Rereading Our Childhood is hosted at Buzzsprout, and you can listen to it on Spotify, Apple, Google, and other podcast platforms.***** The website, with show notes and links to the episodes, is at www.rereadingourchildhood.com. We’re on Twitter at @RereadingPod. We’d love to hear from you with your thoughts about the podcast or memories of your own childhood favorites.
Now that the podcast is up and running, I look forward to having more time to return to the world of 100 years ago!
*Apologies to my childhood self for not living this dream.
**The artwork for the podcast and the podcast’s website, with the girl reaching for a book, is from a 1921 Children’s Book Week poster by Jessie Willcox Smith, whose work is frequently featured here. (The same illustration was used on the poster for the first Children’s Book Week in 1919.)
***I had access to wonderful public libraries in the various places I lived as a child, but the most extraordinary one was the I.M. Pei-designed library in Columbus, Indiana, with a Henry Moore sculpture in front.
Richard McCoy, 2013 (Creative Commons license, CC BY-SA 3.0)
****I got extremely stressed out over this before throwing up my hands and deciding to use a professional editor, at least for now.
*****If you can’t find the podcast at your podcast platform or if you run into any technical difficulties, please let me know, here or through the podcast website.
To celebrate Black History Month, I read Claude McKay’s 1922 collection Harlem Shadows, one of the first major works of the Harlem Renaissance. Up to now, the only one of McKay’s poems that I was familiar with was “If We Must Die,” his searing response to white supremacist attacks on African-Americans. The poem was first published in the July 1919 issue of the left-wing magazine The Liberator and later appeared in HarlemShadows.
The Liberator, July 1919
“If We Must Die” is so powerful as a clarion call that I had never paid particular attention to its traditional structure—it’s a rhyming sonnet. McKay, it turns out, was an unapologetic traditionalist when it comes to form. The British poetry, religious revivals, and African folklore he grew up with in Jamaica, he says in the “Author’s Word” in Harlem Shadows, “are all punctuated by meter and rhyme. And nearly all my own poetic thought has always run naturally into these regular forms.”
Harlem Shadows, first edition
Harlem Shadows covers the arc of 32-year-old McKay’s life: his fondly remembered Jamaica childhood, depicted most memorably through his descriptions of tropical fruits; his arrival in the United States as a young man and the racism he encountered there; his observations of life in Harlem, with unsentimental depictions of prostitution and grindingly hard work; and elegiac, sensual recollections of his short marriage.*
I was curious to see how Harlem Shadows was received by critics of McKay’s own time. Given how condescending The Liberator editor Max Eastman was in his introduction to the book,** I wasn’t optimistic.
Claude McKay and Max Eastman, 1923 (Reds in America)
“These poems have a special interest for all the races of man because they are sung by a pure blooded Negro,” Eastman begins. He goes on to say that “here for the first time we find our literature vividly enriched by a voice from this most alien race among us. And it should be illuminating to observe that while these poems are characteristic of that race as we most admire it – they are gentle-simple, candid, brave and friendly, quick of laughter and of tears – yet they are still more characteristic of what is deep and universal in mankind.” There’s some more about the good and bad kinds of educated Negroes (McKay, of course, is the good kind), but I’ll spare you that.
Walter F. White, c. 1918 (The Crisis)
Reading excerpts from reviews in Book Review Digest, I was surprised at first to see that the reviewers were generally more respectful than Eastman. This was explained in part by the fact that two of the reviews, in The Bookmanand The Nation, were written by Walter F. White, an African-American civil rights activist who would later head the NAACP.*** The Nation review is edgier than the brief Bookman writeup, concluding with the collection’s title poem, which is about a Harlem prostitute, while the Bookman review ends with an innocuous poem about feeling like a flower in a storm. It’s more nuanced as well, saying along with the praise that “there is in this volume perhaps too much sameness of form.”
In the New Republic, critic Robert Littell was lukewarm about McKay’s versifying, saying, “I feel that a hospitality to echoes of poetry he has read has time and again obscured a direct sense of life.” He praised the collection’s political message, though. “It is not a merely poetic emotion that they express,” he says, referring to McKay and other African-American poets, “but something fierce, and constant, and icy cold, and white hot.” The New York Times praised McKay too, saying that “this young negro is responsible for a bulk of poetry that seems quite new from his race.” All in all, other than some lumping together of African-American poets, it was a more respectful reception than I would have imagined.
