From the Outside In: the Golden Treasury‘s Endpapers

[See the previous entry in this series here.]

Adult readers know unambiguously what it means to “read a book.” They have an image of someone — most often themselves? — sitting somewhere in a comfortable chair, on a commuter train or in an airport terminal, good lighting from over the shoulder… The book lies open in their hands or lap, somewhere in the middle, with a sheaf of pages pinned in place behind each thumb. Because, y’know, whether the book in question is a potboiler or a metaphysical treatise, that’s where all the action is — in the middle. It’s the heart of the book.

But just inside the front and back covers? Those “pages,” the endpapers, serve a purely physical function; they’re where the dynamic stresses are greatest, where the tension between spine and glued contents would most likely result in tearing and/or separation. In a book, they’re the analogue of a painting’s picture frame: they physically hold it all together, hence are important, but they have no real point otherwise. They’re to be gotten through.

But kids harbor fewer clearcut preconceptions. From their perspective, the very first spread of paper and the very last might well be places to expect the most drama, the most meaning. And in a book or elsewhere, when faced with a large two-page spread of blank paper, few kids could resist the temptation to scribble, to color, to fill. Leaving them empty would be such a waste, no?

I don’t know, but can guess, that artists and illustrators love having the freedom to fill whole tabloid-sized sheets of whitespace, too, free from the constraints of story and the rigid geography of text on the page. Bill Watterson, creator of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, hated the tedium of the daily strip format: day after day, year after year, working within the same narrow rectangle. (It especially had to frustrate him as the creator of such an undisciplined protagonist.) If I remember correctly, he stipulated in his contracts that if you wanted the daily strip, you had to give him a half-page on Sunday, to fill with whatever layout he wanted. His Sunday strips dazzled, even before you’d read any of the text in the speech balloons.

The publishers of kids’ books, especially illustrated ones, know all this. And the publishers of great kids’ books pull out all the stops.

Here’s what you saw when you first opened the Golden Treasury of Natural History (click to enlarge):

Obviously, I don’t know how they came up with the general layout. (Why three page-spanning lozenge-shaped panels? Why not rectangles? And why split the central panel up into the quadrants of a big flat X?) But it’s pretty obvious what’s going on within each of those broad areas:

First, if you’re offering a book on natural history in general then by the gods, you’d better show some nature, some life. The front endpapers of the Golden Treasury proclaim pretty plainly that the topic at hand has nothing artificial about it. You want man-made — building, trucks, products? Look elsewhere.

Note too that each general area includes a little story, if you will. A little life-cycle. (In the case of the frog and the moth, across the central band, these are literally circular. The peach-tree life-cycle at bottom right is laid out linearly, but suggests a circle in both starting and ending with a dark, knobby pit.)

When you turned at last to the back of the book, you saw this spread (click to enlarge):

Here, the same general structural layout as in the front, but the interiors of each of those geometric shapes have changed — both thematically and specifically. Gone are the life cycles. In their place, we find suggestions of categories of information: astronomy, ancient life, contemporary life forms, plants, geology. This almost represents the organization of the book you’ve just made your way through.

But if you had gotten through the whole book, you’d also find some surprises here — particularly in the three human figures: the rockhound hammering away on a stone jetty at the bottom right; the mahout leading a herd of elephants into a clearing shared with woolly mammoths, in the center; and especially the apparently naked — but tastefully so — male figure in the center-right balloon.

He hints vaguely at certain forms of civic, often Cold War-era statuary, in which the humans gaze — even in daylight — at some unidentified star or satellite blinking across the sky.

That single male figure jars, in retrospect. It’s got nothing to do with the book itself, for one thing; the Golden Treasury of Natural History has next to nothing to say of humans, except in asides and in graphics showing the scale of the non-human natural world. Furthermore, it resembles pretty much no one at all in the real world, at least the real world of mid-20th century southern New Jersey. Was it even recognizably a kid, vs. an adult? (Had to be a kid, right? Not a single hair in sight, except for the immaculate coif at the top of his head.)

Finally, in its clear maleness it suggests something which may have been true, in a broad sense, of the time during which the book was published: if a kid was interested in the book’s contents, the kid was probably a boy. Because girls don’t do science, it seemed to say, there’s no need to represent a counterpart idealized female form alongside (let alone instead). Girls had other things on their minds; they didn’t aspire to the stars, had no interest in microscopes and bubbling test tubes.

But in even implying such a thing, the Golden Treasury‘s closing endpaper in one respect denied the book’s own reality: it was written entirely by a woman, a science teacher and easily one of the greatest writers of science for children in US history.

Coming up next: what I’ve been able to uncover about Bertha Morris Parker, starting with this post.

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Postscript: Looking back on that closing endpaper, one other feature — aside from the giant human — jumps out at me: the perfect thin red ellipse at the right of the topmost panel. I know what it represents — a comet’s orbit, which makes sense in the context of the rest of that panel. I have no idea why it’s bright, sharp, almost unnaturally red. But in the enlargement, you can clearly see one nice subtle touch: it hasn’t been simply drawn or painted over the blurry pastel Solar System in the background, it’s been threaded through the orbital plane of the planets, passing above some orbits but below others. I love discovering this sort of detail.