#Francis Newbery

[uwmspeccoll]

Wood Engraving Wednesday

ROBERT GIBBINGS

In 1933, Irish wood engraver and fine-press printer Robert Gibbings sold the Golden Cockerel Press, which he had owned and operated since 1924, to Christopher Sandford, Owen Rutter, and Francis J. Newbery. The new owners took the press in a decidedly more commercial direction, more as a publisher than a fine press, with production work overseen by Newbery at the Chiswick Press. Gibbings continued to work at the press for the new owners, although, as Roderick Cave and Sarah Manson write in their A History of the Golden Cockerel Press 1920-1960, he chafed “at having to work to other people’s specifications.” 

One of those specifications was to produce a multitude of wood engravings for the 1933 Limited Editions Club production of Le Morte d’Arthur, designed at the Golden Cockerel Press and printed at the Chiswick Press in an edition of 1500 copies signed by the artist. Shown here are some of the chapter heads engraved by Gibbings, who also produced numerous marginal illustrations and tailpieces. Cave and Manson write:

He was under great pressure to cut all the blocks needed for the Morte d’Arthur, an edition of [Thomas] Malory commissioned by George Macy, being printed by the Cockerel partners . . . for the Limited Editions Club in New York. It was a valuable commission for Cockerel and Gibbings, though designed to be more economical in production than either would have wished. But even in the modest format, the Limited Editions Club edition was a successful exercise in ‘economical’ fine printing.

View more wood engravings by Robert Gibbings.

View more post on works from the Golden Cockerel Press.

View more Limited Editions Club posts.

View more posts with wood engravings!

[obsidian-sphere]

Turns out, all "brain salt" was, was plain old sodium chloride, or that is, just salt.

Seems unlike today where we have far too much sodium in our diet, for a lot of people in the 1800s they had too little.

And too little sodium can cause headaches, fatigue, and so on with all the things they said Brain Salt cures.

[jvnla]

Exciting Promotions at JVNLA!!!

Alice Tasman and Ariana Philips Join as Partners at JVNLA

Cole Hildebrand is Promoted to Junior Agent

As JVNLA celebrates its 45th Anniversary, owner Jennifer Weltz is thrilled to announce that agents Alice Tasman and Ariana Philips have joined as Partners in the company.

Alice Tasman has been an agent at the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency for over 25 years. She represents a wide range of award-winning writers with an emphasis on commercial and literary fiction, young adult and middle grade. Her clients have earned numerous awards, honors, and fellowships, including the Calvino Prize, the C. Hugh Holman Award, the Henfield/Transatlantic Review Award, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, the O. Henry Prize, the Saint Francis College Literary Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her clients' writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, Best American Short Stories, McSweeney's, Salon, A Public Space and elsewhere. Awards and honors for her children's writers include a Caldecott Medal Honor, Newbery Medal nominee, Midwestern Booksellers Association Award, Texas Bluebonnet Award, Edgar Finalist and International Thriller Writers Finalist.  Alice earned her BA from Brown University and her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.

Ariana Philips has been at the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency for over 10 years. Starting as an intern at the company, she now represents a wide range of award-winning fiction and non-fiction for both adults and children. In addition to being a full-time agent, she is the office manager, royalties manager and heads up audio and permission rights for the agency. Ariana attended Iona College, where she graduated with honors in English and Communications.

Additionally, Cole Hildebrand has been promoted to Junior Agent, representing literary and upmarket fiction as well as narrative non-fiction and poetry, while handling the Australia/New Zealand market.

Cole Hildebrand joined JVNLA in 2021 as an assistant, working alongside Jennifer Weltz in international rights, film rights, and contracts. Prior to joining the agency, he was Managing Editor at YesYes Books, working on manuscript acquisitions, event planning, website design, and publicity. He earned his B.A. from Lewis & Clark College and his M.A. from New York University.

“JVNLA’s mission statement sums up the core precepts of our agency,” says Jennifer Weltz, “We are a locus of guidance, support and partnership for our many authors. With Alice and Ariana joining as partners and Cole joining our roster of accomplished agents, I look forward to an exciting future where championing our authors’ literary careers is our passion and highest priority.”

Along with Agent Alicia Brooks, JVNLA looks forward to celebrating this milestone in the Fall in New York City.