The Messenger, September 1919
Reading Harlem Shadows gave me an opportunity to go back to an idea for a post that I had around the time of the 100th anniversary of the first publication of “If We Must Die” in 2019. I had been surprised to read in the short Wikipedia article about the poem that, in addition to its appearance in The Liberator and its republication in the left-wing African-American magazine The Messenger in September 1919, it was “read to Congress that year by Henry Cabot Lodge, the Republican Senator from Massachusetts.” The source was a a book on the Harlem Renaissance.
Henry Cabot Lodge, ca. 1915 (Bain News Service)
That sounded bogus to me, so I did some research. Other sources claimed that Lodge quoted the poem during World War II as a source of inspiration (Lodge Sr. died in 1924, so this would have had to be his grandson and namesake, who was also a senator), or that he read it as a disturbing example of black radicalism. I couldn’t find a free searchable copy of the Congressional Record online, so I e-mailed the Library of Congress, using their awesome Ask a Librarian resource.**** The librarian responded that they had been unable to locate a record of Henry Cabot Lodge reading “If We Must Die” in the House of Representatives, which I took as cautious librarian-speak for “it didn’t happen.”*****
However, the librarian informed me, Senator Truman Handy Newberry had the poem entered into the Congressional Record on September 23, 1919. Newberry didn’t actually read the poem in Congress; he submitted for the record a statement by the Commission on After-War Problems of the African Methodist Episcopal Church appealing to Congress to investigate the race riots in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Knoxville, Tennessee. The statement quoted “If We Must Die” in full and said that the poem represents the sentiments of a large portion of the African-American community.
Truman Newberry, 1907 (Walden Fawcett)
Who was this Senator Newberry, I wondered, imagining a heroic figure, a progressive and outspoken ally of the black community. I was soon disabused of this rosy view. Newberry, it turned out, was a Republican from Michigan who defeated Henry Ford (yes, THE Henry Ford) in the 1918 election. He resigned in November 1922 after being convicted of committing election irregularities in violation of the Federal Corrupt Practices Act. His conviction was reversed when the Supreme Court ruled, in the 1921 case Newberry v. United States, that the Act was unconstitutional. The Senate, after an investigation, decided that he could remain a member but criticized him for excessive campaign spending. When a new effort to unseat him began, he resigned.****** So not exactly an illustrious Senate career, but I was pleased to see “If We Must Die,” and the compelling statement that accompanied it, in the Congressional Record.
I never got around to doing this post, however. (In my defense, this is probably not the only late-2019 plan that was never carried out.) I also never got around to doing anything about the Lodge reference in the Wikipedia article, although I did correct the date of the poem’s publication in The Liberator, which some misinformed person had changed from July 1919 to July 1922.
Liberator, July 1919
Others were on it, though, with varying degrees of accuracy. In October 2020, someone added a sentence to the Wikipedia article saying that, in reading “If We Must Die” to Congress, Lodge intended the poem to serve as an example of “black radicalism.” Then, in February 2021, a substantially revised and expanded version was published, and the article was upgraded from its previous “stub” status. The new version refers to the claim that Lodge read the poem in Congress, but quotes a scholar as saying that there is no evidence of this. This scholar also casts doubt on similar claims that Winston Churchill read the poem in the U.S. Congress and/or the House of Commons.
I promise I’m not going to do this on every single post, but I was curious to see what ChatGPT had to say about all this, so I asked whether Henry Cabot Lodge read “If We Must Die” in Congress. Never happened, ChatGPT said. “While he was known for his eloquent speeches and strong political positions, there is no record of him ever reading or referencing the poem ‘If We Must Die’ during his time in Congress.”
I was impressed for a moment, but then I wondered what ChatGPT would have to say about Senator Newberry. “While the poem was referenced and discussed by various political figures and commentators at the time of its publication,” the bot responded, “there is no evidence that it was formally entered into the Congressional Record by Senator Newberry or any other member of Congress.”
I begged to differ, noting the date and circumstances. Within seconds, ChatGPT responded with this gracious apology:
I’m glad I finally managed to write about “If We Must Die,” and I’m glad to have read the rest of the poems in Harlem Shadows. Even though, poetically, many of them are too old-fashioned for my taste, they’ve lingered with me, leaving a vivid sense of the early years of McKay’s remarkable life.
