A Catalogue of the Cotsen Children’s Library. By Stephen Ferguson

THE COTSEN CHILDREN’S LIBRARY in Princeton’s Firestone Library amounts to over 100,000 books, not counting such objects as the lithographic stones dating from W. G. Webb’s mid-nineteenth century toy theatre publications or Maurice Sendak’s clock from his staging of Ravel’s Heure Espagnol. Its origins lie in the Cotsen family collection of children’s books which Lloyd Cotsen and his wife JoAnne put together in the 1960s and 70s for reading to their children. JoAnne copied a drawing by Alec Buckels from Basil Blackwell’s Joy Street annuals to make a bookplate and these were sometimes annotated with remarks about the book in question or the children’s responses to it.

The collecting grew out of personal interest and, after JoAnne’s tragic death, Cotsen pursued it with vigour and, as President and CEO of the Neutrogena Corporation, was able to commandeer space in a company warehouse in Los Angeles to accommodate the growing hoard. But Cotsen was an alumnus of Princeton University (Class of 1950) and it was his desire that the books should go there so, in 1994, a letter of agreement was signed and one of its terms was that the Princeton University Library should publish a catalogue of around 23,000 of the books, later known as the ‘core collection’. Andrea Immel, who became the curator of the Cotsen Children’s Library, began assembling a team of Library staff to work on the twentieth-century holdings.

It was a massive job. The first of two volumes (letters A–N) containing 6695 entries was published in 2000 with a dedication by Cotsen to his late wife and an Introduction by Immel, with twelve illustrations, setting the scene for the whole enterprise from its beginnings and outlining the planning of the catalogue. This turns out to be the only statement of any consequence about what Cotsen’s aims for the Collection were: Immel sees it, perhaps with his sanction, as an international celebration of how publishers over history have devised and illustrated books to encourage children to become readers. (Appearing in what would eventually become the fifth of six volumes, the insights present in this important justification of the enterprise are nowhere referred to for readers who consult the four volumes that eventually came to precede it.)

The second volume of this pair (here described as Vol. C2, following the numbering of volumes later adopted for the cumulative index in 2021) brought the sum total of the twentieth-century entries to 12,403. It was published three years later, in 2003, when Cotsen inscribed a dedication to the famed antiquarian book-seller, the late Walter Schatzki: ‘a wonderful human being … and an inspiration to this beginning collector’. Thus it was that the donor was able to inspect the substantial scale in which Princeton’s promise was being fulfilled. A pattern was laid out upon which further volumes could be modelled and a fully detailed set of descriptive features, to be continued in later volumes, was outlined with especial attention given to designating illustrative methods and those concerned in them, an aspect all too often neglected by cataloguers. The two volumes were designed by Mark Argetsinger, America’s leading book designer, with what Immel called ‘unprece dented splendour’, although researchers need to be warned of the risks of lumbar injury in making use of them. A large and stout table is a sine qua non since one may find oneself consulting as many as four of the giant volumes at any one time.

My ‘reading’ of this initial collection, assembled over some thirty years with a gradually maturing purpose, was necessarily a matter of serendipity, inspired perhaps by its 380 intriguing and beautifully printed illustrations. Not only was its con tent overwhelming, with few entries afforded space for more than ten lines or so of description but, at this stage, there was no guidance from an index. Once the two huge volumes of that vital adjunct to the whole catalogue appeared in 2021 Cotsen’s ambitions for his Collection came to life.

Key to this and indeed to the rest of the catalogue is the 510-page chronological index which makes for illuminating reading in itself. For the twentieth-century volumes it records the notable growth of children’s book publishing beyond Britain, France, and Germany, the countries which were to figure most prominently in earlier volumes (it is the century when the United States comes into its own). At the same time specific movements may be followed up with additional help from the illustrator and subject indexes: widespread novelty book publishing, say, or the brief years of Soviet experimentation, or National Socialist propaganda. Immel’s assessment of Cotsen’s almost perverse neglect of the ‘high spots’ beloved of so many collectors is fully borne out (there are eleven casual entries for Frank Baum, forty-nine for the Soviet author Samuil Marshak and a mere thirty-four for Dr Seuss).

Two disappointments should be noted which apply across the organization and indexing of the whole catalogue and owe their presence to cataloguers’ love of the alpha bet as an informing principle where an alternative ordering may better suit scholars. In the first instance there is confusion over the handling of authors or subjects present in substantial quantities. Thus the usefulness to the reader of the 181 entries under ‘Potter, Beatrix’ would have been enhanced had they been divided, say, between the original Warne publications, including ephemera, the American unauthorized editions of Peter Rabbit, and the multiple commercial re-workings after Penguin got hold of the copyrights. As for H. C. Andersen, whose 233 entries, probably the most prolific in the catalogue, are found in both B1 and C1, no effort has been made to separate Danish editions from translations or collections and selections from single picture-book versions. Confusion reigns. (The run of Schiller Perraults in A2, noted below, has its majesty reduced through alphabetization rather than chronology while, oddly, in the same volume the rule is broken to everyone’s advantage when Jack Pafford’s organization is adopted for the eighteenth-century editions of Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs. And yet unsurprisingly, as we shall see, the cataloguer of the Watts entries in B2 not only reverts to an unhelpful alphabetization but omits any citation to Pafford entirely.)

