Some Girls Wander

Henry Darger's Room

These photos are of a now-lost place - a realm of dreams. 

All photos copyright Keizo Kitajima

These beautiful photos of the apartment at 851 Webster were taken 25 years after Mr. Darger's death, before the room was, at last, dismantled.

The collection of Oz books feels so familiar, because there are so many similar little volumes littering my own shelves. 
 

But this is the photo that makes me feel like I might start crying - every single time I see it:

The boxes of pencil nubs and crayons and cracked watercolor cakes. Irrefutable proof that the most humble of materials can create exquisite things.

These photos are just a smidgen of the two visual records contained in this book. One set of photographs is in black and white, taken after the initial discovery of the strange and wondrous room. The second is a color series, taken in 1999, before the bits and pieces of the room found their way to the Intuit Museum in Chicago.

Some excellent friends presented me with this book last Christmas...they had squirrelled it away for me on their own trip to The Room, as it exists now.

It's really a treasure, and I get lost whenever I look through it. The sheer amount of things in that room: the pencils, paintings, clippings, balls of twine, thick stacks of paper wavy from time and paste.

It was somebody's whole world in there.

A Book By Its...

I recently had occassion to scan and send a designer a bunch o' covers from my library of dusty books, as a way of just giving reference to...well...some of the dusty book covers I like (nerd-to-nerd).

So, why not share a few favorites right here!

This is one of my all-time favorites, and you can't even see how good it is because, in person, the frame around the fairies is shining and gilded! I can't even say what I love most about this cover. The lettering is so pretty. But then, the colors are perfect, too.

The lettering! The musket! The bear!
I have a soft spot for early 20th century Boy Adventure Books, but usually I keep it to just admiring the shelves at Powell's. This one was an exception.

While we're on the bear ticket...I mean, I have a bit of a weakness.

The lettering on the center plate and the blue embossed scrolling on this one just knock me out (and the insides of this one are really good, too.)

This has a pretty typical Victorian primer look, but I love that sunflower border!

And the above isn't from my library, but I wish it was. I've had it saved in my inspiration folder for a few good years now, because it's so elegant and perfect.   

These things make my heart flutter.
I only wish most newly-made books were so pretty!

Monsters of the Sea!

 
Josiah is a champion at indulging my nerdiness, and these old Sea Monster magazines from Christmas are the proof. Can a more perfect periodical exist?

I think not. Just look at those headlines!

The insides are filled with good/awful black and white line art, engravings and the like, and they all  have a comforting, photocopied appearance.

I only found out about the existance of these magazines this Fall, and immediately wanted them so bad. And that sweet fella of mine made that happen!

Since there are a finite amount of sea and lake monster sightings, by now, I think I've read almost all of the accounts. But even still, very little makes me happier or sends my mind racing than dreaming about mysterious things under the dark waves.

Libris Lunaria

(I just posted this on the big blog, but I wanted to include it here for the folks who only frequent this blog)

Upon finding her on the ol' internets, one of the first things I noticed about Francesca was her incredible collection of beautiful vintage illustrations - both archived on her blog, and hanging up on her walls. I longed for a whole big garden of flower images from her What Genus Are You? series of posts. And now it looks like my dreams are coming true, because...

She is currently hard at work embarking on a new, beautiful print-shop dreamily called Libris Lunaria !

You can read all about it here.

Animal Children, Updated

I felt so awful about having crummy photographed images from the lovely Animal Children, who just deserve better than that. I've completely updated the original post with scans (courtesy of a new scanner!).

And there's a couple of new pals I couldn't resist adding to the post, too.
That boar boy?! C'mon.

Animal Children (Revised)

Animal Children: The Friends of the Forest and the Plain

By Edith Brown Kirkwood
Illustrated by M.T. Ross
1913

I found this copy of Animal Children at Powell's last week, and very nearly jumped for joy. It was a really, really good price, too - so that made me all the more pleased!This book is the only one in the "Little anthropomorphised Items/Creatures" series (like Bird Children, Flower Children, etc.) that isn't written by Elizabeth Gordon. It is illustrated by the same person, so the images have the same kind of beautiful madcap quality the others do.

Here are some of my favorites of the animal children :

(I think Bobcat & Lynx might be one of the weirdest illustrations of all time)

 

 
(Prairie Dog & Deermouse are suspiciously similar!)

 


I saved my favorites: The Bears, The Reindeer (those pinks & greens!) and The Bats for last. That bat in the big black hat is just the best. I wonder if Marcel Dzama has seen it? I think as a noted bat fancier, he might appreciate a bat in a cowboy hat.

You can find it in its entirety here on Gutenberg, and probably more places online, too. The colors are a little funny in the Gutenberg version, but you can read all the little poems at least!

Alameda Treasures

 

            

Here are some of the little things I took home from a really fun, really good treasure-hunting morning with Ms. F. We kept doing the frenzied running up to each other: "Oh my god! Look at this for you!" thing that is a sure sign of a good old-stuff-hunting day. There was so much to love and sift through, I could've come back with bags and bags and boxes and boxes if we'd had the time and the space!

The Eiffel Tower blouse is probably the most special treasure I got that day (Francesca grabbed and thrust it into my hands with enormous, excited eyes) and it's now all altered + taken in to fit me nicely. Also high on the special-o-meter, the Little Jack Rabbit book is from a series I didn't know about by the author of the Billy Bunny books (which are some of my very favorites!) And that Snow White + Rose Red was snapped up because of the incredible color, and, of course, that excellent bear. The gingham dress is probably 80's pretending to be 50's, but I think it's going to be so sweet with cardigans this fall.

Huzzah!

A Child's Book of the Teeth

I picked up this little book o' toofs at the last big antique fair.
I love teeth!

It's a rather exhaustive little manual/textbook regarding everything a young person might wish to know about the current and future inhabitants of their mouths. Good ol' World Book!

Publishing year: 1920

It is very heavily illustrated, both with charts like the one above, as well as these fantastic little cartoonish teeth-men (and some tooth-ladies), like the ones on the cover.

 

I think what we are seeing above is a very pushy wisdom tooth.

This is my favorite part of the book - "Nicknames That Teeth Have":

 

The owly "wisdom tooth" illustration is pretty wonderful.

The "Army of Prevention"!

And I'll finish with the wonderful end-papers:

I love patterned endpapers, but lately I've been really dazzled by ones with a larger scene or image, like this.