*I assumed, reading the poems, that his wife had died. It turns out, though, she returned to Jamaica six months after their wedding. (She and McKay had been childhood sweethearts.) He never met their daughter, his only child. McKay was bisexual and had relationships with both men and women over the course of his life.
**This introduction, unsurprisingly, does not appear in the edition I read on my Kindle.
***In the two reviews, White also discusses the collection The Book of American Negro Poetry. The Nation review also discusses a book called Negro Folk Rhymes. This is the only time I can think of, now or a hundred years ago, that I’ve seen the same person write two different reviews of the same works.
****Which, I hasten to add, you should only use if you have tried really, really hard to find whatever it is you’re looking for yourself.
*****The librarian also informed me that there is in fact a free online version of the Congressional Record, at https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/crecb. It doesn’t appear very user-friendly, though.
******This strikes me as an unusually speedy sequence of crime-committing, charging, convicting, Supreme Court overturning, and Senate investigating.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a magazine cover post, and last time I was kind of snarky, so I decided to set out in search of the top 10 magazine covers of January and February 1923.
Except that it was really hot outside (I’m in Cape Town), and I wasn’t feeling all that energetic, so I thought maybe ChatGPT could find them for me.
In other words, do your own blog post, I’m too busy writing term papers!
Feeling slightly chastened, I set out on my search.
I started out with a round of disqualifications, beginning with covers that reused illustrations that had originally appeared elsewhere. This led me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out whether the Jessie Willcox Smith illustration from Little Women that appears on the cover of the February 1923 issue of Good Housekeeping is from the edition of the book that she illustrated. I tentatively decided that it isn’t.
Jessie WIllcox Smith
I had an even harder time figuring out the provenance of Smith’s January 1923 cover featuring Hans Brinker. Irritated, I summarily disqualified Smith. I was looking for edgier covers in any case.
Jessie Willcox Smith
Next to go was the February Ladies’ Home Journal cover, which turned out to be a painting by French artist Gabriel Émile Edouard Nicolet, who died in 1921.
Gabriel Émile Edouard Nicolet
Then I eliminated covers that gave me the creeps, regardless of their artistic merit.
Frank WaltsA. M. Hopfmuller.
Ditto, covers with guns,
Georges Lepape
especially covers with babies with guns.
Next up are the covers that captured my interest for reasons other than the quality of the art, like this one from Fruit, Garden and Home, which, fascinatingly, turns out to be the original name of Better Homes and Gardens, from its founding in 1922 until August 1924, when sanity prevailed and the magazine was renamed.
And this one from Popular Mechanics, illustrating an article called “Down Popocatepetl on a Straw Mat.” As someone who rode up Popocatepetl (a volcano outside Mexico City) in a car and struggled to walk up a tiny bit of it, I have a great deal of admiration for anyone who accomplished this.*
And this intriguing cover illustrating the article “Stopped by a Pencil” in Personal Efficiency magazine. What the heck is going on here? A metaphor for bureaucracy? An actual giant pencil on the rampage? Sadly, Personal Efficiency is not available online, so I’ll never know.
And now for the Top 10! Ranking them was a challenge, not for the usual “it was so hard to decide, everyone deserved to win” reason but because of the lack of standouts. Most of the covers struck me as deserving to be ranked #5. Here’s what I came up with, after a lot of hemming and hawing.
10. Popular Science, January 1923, artist unknown
I toyed with the idea of relegating this cover to the same category as the giant pencil, but it’s just too cool. I mean, it’s a monster new airship that will carry passengers across the continent! Called the San Francisco Express! Okay, it might be a dubious bit of futurology at a time when transatlantic airplane flights had already taken place,** but still…cool!
9. Shadowland, February 1923, A. M. Hopfmuller.
A. M. Hopfmuller
I can never figure out what exactly is going on in A.M. Hopfmuller’s Shadowland covers, but I’ll miss them when the magazine ceases publication in November 1923.
8. Vanity Fair, February 1923, Anne Harriet Fish
Anne Harriet Fish
I’m a fan of Fish’s Vanity Fair covers, and this one might have ranked more highly if I could figure what exactly was going on. A woman is looking through store receipts??? and is crying??? or holding another receipt up to her face??? while her husband smokes nonchalantly??? Or something??? Plus, what’s the deal with that chair?
7. Vogue, George Wolfe Plank, February 1, 1923
George Wolfe Plank
This cover, of a woman feeding a sugar cube to a dragon, is done with Plank’s usual artistry, but it just didn’t particularly grab me the way some of his other covers did.***
6. Saturday Evening Post, Coles Phillips, February 17, 1923
Coles Phillips
My love for Coles Phillips knows no bounds, and I’m always happy to see him pop up, but the Saturday Evening Post’s limited color palate doesn’t play to his strengths.
5. McCall’s, January 1923, Neysa McMein
Neysa McMeen
I’m normally more of a fan of Neysa McMein as a fascinating 1920s figure (salon hostess, suffragist, Dorothy Parker’s best friend, etc.) than as an artist, but there’s something that haunts me about this woman. “Who are you?” I keep asking myself. “And what’s wrong?”
4. The Crisis, February 1923, Louis Portlock
Louis Portlock
I’m not familiar with Louis Portlock and I couldn’t find out anything about him except for one other cover for The Crisis, from 1922. I like the simplicity of this illustration.
Erté’s never not brilliant, but, as with Plank, I wouldn’t say he was at his best here.****
2. Motor, January 1923, Howard Chandler Christy
Howard Chandler Christy
I was struck by this Motor cover, although I can’t figure out what’s going on in the lower left corner, where the woman’s dress seems to turn into a wall, or something. I didn’t think I was familiar with Christy, but it turns out that he was the artist behind some of the most famous World War I recruiting posters, like this one:
Howard Chandler Christy
1. The Liberator, January 1923, Frank Walts
Frank Walts
I almost disqualified this Liberator cover because I featured it with other New Year’s covers in last month’s top posts of 1922 post, but that just seemed unfair, especially given the lack of top-quality covers.***** It wasn’t a shoo-in for #1, but I like the simple artistry.
Even though I wasn’t wowed by this batch of covers, I had fun seeing what some of my favorite artists were up to, discovering a few new ones, and pondering the mystery of the giant pencil. In retrospect, I’m glad ChatGPT wasn’t up to the task.
*Although I have more admiration for the Mexican guy steering with the stick than for the the guy holding on for dear life in the back, who I assume is the writer of the article.
**If, like me until recently, you thought Charles Lindbergh was the first person to fly across the Atlantic, he was just the first person to do it SOLO. British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown made the first transatlantic flight in 1919.
***Like this one
George Wolfe Plank, Vogue, June 15, 1921
and this one,
George Wolfe Plank, August 1, 1918
for example.
****As opposed to here
Erté, February 1918
and here.
Erté, May 1918
*****J.C. Leyendecker’s Saturday Evening Post cover was disqualified, though, because it came out on December 30. Besides, it was confusing.
Happy New Year, everyone! I’m full of New Year’s resolutions, including to do enough posts this year to actually do a Top 10 a year from now.*
Halfway through his Saturday Evening Post New Year’s baby cover run, J.C. Leyendecker weighs in with a cover that left me baffled. A prosperous gentleman with a treaty in his pocket is conversing with the baby. But the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919 and went into effect in 1920, so what treaty is this? A Google search revealed that the Treaty of Lausanne, which cleaned up some remaining Turkey-related bits and pieces from World War I, was signed in 1923. But the United States wasn’t a signatory, so why the U and S on either side of the baby? I have no idea.** The baby, on the other hand, seems totally up to speed.
J.C. Leyendecker
Meanwhile, they’re ringing in the new year at Pictorial Review
Nell Hatt
and Liberator in ways that you don’t have to have a Ph.D. in history to understand.
Frank Walts
Vogue is celebrating its 30th anniversary, with Miss 1892 and Miss 1922 holding the cake.
Pierre Brissaud
The Top Seven
Now on to the Top Seven! As was the case last year, they’re pretty much in chronological order, with the last post in the last spot, etc., except that the Top 10 Posts of 1921, which was the first post chronologically, politely steps back to the sixth position to make way for more substantive fare.