Given the labour that has gone into the making of the indexes (from Ferguson’s report on the job it seems as though he and Mark Argetsinger performed it with the help of Kirsten Ohrt and Messrs. Cindex Software during Princeton’s Covid lockdown), it is disappointing to have to fault another blunt alphabetization: the listing of Publishers, potentially a most valuable addition. Cotsen set much store on the inter nationalism of the Collection and this would have been reflected had the publishers’ names been arranged in a nation-by-nation and then town-by-town sequence. Britain, true, may have presented a problem in view of the dominance of London as a centre but that, in itself could usefully be divided up into districts (the City, Bloomsbury, the West End, Westminster) while a fascinating list of provincial publishers (usually booksellers) would be of value in itself. (There were at least twenty in the first part of B1.)

In her Introduction in 2000, Immel had hazarded that the pre-twentieth-century books (presumably the 11,700 or so making up the rest of the Los Angeles core) would be following the 2003 publication along with an index. Hence, if cataloguing had proceeded on that course then the likelihood is that Cotsen would have seen the operation completed before his death in 2017. However, silence fell and we are given very little guidance as to the planning of the coverage of the pre-twentieth-century books. At some point a decision must have been made to extend the comparatively simple descriptions of C1–2 with the result that two separate two-volume catalogues (A1–2 and B1–2) eventually arrived in backwards order, each differing in some degree from each other and both from C1–2.

What emerged in the four later volumes suggests that the idea of documenting the ‘core collection’ was largely abandoned. For one thing the quantity of books in them is not equivalent to what had remained in Los Angeles. For another the contents include books that had been transferred after the initial shipment, sometimes after Cotsen’s death. And, finally, the sum included additional material which was brought together by fellow collectors: Kurt Zafranski, a German emigré to New York, sold his collection of some 300 German books all pre-dating 1900; Pamela Harer gave thirty, including a collection of English movables from the house of Dean; and Diana Rexford Tillson’s collection of children’s books relating to music was acquired en bloc. Later accessions have included books and papers held by Lawrence Darton, a direct descendant of the founders of the two London publishing firms, and a magnificent run of forty-five early Perraults, possibly the finest outside France, collected over many years by the dealer Justin Schiller. It may not be of great consequence that ‘core’ is here a flexible term but, since focusing on it was the original purpose of this huge enterprise, departures from it should not only have been made clear but we should know on what criteria additional material was selected. When B1–2 were eventually under way there were already a hundred thousand Cotsen books in Firestone’s Special Collections from which to choose and some entries, such as the hitherto unseen Nancy Cock’s Song-Book (1744), were only added a few years ago.

No move was made towards determining how this diverse nineteenth-century material should be catalogued until 2016 when, under the administrative guidance of Princeton’s Stephen Ferguson, an Associate University Librarian, a team which would eventually amount to some twenty cataloguers and others set about organizing the 6377 entries that would make up the contents of B1–2 with their 278 illustrations. That the resulting 1175 pages of the two volumes are not far off equalling the 1474 of C1–2 while including about half the number of entries bears witness to a change in policy in the content of the entries with far more space being given to that part of the original framework devoted to illustration. The grounds given for this were that the nineteenth century was to be ‘a transformative period’ as children’s book publishing emerged as a busy and a lucrative element in the book trade, although this argument is a trifle specious: international activities in the twentieth century, often related to Cotsen’s criteria, have an equivalent transformative developmental character.

As will be seen in the pre-nineteenth-century volumes, the ‘transformative’ agent was (and remained for two hundred years) the publisher, and the nineteenth century would see that role becoming a specialist one as distinct from its initial alliance to the bookseller. Perhaps because of social developments and the place of London as a publishing centre, advances were more prominent in Britain, as may be confirmed throughout the Cotsen Chronology Index. In 1807, for example, while there were five entries from France and five from Germany, with one each from Holland and the USA, there were fifty from Britain including the remarkably diverse and inventive firms of Wallis, Harris, Darton, Tabart (with Sir Richard Phillips), and the Godwins.

