The Wenham Museum in Wenham, Massachusetts is borrowing artifacts, sketches, and illustrations from the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection for their upcoming exhibit Picture This: 90 Years of Storybook Art (February 3- May 6, 2012).  Classic toy stories will come to life through more than 50 original illustrations, vintage toys, and antique books in a colorful display that is engaging for all ages. In the gallery visitors will be able to make their own picture book to take away after their visit, dress in costume to become part of the story, and use story cubes to create their own picture stories all while enjoying the illustrations and reading classics of children’s literature.

The NCLC is lending two artifacts from Nellie, a cat on her own, written and illustrated by Natalie Babbitt and published in 1989 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.   Ms. Babbitt was born in 1932 in Dayton, OH, the daughter of Ralph Zane and Genevieve (Converse) Moore. She received her B.A. from Smith College in 1954. That same year she married Samuel Fisher Babbitt, who also collaborated with her on her first book, The 49th Magician.

The Babbitt Papers hold the manuscripts, preliminary sketches, finished artwork and models for this and many other Babbitt titles, including her most famous work, the multiple award-winning Tuck Everlasting.   Seven paintings and two sketches by Ms. Babbitt will accompany Nellie and her hat to Wenham. To keep Nellie company, eight collages by Ed Young will be featured in the Wenham show as well.  These collages are the finished works of art for his Pinocchio, published in 1996 by Philomel.  Mr. Young, a children’s book author/illustrator and winner of many awards was born in Tientsin, China and raised in Shanghai and Hong Kong, where he was interested in drawing and storytelling from an early age.  He moved to the U.S. in 1951 to study architecture but quickly changed his focus to art.  Mr. Young has illustrated over eighty books, many of which he also wrote.

The mission of the Wenham Museum is to protect, preserve, and interpret the history and culture of  Boston’s North Shore, domestic life, and the artifacts of childhood.  The Museum was established in 1922, making 2012 its 90^th anniversary. It began as an historic house museum, but the first donor, Elizabeth Richards Horton – who also happened to be the last child to grow up in the house – donated nearly 1000 dolls to the museum that had been her childhood home, thus establishing the Wenham Museum as one of the premier museums of dolls, toys, and the artifacts of childhood from the 17^th century to the present. Since then the museum has maintained a tradition of celebrating childhood and domestic life through its exhibitions of artifacts that have been a part of childhood for the past 400 years, including children’s books, toys and dolls of all kinds, electric trains, and textiles and objects of domestic life.

Putting together your holiday music playlist?  Considering gifts of music?  My pick is Bobby Timmons’ Holiday Soul, on Prestige Records.  This rerelease by Fantasy Records of the original 1965 recording includes Bobby Timmons on piano, Butch Warren on bass and Walter Perkins on drums.  All the well known classics are improvised including Deck the Halls, White Christmas and my favorite We Three Kings.  You don’t need to be a jazz enthusiast to appreciate the “glittering” and “stimulating” nature of the tunes.  You don’t even have to enjoy the holidays.  As Jack McKinney wrote in the original liner notes, “…this album is to be played in June as well as in January, for joy and jazz are not confined to the calendar.  It is as cool and as warm as your own senses, and the effect is stimulating in any climate.” 

Fantasy Records, Berkeley California, acquired the Prestige Records catalog in 1971 and in 1983 established the subsidiary record label Original Jazz Classics, rereleasing for serious jazz enthusiasts a series of reproductions from Prestige.  Holiday Soul is one of them.  Review a listing of Fantasy Original Jazz Classics recordings held in the Charters Archive of Vernacular African American Musical Culture.

Kristin Eshelman, Curator of Multimedia Collections

The International Council on Archives has chosen today as World Day for Audiovisual Heritage.  The purpose is to draw attention to the historical development of audiovisual media: cinema, photography, television, video and sound recording.  Check out the poster outlining a timeline of audiovisual development in four languages.  Modern archives contain vast quantities of audiovisual materials that document cultural heritage.  Our knowledge of our national and local history is enriched by these records.  For example, how limited would our understanding of our participation in World War II be without the “Man on the Street Interviews After the Attack on Pearl Harbor“, or of our developing cities at the turn of the 20th century if not portrayed in photographs made by the Detroit Publishing Company, all preserved at the Library of Congress.  By preserving photographs, film and sound recordings, we can explore and better understand from where we have come.  Celebrate our audiovisual heritage by visiting The UConn Story to investigate the University of Connecticut’s history through a variety of formats, watch the earliest UConn football and basketball game films  and see college life as it once was in photographs in the Digital Mosaic.

Kristin Eshelman, Curator of Multimedia Collections

Who is this man?  What’s with the fish on a stick?  What’s the story behind this photograph?

You want to know, don’t you?  Well, I’m not going to tell you, not yet.  What I want is YOU to tell ME what you think is going on here. 

Here’s a challenge to our loyal blog readers.  Use the comments to give your best guess.  Where is this man?  What year do you think this photo is from?  And why in the world is he grinning from ear to ear at the fish? 

Make up a story about him if you want. 

I’ll give you more information on Wednesday.  In the meantime, I want to hear from you about what you think is going on with this photo.

Cheers!

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections