This essay was originally written for the 2019 Honey and Wax Prize, a book collecting award for women under 30. It describes my thoughts about my collection of mass-market colonialist children’s books and natural history books from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, as well as the process of acquiring such a collection.
My book collection began when I was pursuing my MFA in Book Arts at Columbia College Chicago. In the college’s bindery hangs a poster depicting several shelves of children’s books from the Bodleian Library; their covers and spines are brilliantly illustrated with gold and silver foil that shines against brightly-colored ink and cloth. I assumed that such lavish specimens (from the hallowed halls of the Bodleian, no less) must be prohibitively expensive – but when a quick internet search proved me wrong, I excitedly ordered the first few turn-of-the-century trade bindings that would begin my collection.
My interest in natural history drove me to begin with natural history books for children, all from the late 1800’s through the early 1900’s, the era of the bright and gaudy cover illustrations that had so captured me. My background in printmaking also drew me to those book covers that had used their limited print runs to the fullest effect – utilizing the cloth color to create negative space, using “split fountain” gradients to achieve multiple ink colors with one printing run, or blind-debossing a pattern into the book board. When I began to read, I was most intrigued to find that these ostensibly objective educational books were full of ludicrous, easily disproven information and bizarre moral projections upon the animals they described. Scorpions, claimed one, so loved darkness that if they were trapped in a ring of fire on a sunny day, they would sting themselves to death rather than tolerate the light. Some animals were beautiful, majestic, stately, kind, and good; others were ugly, treacherous, and evil. Personal, unsourced anecdotes were rampant and taken as fact (“A farmer from New York once told me…”), and many of the illustrations were wildly inaccurate. The animals were frequently arranged into a hierarchy from least to most advanced or civilized, and, far more troubling, that hierarchy often included mankind, with white Europeans held above all other peoples and various African tribal cultures listed one step above apes.
I was surprised not at the existence of such scientific inaccuracy and racist rhetoric, but rather at its widespread publication so recently in history, and behind such bright and inviting cover art. This was a through-line that I had not expected, and it would become the focus of my collection. I decided to expand my collecting scope from solely children’s natural history books in order to form a fuller picture of what a white European or American child might read just before and after the turn of the twentieth century. Specifically, I hunted for books that might contribute to the Western impulse to dominate the natural world and the worlds of other peoples and cultures, not only physically through military force, but intellectually through the spread of misinformation and mischaracterization. I collected primarily mass-market trade bindings, not only because their aesthetic beauty is part of what made such problematic ideology palatable and desirable, but also because they were widely accessible and affordable, and therefore found their way into the hands of more children and everyday people.
Now, my collection contains natural history books, boys’ and girls’ adventure fiction, nonfiction accounts of explorers and travelers, and notable examples of various cover art printing and design techniques. Although casting such a wide net may at first seem unfocused, I believe that each item in my collection helps to tell the story of how colonialist and imperialist thought was packaged and marketed to Western youth. Because each color of ink or foil stamped into a book cover represents a separate, costly printing run, publishers strived to achieve their eye-catching designs with the fewest colors and cover treatments possible. This is why even those items in the collection included solely for their cover design, rather than their content, are valuable examples of the aesthetic choices being made to make books of this era available to the general public.
Any time I read through a new acquisition, I uncover the ways in which it connects with other items in the collection or echoes the same misconceptions or prejudices. For example, the Reverend John George Wood was an English writer whose books on natural history massively popularized the genre. I have two editions of his Illustrated Natural History in my collection, but his words and assertions (correct or not) trickle through so many other natural history books I’ve acquired that he is represented far beyond those volumes. It is fascinating to trace his influence in this way. So many items in my collection attribute the same human characteristics to the same animals – and the same animal characteristics to the same humans. It is astonishing how willingly the books’ authors personify animals to help children relate to them, and yet how unwilling they are to extend the courtesy of humanization to people of other cultures. When considered as a group, these books present a fuller picture of just how fluidly the hierarchy from the lowest to the highest forms of animal life slipped into the spectrum of mankind – and how that might have made “civilizing” faraway lands through force seem no less wrong than training a dog or keeping an exotic bird in a zoo.
Because I am a book artist and illustrator myself, my collection serves primarily as my private research library. I am fascinated with the white Western impulse to collect, categorize, list, document, explain, and thereby master both the natural world and the worlds of other peoples and cultures. In my own work, I appropriate the illustrative style of this era’s children’s books in order to draw a line between them and the modern-day results of the ideologies they contain. The first artist book I created, Maneater, is a set of four separate books designed in the style of those in my collection, and tells the story of both a wealthy shareholder of an imperialist trading company and an inhabitant of the island that company exploits. My second book, Out of the Dark/Into the Water, is an account of a collector of “exotic” art and artifacts, and explores the ethics of keeping such objects in both museums and private collections. Both are informed by the insight I develop through expanding and honing my collection, and are attempts to answer, or at least amplify, the questions my collection asks most loudly: how was this mindset perpetuated and accepted so ubiquitously? What techniques were used to indoctrinate Western children with imperialist thought? And what was the truth behind the propaganda and misinformation? I believe that as a white artist and collector, it is my responsibility to call attention to the oppressive history that my collection represents, and to contribute to the dissolution of the social hierarchies that these books espouse as intrinsic. This is the ultimate goal of my collection: to preserve the history of how imperialism was reinforced, to trace the lineage of that history, and to keep that history from repeating itself.
Hannah Batsel