JVNLA was started by Jean Naggar in 1978. Headed by Jennifer Weltz since 2013, current President of the Association of American Literary Agents (AALA), JVNLA has grown tremendously over the past 45 years. The agency represents bestselling and critically acclaimed authors including Jean M. Auel, Maud Casey, Erica Cirino, Boyah J. Farah, Matt Goldman, CW Gortner, Bonnie Kistler, Phillip Margolin, Mary McGarry Morris, Linda Pastan, Ellen Potter, Carl Safina, Timothy Schaffert, Nancy Springer, and Sarai Walker as well as numerous prestigious literary estates. The agency's titles have been published in over 50 countries; featured in short story anthologies, magazines, and webzines; adapted for audio and showcased on big screen, small screen, and stage. As is stated on the website - “Our collaborative team redefines commitment and passion and our ideas seek out publishing's cutting edge with a bold business philosophy that has proved its worth.”

To learn more about JVNLA visit www.jvnla.com.

Contact jweltz@jvnla.com.

-----

Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency

216 E 75th St., Ste. 1E

New York, NY 10021

[thefollyflaneuse]

Gibraltar Tower, Heathfield Park, East Sussex

Gibraltar Tower, Heathfield Park, East Sussex

In 1791 Francis Newbery, bought Bailey Park, an estate in East Sussex, which he renamed the Heathfield Park Estate. Almost immediately he set to work constructing this elegant tower on high ground in his park. The Folly Flâneuse has joined forces with The Garden Historian to elaborate on its history.Continue reading

[podsteklom]

Day Dreams. 1940. Francis Henry Newbery (1855-1946)

[bernar444]

"To the Shore" (c.1910) by Francis Henry Newbery, McLean Museum and Art Gallery

The work shows a rural scene of three young girls walking arm in arm seen from the back. They wear dresses coloured white and yellow with dots, tied with sashes with the central girl wearing a hat tied behind her neck. Sea on the right horizon. Light blue coloured sky. ( McLean Museum and Art Gallery )

[pwlanier]

Francis Henry Newbery (1855-1946)

The regatta at Walberswick Signed

Oil on board

Woolley and Wallis

[librarycompany]

We were going to share this for #TypeTuesday, but then remembered that today is Wednesday. Y indeed.

Initial Letter from Benjamin Franklin's Experiments and observations on electricity, made at Philadelphia in America...London: Printed for David Henry; and sold by Francis Newbery, at the corner of St. Paul’s Church-Yard., MDCCLXIX. [1769]

[fleurdulys]

Daydreams - Francis Henry Newbery

~1920

[nationaldvam]

Our favorite childhood stories tend to stick with us. For me, rabbits seemed to be prominent characters in the books I loved – from Uncle Wiggily to Watership Down, Peter Rabbit and Alice in Wonderland. And more than the adventures of the bunnies, I remember the way the stories made me feel, and the lessons I still carry with me. There were lessons of survival, persistence, curiosity, risk-taking, and problem-solving that reinforced values of leadership, compassion, community, respect, and kindness. These rabbits live on in my subconscious, holding power and space having shaped my understanding of the world and all of its love and pain. Now, as a parent, I’ve come to know just how critical these choices are for my own children, and just how much power a simple picture book can hold.

Enhancing Social Justice Literacy

In 2015, Tanya Nixon-Silberg and Francie Latour, two Black mothers, authors, and community activists, drew on their own parenting practices – especially their use of children’s books to disrupt dominant narratives with their kids – to launch Wee the People (WTP) in Boston. WTP is a social justice project for children aged 4-12 that explores activism, resistance, and social action through the visual and performing arts. As part of their work, WTP hosts Social Justice Storytime at the Boston Public Library for their “Little Voices, Big Changes” initiative, built on the belief that if kids can understand fairness they can understand justice. Tanya and Francie work to builds parents’ capacity to confront topics like racism, deportation, gentrification, misogyny, islamophobia, and homophobia.

Innosanto Nagara, a Southeast Asian immigrant father, author/illustrator, and graphic designer creates new-wave board books that inspire conversations about social justice and encourage children’s passion and action around social causes like environmental issues, LGBTQ rights, and civil rights. With titles like A is for Activist, Counting on Community, and The Wedding Portrait, Innosanto explores themes of activism, free speech, political progress, civil disobedience, and artistic defiance. Innosanto is on the editorial team of M is for Movement, a site dedicated to exploring social justice and activism in children’s literature. The contributors to M is for Movement are children’s writers, illustrators, and book creators who are long-time activists and advocates who “come from and stand with marginalized communities living at intersections of identity, experience, race, class, gender, religion, sexuality, and ability.”

At the 2018 Facing Race National Conference in Detroit organized by Race Forward, Wee the People co-founder Tanya Nixon-Silberg and author/illustrator Innosanto Nagara presented a workshop together on racial literacy for children. They stressed the importance of racial literacy from an early age in the process of dismantling racist systems and structures.