Fundamental to the character of the Collection through most of the century was the presence of themes such as fables, alphabet and spelling books, nursery rhymes, and folk and fairy tales. These owed little to specific authors but were the choice (and perhaps composition) of publishers who hired the artists, engravers, and colourists who figure in the Illustrator Index. (With an overall quantity of 870 illustrations throughout, a separate volume could have been composed on the principles of their selection and what they reveal of developing graphic processes, approaches to subject illustration, national differences of style, etc.) Here again, British activity tended to dominate, not least through the attractions of hundreds of inexpensive picture books which found equivalents, but not so numerous, in European picture-sheets and picture books. Evidence can be found simply by noting the quantities of titles singled out by the cataloguers as ‘thematic units’ (e.g. authors such as Berquin or titles such as Till Eulenspiegel). B1–2 show ten from Germany and eight from France but seventy-six from Britain.

In many entries painstaking research has sought precision in the description of illustrative techniques and for dating (though as always, Greenaway’s famous Under the Window is a year early). The notes themselves offer more extensive descriptions than those found in C1–2 such as direct quotations from texts, synopses of stories, and histories of editions and editorial changes. It is good to have many of these extensions, and the Library is rich in English and foreign reference books for citations, but the entries are riddled with inconsistencies (see the comment on Isaac Watts above). These may be elementary (the author of Pinocchio is entered as Lorenzini while he had been Collodi in C1) but many may be occasioned by the varying numbers of cataloguers employed at any one time, by the assignment of near duplicate editions to separate hands, and by the likely unfamiliarity of cataloguers in Special Collections with the quiddities of books published for children. For instance, a column is wasted on twin copies of Charles Welsh’s commonly found facsimile of Little Goody Two-Shoes. There are multiple confusions in the policy for describing the form and contents of the many entries for popular literature such as nursery rhymes and folk and fairy tales, whether in collections or in single copies—Grimm and the Arabian Nights suffering in particular. The Lang Colour Fairy Books have the numerous story titles of their contents painfully listed while we are told nothing of what is to be found in the exceptionally rare volumes of Hauff’s Mährchen Almanach (1826–8). (A citation is also needed for these, but the desirable one from Metzger’s Handbuch for 1800–50 is missing from the list of sources, although other volumes in that series are present.)

The two volumes (A1–2) that stand at the start of the Collection were the last to be published, appearing in 2020. Markedly shorter than what followed them, they contain the incunabula of children’s literature and they are full of treasure. While it is predictable that, at this early stage, moral and educational didacticism should be called for, it is easy to see how appealing to Cotsen were the experimentalists publishing for children beyond those daunting categories, for instance those illustrators for whom Aesop offered such diverse opportunities, the encyclopaedist Jan Amos Comenius, whose Orbis Sensualium Pictus of 1649 started a genre that lasted down to the twentieth century, the world famous contes of Perrault, or the narrative inventions of the Countess D’Aulnoy. Little researched and, by their nature, full of rarities, the scattered discoveries offered Europe-wide territory for a collector of Cotsen’s enthusiasm and resources to explore.

This material was also more comfortable for the Princeton cataloguers to work with. They were fewer in number than the changing population dealing with B1–2, and were working in ESTC country with an experience more uniform than that applied to the wild and woolly nineteenth century. Collations appear more frequently than elsewhere and the level of annotation is more coherent, although a precedent occurs in the extensive bibliographical quotation on a rare Darton book from the bookseller Ximenes (Stephen Weissmann). How many other booksellers’ and auction catalogues might also have been called upon in like circumstances?

The great breakthrough of the London bookseller/publishers in the 1740s can be observed most clearly through the Cotsen Chronological Index. The Boreman ‘Gigantick Histories’ of 1740 head decades of varied productions which, like Thomas Cooper’s Child’s New Play-Thing (1742), of which the Collection has the unique first edition, sought to ‘make learning a diversion instead of a task’ in full accord with Cotsen’s collecting purpose. Its rare and often delightful companions dominate the more sober but impressive productions of French, German, and Dutch rivals.

That said, it comes as a surprise to find that the catalogue contains no examples of the many children’s books published between 1744 and 1800 by the most famous of the London booksellers, John Newbery and his family. These were of particular interest to Cotsen, and although they formed the subject of an authoritative bibliography by Sydney Roscoe in 1973 recording 397 ‘Juveniles’ along with their many later editions, the Children’s Library contains much hitherto unrecorded material. (The books have recently been joined by some 700 original woodblocks from the collection of Simon Lawrence of the Fleece Press, many of which were used in Newbery children’s books.) A separate catalogue of the Newbery children’s books with extensive notes on illustration, contents, reception, and provenance has been compiled by Andrea Immel. It will be uniform with the format of the present catalogue and is scheduled to appear over the imprint of the Princeton University Library in 2025. As things stand though with these present eight volumes Princeton University Library have done proud their student from the Class of 1950.