Russian dolls

I was really pleased to come upon another online repository of images of vintage children’s books this week. So much so it means the unheard of excitement of two posts in one week!

I blogged a website in March 2007 that featured beautiful images from a vintage Japanese magazine called Kodomo no kuni. This time it is Russian children’s books and how gorgeous they are. Not a poor illustration amongst them. They were part of an exhibition in the McGill University Library, Quebec and wouldn’t I have liked to have seen that?

The library apparently has over 350 Soviet children's books published in the 20s and 30s. From this selection I particularly like the paper cut-out instruction book Iz Bumagi Bez Kleia (deliciously translated as Made of Paper Without Glue) from 1931. As you can see from the picture of the cover above, it has a bright and witty illustration of traditionally dressed woman on its cover, pushing a rather abstract wheelbarrow and happy in her work.

In the same section of the website Women as Partners is my second favourite book: Mamin Most (apparently Mother's Bridge). Its chromolithographed illustrations are very nice indeed. Seeing women depicted as architectural engineers is unusual enough, but in 1933? Vive la Révolution.

And as I was clicking through the site I had a ‘whatdoyouknow’ moment. I wrote about one of my favourite contemporary illustrated books Ton in July last year. And you can’t help feeling the illustrator of that book, Taro Miura, had seen this book as the characters are look so very similar, down to the outfits, colours and trouser turn-ups. Its nice, though, to see that what goes around, comes around.

Edinburgh rock

A recent weekend in Edinburgh proved to be full of fantastic stonemasonry. Street after impressive street of great houses and municipal buildings. Lots of independent shops, many with remnants of their original facades still visible. And hills - London doesn’t have enough of those. There was a really good exhibition on Basil Spence with a great Festival of Britain model, it was packed with visitors on a very cold Sunday afternoon.

And a really nice botanic garden.

I do like parks. Nature tamed for the urbanite. Botanic gardens are the best - they have plants nicely labelled, like open air museums. This one has a lovely palm house, Japanese gardens, plenty of sculpture and a very smart art gallery. One entrance to the gardens is currently being re-built on a grand scale, to maximise visitor spend with new facilities. But I think I’d stick with this East Gate entrance and its fabulous metal nameplate.

A quickly answered enquiry to the garden website elicited the information that there was no definitive designer attributed to this classic logo. The flower was originally drawn by Gillian Meadows, a Herbarium Assistant ‘with a special talent for illustration.’ She drew it for the garden’s tercentenary in 1970.The drawing was for the cover of the garden's journal. It made it onto the entrance plates that year too and has remained the logo, with tweaks, ever since. It pictures the Sibbaldia wildflower, named after one of the founders of the gardens Robert Sibbald.

The typography sits really well with the illustration and the whole logo still holds its own on the website header, 38 years later. All in all, it reminds me of one of those beautiful, classic Penguin covers.

Britain in pictures

The Britain in Pictures series of books was published in the late 1930s and 1940s by Collins. It was edited by the then literary editor of the Spectator, Walter James Turner.

The overall aim of the series was to tell a social history of Britain, perhaps spurred on by the war and a subsequent re-appropriation of nationalism in all its forms. Although the series ran with the subtitle 'The British People in Pictures', the books were as much about writing as pictures. The roll call of authors reads like a veritable who’s-who of the literary, political and arts worlds of the period. From John Piper on British Romantic Artists, Cecil Beaton on English Photographers and Edith Sitwell on English Women to Graham Greene on British Dramatists and John Betjeman on English Cities and Small Towns.

A uniformly designed set of over 100 books, they look great as a collection. This image (from a 1939 book promoting Britain abroad) is an advertisement for the Tullis Russell paper company. Each book in the Britain in Pictures series, it says, was printed on their Mellotex cartridge paper. The advertisement features 3 small model men, standing amongst a world built from Britain in Pictures. It’s all a bit Incredible Shrinking Man and Gulliver (the experimental Russian communist puppet version from 1935, of course…) rolled into one.

And, really, what could be nicer than living in a world of books?