Through their work, Tanya, Francie, and Innosanto are invested in inspiring social action through the arts, and have found that children’s books offer a powerful medium for moving new generations of people towards justice. Louise Derman-Sparks from Social Justice Books (a project of Teaching for Change) agrees:

“Children’s books continue to be an invaluable source of information and values. They reflect the attitudes in our society about diversity, power relationships among different groups of people, and various social identities (e.g., racial, ethnic, gender, economic class, sexual orientation, and disability). The visual and verbal messages young children absorb from books (and other media) heavily influence their ideas about themselves and others. Depending on the quality of the book, they can reinforce (or undermine) children’s affirmative self-concept, teach accurate (or misleading) information about people of various identities, and foster positive (or negative) attitudes about diversity. Children’s books teach children about who is important, who matters, who is even visible” (Guide for Selecting Anti-Bias Children’s Books, 2013).

Social Justice Literacy as a Prevention Strategy

Social justice literacy is an effective gender-based violence prevention strategy – a proactive effort to stop violence and abuse from happening in the first place by interrupting the cultural rules, norms, and constructs that support it. Several projects highlighted in the PreventIPV Tools Inventory demonstrate the effectiveness of social justice literacy in creating a more peaceful and just world. For example, Teaching for Change is a project that strives to build a more equitable, multicultural society by promoting social justice activism in the classroom. Their strategies center on leadership development and civic engagement for students, parents, and teachers that draw on real world current events. Teaching a People’s History offers classroom materials that emphasize the role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history. And Rethinking Schools focuses on strengthening public education through social justice teaching and education activism with a specific focus on promoting equity and racial justice in the classroom. These approaches focus on impacting the outermost layers of the social ecology to shift our cultural norms and values.

Priya Vulchi and Winona Guo, youth activists and creators of The Classroom Index, a textbook on racial literacy, identified two gaps in racial education:

The heart gap: “An inability to understand each of our experiences, to fiercely and unapologetically be compassionate beyond lip service,” and

The mind gap: “An inability to understand the larger, systemic ways in which racism operates.”

TED Talk: What It Takes to be Racially Literate by Priya Vulchi and Winona Guo

Children’s literature is one way to bridge these gaps by inspiring, educating, and engaging readers of all ages in a deeper understanding of the lived experiences of all people, families, and communities in our wide and vibrant world. But the fact is that marginalized people and communities are outrageously underrepresented in books available to children in mainstream American classrooms, libraries, and catalogues – in terms of both those authoring the books, and characters represented inside them. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center found that in all children’s picture books published in 2015, you are more likely to find non-human characters like bunnies (12.5%) than African Americans (7.6%) and Latinx (2.6%) combined. White characters are primarily depicted in the vast majority (73.3%) of these books.

Illustration: Diversity in Children's Books 2015 by David Huyck, in consultation with Sarah Park Dahlen and Molly Beth Griffin

Social Justice Books serves to identify, vet, and promote multicultural and social justice children’s books, building on the tradition of the Council on Interracial Books for Children which offered a social justice lens to reviews of children’s literature. They also help parents and children develop critical literacy skills and promote activism around diverse representation in libraries. One example is their #StepUpScholastic campaign urging Scholastic to “publish and distribute children’s books that reflect and affirm the identity, history, and lives of ALL children in our schools.” Engaging children in proactive efforts to both notice and address the underrepresentation of people of color in literature, as illustrated above, builds their social justice literacy.

Books that Promote Justice and Peace

For those looking for books that promote justice and peace, resources like Social Justice Books offer vetted booklists on a variety of topics, as do Raising Luminaries: Books for Littles and Little Feminist: Books for raising conscious kids. Topics include:

Learning about family structures

Talking to kids about violence

Books for tomorrow’s leaders

Honoring single mothers

Promoting healthy fatherhood

Fostering social and emotional health, compassion, and independence

Helping kids recognize privilege

Cultivating healthy sexual boundaries

Preventing sexual violence

Bullying, civil disobedience, and disrupting injustice

Seek out books by authors of color like Newbery Medal and Coretta Scott King Honor receipient Kwame Alexander. Additionally, several anti-violence organizations offer book lists specific to addressing trauma. For example, The Child Witness to Violence Project offers books about trauma and violence for young children.

As M is for Movement explains, “Children’s literature—both fiction and nonfiction—is full of inspiration and examples of children and adults who stand up for themselves and others. Whether it’s ducks organizing animals to oppose unfair farm rules, a student listening to her classmates’ concerns when running for student council, or a boy joining his first march, young people’s literature can demonstrate how individuals and communities have the power to act as agents for social change.”

Through children’s books, we can teach justice and peace across generations. By engaging a child in a book with a strong message that fills the heart and the head, we can help build their understanding, compassion, and confidence to impact social change in ways that are meaningful and important to them. And these lessons and values will likely stick with them their whole life long

Images:

The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld

Counting on Community by Innosanto Nagara

Illustration: Diversity in Children's Books 2015 by David Huyck, in consultation with Sarah Park Dahlen and Molly Beth Griffin

[ubu507]

The Spirit of Bridport, Dorset Francis Henry Newbery (1855–1946) Bridport Town Hall

[uwmspeccoll]

Wood Engraving Wednesday

GERTRUDE HERMES

Last week we mentioned Gertrude Hermes only as the beleaguered wife of English wood engraver Blair Hughes-Stanton and as an employee of the Welsh private press Gwasg Gregynog. Hermes, however, was also an accomplished sculptor and wood engraver in her own right, maintaining a long career from the mid 1920s until her debilitating stroke in 1969.

This week we present four original wood engravings by Gertrude Hermes from R. H. Mottram’s Strawberry Time and The Banquet, printed in 1934 by master printer H. Barker at the Golden Cockerel Press for the Press’s third set of owners Christopher Sandford, Owen Rutter, and Francis J. Newbery in an edition of 250 copies signed by the author.  

There are stylistic similarities between Hermes’s engravings and those of her former husband Blair Hughes-Stanton (by the time this book was printed, the couple were divorced). This could be because both were students in Leon Underwood's Brook Green School in the early 1920s, where among their classmates was the great British sculptor Henry Moore.

Gertrude Hermes would achieve numerous honors before her death in 1983, including being appointed an OBE in 1981.  

View our other posts on the books of the Golden Cockerel Press.

View more posts with wood engravings!

[the-paintrist]

Photography of Thomas Corsan Morton ca. 1890

Thomas Corsan Morton (1859–1928) was a Scottish artist, known as one of the Glasgow Boys.

Born in Glasgow, Morton worked briefly in a lawyer's office, and went to the city's School of Art. After a period at the Slade School in London, he studied in Paris under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre. He exhibited widely in the UK and beyond, often in exhibitions with work by other members of the Glasgow School, including Secessionist exhibitions in Munich in the 1890s.

Morton was primarily a landscape artist. Some of his work came from summer painting trips with others of the "Boys". These included stays in Kirkcudbright and in Cockburnspath, James Guthrie's home, in the 1880s.

He taught landscape painting at the Glasgow School of Art, and assisted Francis Newbery with the life drawing classes. In May 1908, he was appointed Keeper of the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. After retiring from that post in 1925 he became Curator of the newly established Art Gallery in Kirkcaldy, where he died in December 1928.

He is buried in the Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh with his wife Amelie Robertson (1869-1942), whom he had married in 1890, and their daughter Mildred Bruce Tupman (d.1972). The grave lies to the north of the main east-west path in a central area.

[kislak-center]

Following publisher John Newbery’s death in 1767, his son Francis, his nephew and his nephew’s wife Elizabeth carried on the business which made children’s literature sustainable and profitable. The John Newbery Medal was named after this legacy, the first of which was awarded June 27, 1922. This tiny bible, published by Elizabeth Newbery, is leather bound, gilded and comes complete with perfect little prints. Perhaps even more charming is the handwritten Inscription from S. Naish to her sister Ann. *** The Bible in Miniuture, or, A Concise History of the Old & New Testaments, London, 1780 http://ow.ly/T9iy30jNOhl BS408 .B582 1780 *** #kislakcenter #pennlibraries #tinybible #tinybooks #thumbbible #miniaturebooks #miniaturebibles #rarebooks #fineprinting

[nprbooks]

Renée Watson's young adult novel Piecing Me Together tells the story of Jade, a Portland, Ore., high school student with "coal skin and hula-hoop hips." Jade has won a scholarship to St. Francis, a private school that's mostly white. She makes friends and does well, but she also feels the school sees her as some kind of project --  and she doesn't like it. 

Piecing Me Together recently received the Coretta Scott King Award from the American Library Association, and it's also a John Newbery Medal honor book. 

Watson tells NPR, “I hope that my books provide space for young people to explore, and say, ‘Yeah, I feel seen.’ "

Check out Watson’s conversation with NPR here. 

[podsteklom]

Daydreams. 1920. Francis Henry Newbery (1855-1946)