As I do every year, I took a look at the latest crop of children’s books. I found a few that are now regarded as classics, some more deservedly so than others, along with some intriguing lesser-known books like one illustrated by a teenaged American Indian artist and one illustrated by Freud’s gender-nonconfirming niece.
A roundup of magazine ads took the top spot last year, with one of my favorite posts ever, a profile of illustrator Rita Senger featuring an interview with her granddaughter, in second place.
I scaled my ambition way back from my previous quest to earn all the badges from the 1916 Girl Scout book and set my sights on just one badge this time—Pathfinder, where you learn all about your community, Washington, D.C. in my case. But even that turned out to be an ambitious goal, so I focused on one requirement. Then I went to Belgium for six weeks, then back to D.C., then to Cape Town, where I am now. I’ll wrap this up with some long-distance pathfinding soon.
Reading a bunch of children’s books for a project I look forward to telling you about soon inspired me to take a magical journey to the advertising pages of the June 1922 Ladies’ Home Journal.
I loved loved loved writing this post about a 1920 book about Jane Austen by eccentric professor and critic Oscar Firkins. Firkins on Mansfield Park: “We feel that Edmund is overstarched, that Fanny is oversweetened, and that the two Crawfords are unfortunate in their resemblance to unstable chemical compounds.” For more, read the post, or better yet, Firkins’ book.
I was delighted to see this post, about Hughes’ first published writing in the children’s magazine The Brownies’ Book, in the top spot. His contributions included not just poems but also articles on Mexico, where he was living. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which became his signature poem, was submitted to The Brownies’ Book but ended up in The Crisis instead.
The Best of the Rest
Meanwhile, the backlist was going strong, with the top eight pre-2022 posts outperforming the top 2022 post. (This isn’t a fair comparison, though, since views of current posts are credited to the home page.) Here are the top three. The Rita Senger post, mentioned above, was the fourth most read.
This post about the eventful and tragic life of poet George Sterling, who founded the artists’ colony in Carmel-by-the-Sea, bumped My Quest to Earn a 1919 Girl Scout Badge out of its traditional top perch. Fame has its price: it also attracted my first angry reader, who didn’t appreciate my flippant tone.
This post, which started out with my idle curiosity about what happened to a young woman who won one of those star of tomorrow contests in a movie magazine, turned into an obsession as I tracked down the fate of Helen Lee Worthing and her African-American husband, Eugene Nelson. I’ve never worked harder on a post, and I’m pleased that it’s still finding readers.
The Journey Continues
This month marks five years since I set off on my journey to 1918. It’s been more rewarding than I could have imagined. I’ve made a number of online friends, including my fellow members of a 1920s bestsellers book discussion group. Some of them became real-life friends when I joined them in Bristol, UK, over the summer for a roundtable at a conference of the British Association for Modernist Studies. I spoke about Edna Ferber and Dorothy Canfield Fisher (that’s me in the mask).
*Who knows how that resolution will go—not very well, if the timeliness of this post is any indication—but I can tell you about one that’s a rousing success so far: to lift 3-pound weights every day while listening to a Taylor Swift song. This is a hybrid of my failed weight-lifting resolution of last year and my aspiration to improve my credentials as a Taylor Swift fan. I’m catching up on the pre-Red era, starting with the first song on the first album. Best song so far: Our Song.
**Apparently there was a side agreement with the United States called the Chester Concession, but my interest in understanding this magazine cover does not extend to learning what this was all about. Besides, it was never ratified by the Senate.
New on the Book List: The Secret Adversary, by Agatha Christie
Last year, I grumbled that my go-to children’s book resource, pioneering children’s librarian and Bookman columnist Annie Carroll Moore, was too busy waxing whimsical to make book recommendations. The year before, I moaned about the poor selection of books on offer.
Be careful what you wish for. This year I was hit with a veritable firehose of books. And I wasn’t the only one who felt that way: “Books for children continue to pour from the presses much faster than descriptions of them can be hammered out on the typewriter,” says the anonymous, but very relatable, writer of the Children’s Bookshelf column in the December 10, 1922, New York Times.
Over at The Bookman, Moore is back on form, wasting only the first page of her October 1922 column on flights of fancy (something about an imaginary train ride, don’t ask) before going on to six pages of solid recommendations.
Fellow children’s book columnist Marian Cutter weighs in in the December Bookman, but mostly about classics.* She and others, like Library Journaland The World’s Work,** are abuzz about a list of the best books for children that a group of librarians and educators had come up with. The idea is that, if you have a one-room schoolhouse and a limited budget, these are the books you should buy. Other than the boy-specific titles and some colonialism, the list holds up pretty well today. Little Women is the runaway winner, followed by the two Alice books, Robinson Crusoe, Tom Sawyer, and Treasure Island, followed by:
The World’s Work, December 1922
Publishers Weekly’s November 4 holiday issue has its usual extensive listing of children’s and every other kind of books, along with ads that are just as much fun. My only regret was that the snarky blurb writer of last year has been replaced with a more temperate colleagues (or else it’s the same guy and he’s recovered from last year’s burnout).
The October 1, 1922, issue of The Library Journal featured a charming article, originally published in the Manchester Guardian Weekly, called “The Books Children Like.” The writer, Evelyn Sharp, is a British suffragist and children’s book writer.*** “One has to be what is called a children’s author, perhaps, to know what it feels like, after writing a book for children, to discover that one has written a very nice story for fathers or aunts,” she sighs. The biggest mistake children’s writers can make, she says, is writing down to children, and the best children’s books are “the ones that make him feel on a level with the author, whether it is actually written for them or their elders.”
So here I am faced with an embarrassment of riches, which is great, except that the holiday season is ticking away, I have a huge (virtual) pile of books to get through, and seasonal activities keep getting in the way.**** So I’ll have to fly through the selection at a torrid pace. Here goes!
Fairy Tales, Nursery Rhymes, and Folk Tales
Katharine Pile, from Fairy Tales from Far and Near
I was underwhelmed by Fairy Tales from Far and Near, written and illustrated by Katharine Pyle, with its muted illustrations and plethora of thous, thees, and thys.
Rie Cramer, from Grimm’s Fairy Tales
Frances Jenkins Olcott’s retelling of Grimm’s Fairy Tales is a better choice. It’s told in refreshingly non-faux-archaic language, and Rie Cramer’s illustrations are brighter and more numerous than Pyle’s.
Back in 2020, I was charmed by Rose Fyleman’s Fairies and Chimneys, which mixed magic and city life a la Mary Poppins, but The Fairy Flutejust isn’t doing it for me. It’s just a bunch of poems about what to do if you come across a fairy (bottom line: don’t run away), with no illustrations. Plus, the first poem, “Consolation,” tells you that the fairies will love you even if you are “very ugly and freckely and small.”
Lining pages from Mighty Mikko
Moore calls Parker Fillmore’s Mighty Mikko, a collection of Finnish tales, “a capital piece of work.” It’s an attractive volume, illustrated by Jay Van Everen, whose small wood-block drawings, like the ones on the lining pages above, I prefer to the full-page illustrations.
Fred Kabotie, from Taytay’s Tales
My most fascinating discovery of the year was Taytay’s Tales, a collection of American Indian stories collected by Elizabeth Willis De Huff. I skipped over it at first, since Moore said that “some of the tale are like Uncle Remus stories,” which wasn’t exactly a draw. It showed up on all the lists, though, so I decided to take a look. De Huff says that the book was illustrated by two Hopi teenagers, including 17-year-old Fred Kabotie. Since books by fake Native Americans are common even now, I was suspicious, but, it turns out that Kabotie not only was for real, but he went on to be a renowned artist whose honors included a Guggenheim fellowship and France’s Palme Academique. Two of his paintings are in the collection of the National Gallery of Art.
E.G. Morris, from The King of the Snakes
The stories in Rosetta Baskerville’s The King of the Snakes, advertised as Ugandan folk tales, also seem to be authentic—at least, the creation myth is—and E.G. Morris’s illustrations are respectfully done. On the other hand, “Ndaba kuki basebo, basebo ndaba kuki,” which is supposed to mean “The Song of the Forest Wanderer,” comes out in Google Translate as meaning “I see cookies, guys—guys, I see cookies!” in the Ganda language.
For Young Children
George Howard Vyse, from Perez the Mouse
Luis Coloma, a Spanish priest and Royal Academy member, was commissioned to write Perez, the Mouse(originally Ratoncito Pérez) in 1894 for eight-year-old King Alfonzo XIII, who had lost a tooth. Perez lives in a box of cookies with his family and runs through the city’s pipes to the rooms of children who have lost their teeth. To this day, children in Spanish-speaking countries to this day leave their teeth under the pillows for the mouse. This 1914 version, reprinted in 1922, was adapted by Lady Moreton with illustrations by George Howard Vyse. “A great favorite with children,” Moore calls it, and I can see the appeal.
Gertrude A. Kay, from The Boy Who Lived in Pudding Lane
Sarah Addington’s The Boy Who Lived in Pudding Lane, illustrated by Gertrude A. Kay, is Santa’s origin story. “The younger children will be amused to read how the very fat little boy who always wore a red suit came to make toys for all children the wide world over,” Cutter tells us.
For Middle-Grade Readers
Homer Boss, from The Adventures of Maya the Bee
The Adventures of Maya the Bee by Waldemar Bonsels, illustrated by Homer Boss, was published in German in 1912 and (after a postwar cooling down period, presumably) first appeared in English in 1922. It’s the story of Maya, a bee who gets caught up in bee-hornet warfare. “One of the most delightful insect stories every written,” Cutter raves, which strikes me as a low bar. In any case, I’m not enthusiastic about the German militarism angle, plus the pictures freak me out, so I’m passing.*****
Kay Nielson’s illustrations for Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe’s retelling of the Norwegian fairy tale East of the Sun, West of the Moon are beautiful—she’s like the Erté of children’s book illustration—but the story itself is way longer than a fairy tale has any business being. Too bad, because I’ve always loved that title.
Tom Freud, from David the Dreamer
Ralph Bergengren’s David the Dreamer came out too late for Moore’s roundup, but Cutter gave it a rave review, and Tom Freud’s illustrations are sprinkled through the article. I couldn’t find a copy online, and when that’s the case I usually skip the book. Plus, who wants to read about someone else’s dreams? But then I found this blog post from The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) about how Tom Freud started life as Sigmund Freud’s niece Martha but, at age fifteen, took on the name Tom and began wearing men’s clothes. Plus, just look at that illustration. (And lots more at The Marginalian.) Freud, sadly, committed suicide in 1930 at the age of 37.
For Older Children
From Gypsy and Ginger, illustrator unidentified
Moore is quite taken with the whimsy of Gypsy and Ginger, about a carefree couple who get married right after they meet, like Dharma and Greg without the sexual innuendo. Me, not so much.
“The Southern slaves were childlike people,” Maud Lindsay says in Little Missy, a tale of life on the old plantation. And that’s just on page 1. I didn’t make it to page 2.
For Older Children
From Red-Robin, illustrator not specified
“Books written for girls present the usual problem,” Moore says, but doesn’t explain what the problem is. This is my fourth year on the beat, so I think I know what she means: they’re boring. I had high hopes for Red-Robin by Jane Abbott, though, since it had gotten rave reviews. I was sorely disappointed. If you think I’m just being grumpy, here’s the opening:
“Maybe she’s just setting the scene,” I said, trying to be fair, so I skipped to the next chapter, which started with more description. As I browsed, I encountered dialect, our heroine calling her father “Father dear,” and a young man who seemed promising at first (walking out of the store he works at, whistling, paying not the slightest attention to the sky) but then ruined everything by saying, “Giminy Gee!”
Kay Nielson, from Tales from Shakespeare
Moore says that the 1922 edition of Charles and Mary Lamb’s 1807 Tales from Shakespeare, with illustrations by Kay Nielson, is “perhaps the most distinguished in form of the books of the year,” and I can see her point. I would definitely get this for 13-year-old me.******
Dugald Walker, from Rainbow Gold
The standout poetry anthology for children in a season full of them, the critics say, is Rainbow Goldby Sara Teasdale. “Miss Teasdale works on the assumption that children prefer the poetry of such figures as Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Swinburne to what may be termed professional children’s poetry, and she is correct,” the New York Times reviewer says. I agree—I would buy this for thirteen-year-old me too. The frontispiece is, disappointingly, the only color illustration in the book, but, as a Dugald Walker fan from way back,******* I’m happy with his black-and-white Art Nouveau illustrations.
From Won for the Fleet, illustrator unidentified
Oh, wait! I forgot something. As much as I balk at the gender-specific reading lists of 1922, I have to admit that there’s a good swath of the adolescent male population that isn’t going to happy with any of these choices. Well, I have just the thing for them! Won for the Fleet: A Story of Annapolisby Fitzhugh Green (Lt.-Commander – U.S.N.) is a rollicking tale of…well, I just skimmed through the beginning and there was Naval Academy hazing (with trash talk like “Oh, you slacker! Oh, you kindergarten kid!”) and someone’s father’s financial ruin and I think a battle in Cuba. It was a bit confusing, but definitely rollicking.
For Young Adults
Young adults want to read about actual adults, not about fake for-children’s-consumption adults like Gypsy and Ginger. And what could be more entertaining than reading about the out-of-control party couple Anthony and Gloria Patch in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned? Well, honestly, I found it a bit boring when I read it during my freshman year in college, and critics generally agree, but subpar Fitzgerald is better than peak almost anybody else.
From Dancing Made Easy, illustrator unidentified
Or, if that young person in your life needs help finding a partner (and hasn’t been scared away from the whole idea by The Beautiful and Damned), there’s always Dancing Made Easy, by Charles Coll and Gabrielle Rosiere. It is the tragedy of my life that I have never hung out with a crowd that does dances like this:
Dancing Made Easy, illustrator unidentified
Classic or Not?
The following 1922 books make a claim for the title of “classic,” or at least fall into the category “really old but I’ve heard of it.” Let’s see how well they hold up.
Hugh Lofting, from The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle
I remember being so eager to get back to The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle, Hugh Lofting’s Newbery Medal-winning sequel to The Story of Dr. Dolittle, that I woke up early to read it in bed. What can I say? My racial politics weren’t very evolved when I was nine. Luckily, I don’t have to dig around in the book for all the racism because Sara Beth West did it already in this excellent blog post, part of a series on Newbery winners. She says that, while some egregious passages have been removed, “the edition I read was still thoroughly offensive.” Example: a monkey successfully disguises himself as a black woman to get passage on a ship. Not a classic!
Maud and Miska Petersham, from Rootabaga Stories
Moore is a big fan of Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories, which plays a big part in the aforementioned incomprehensible whimsical journey. I looked at the first page, which featured characters named Gimme the Ax, Please Gimme, and Ax Me No Questions, and could get no further. Which may be unfair, but do you know of anyone who has actually read this book? I don’t. Not a classic!
William Nicholson, from The Velveteen Rabbit
The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams, is one of those books that was always lurking around when I was a child but that I never got around to. It was old and about animals, so it had two strikes against it. Adult me was charmed by it, though. It’s the story of a toy rabbit that is initially ignored in favor of flashier, but breakable, mechanical toys but eventually finds its way to a boy’s heart and, thereby, life as a real live rabbit. It has humor that I actually found funny, like the self-importance of the other toys: “Even Timothy, the jointed wooden lion, who was made by disabled soldiers, and should have had broader views, put on airs and pretended that he was connected with Government.” Finally—a classic!
So that’s it! This is definitely the best holiday children’s book selection I’ve come across. There’s something for everyone. And it’s only 9:30 p.m. at Christmas Eve Cape Town Time, which is 2:30 p.m. or earlier if you’re in the United States, which, if you’re celebrating Christmas, gives you HOURS to get your shopping done.
Best wishes for the holiday season, everyone!
*I learned from this fascinating post on the blog “Bibliophemera” that Cutter was the founder of the first children’s bookstore in New York.
**I had the idea that The World’s Work was a socialist magazine, but it turns out to be a pro-business magazine with stories like “How a Business Man Would Run The Government.”
***Evelyn Sharp gossip: She and her best friend’s husband were in love for many years. They married after the friend died, when Sharp was 63 and her husband was 77.
****I returned to Cape Town from Washington, D.C., this week, and the obligations are along the lines of picking young people up at this beach, so I’m not expecting a lot of sympathy.
*****The film industry was more enthusiastic, and Maya’s story was recently made into a series of animated films.
******14-year-old me would have turned my nose up at Lamb and plowed uncomprehendingly through the original text.
*******Although I see I misidentified him both of the times I’ve mentioned him, calling him Dugald Steward Walker one time and Dugald Stewart the other time (although I may have fixed these errors by the time you read this). His actual name was Dugald Stewart Walker.
My Life 100 Years Ago 