This June a Research Grant recipient is in residence looking at alphabets in the reading room. Not just a handful, but as many as possible—and Cotsen has literally hundreds, even thousands. All the paging promises the fun of discovering something new in the collection. It took a little time to chase down this print, an alphabet that also refers to Noah’s Ark, making it squarely in scope for Cotsen. The wry contents note mentioning “excrement” written by the donor’s private librarian signaled that the print was something out of the ordinary.
“A-Z” by Christopher Orr. Buckingham, 1987. (Cotsen 18483)
The panel in the lower right hand corner announces that this is the third printing of “A-Z” below a whimsically scratchy illustration of a whale swimming parallel to Noah’s ark, the animals heads hanging over the gunwhales. Floating to the left of Noah holding his nose is the caption “Imagine what the smell there must have been,” a thought which has probably occurred to most people between the ages of four and eighty-four if they bother to think very hard about the logistics of keeping two of every species in crowded quarters for over a month.
Now look at the subjects for “A,” “B,” and “C, which are “Ant poo, Bear smells, Cat’s nasty’s.” The merriment continues with “hedgehog pellets,” “llama lumps,” “owl do-dads, “rabbit currants” all the way to “zebra manure.”
When the print maker Chris Orr (1943-) printed the sheet in 1987, he had not been elected Royal Academician or appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire. His Wikipedia biography (Christopher there) soberly describes him as an “English artist and print maker who has exhibited worldwide and published over 400 limited edition prints in lithography, etching, and silkscreen” in the collections of the British Museum, the Tate and the Victoria and Albert, to name just a few. And he has collaborated with Michael Palin on several publications. These achievements are humorously undercut with the comment:
During my thirty nine years as an artist I have been put in various pigeon-holes, such as ‘quintessential English’ or a ‘latter-day Hogarth‘. But are these epithets reasonable? My pictures are composed of well-mixed metaphors, references, allusions, jokes and descriptions. Does ‘Chris Orr-like’ refer to a typically English muddle? The tradition of graphic eccentricity (Heath Robinson, Donald McGill, Steve Bell et al.) is fair enough…
A pretty fair description of his middle-aged jeux de pee…
To celebrate the 2026 Winter Olympics, Special Collections presented a pop-up exhibition of Olympic-related materials on opening day. Items on display ranged from the discus (Princeton University Archives AC053 Box 58) that Robert Garrett, Class of 1897, threw at the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 [1], along with the laurel branch (AC053 Item 21) he received—to historical photographs, posters, and other ephemera. In this post, I highlight two items from the Cotsen collection.
Flip Your Back…or These Pages!
奥运之星 [Stars of the Olympics, no. 8] / text by Meng Fu; illustrated by Xu Liyuan. Tianjin, China: New Buds Publishing House, 1984. (Cotsen 71748)
This miniature flip book was published in China in October 1984, only a few months after the Summer Olympics concluded that August. Although the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded in 1949, its athletes were largely absent from the Olympic Games for more than three decades. (The PRC was invited to participate in the 1952 Summer Olympics, but the Chinese delegation arrived in Helsinki ten days late; the self-sabotaging political reasons behind this curious delay warrant a separate explanation.)
When Chinese athletes, representing the PRC’s first full participation in the Olympics, began winning medals in Los Angeles in 1984, the nation elated with immense pride.
Part of the series Stars of the Olympics, this flip book features the 21-year-old gymnast Li Ning. Having secured six medals (three gold, two silver, and one bronze), he ranked first in total medals won by any individual athlete at the 1984 Summer Olympics and became one of China’s most decorated Olympians.
The flip book contains two animated sequences. One side, titled “Men’s Pommel Horse,” opens with a brief introduction to Li Ning’s achievement (though it omits that he tied with American gold medalist Peter Vidmar in the pommel horse event). After a photograph of Li wearing half-a-dozen medals around his neck, the animation depicts a gymnast performing a full routine, including double-leg circles, single-leg swings, and scissors, before dismounting with perfect steadiness.
It is worth noting that in 1984 most Chinese families did not own a television—let alone a color set. By 1985, there were 17.2 color television sets per 100 urban households nationwide; in rural areas, ownership was under one percent (National Bureau of Statistics, 2008). For many children, this flip book would have served as a decent visual substitute for televised Olympic coverage.
The reverse side of the miniature book reenacts the raising of three national flags during a medal ceremony. China’s flag occupies the highest position, with those of the United States and Japan at equal height below. The scene may reference the men’s vault competition, won by another Chinese gymnast, Lou Yun. That event produced the only four-way tie in Olympic history. Li Ning received one of the silver medals; the remaining three silvers went to two Japanese athletes and Mitchell Gaylord of the United States.
Pick a Winning Team for 2000!
奥运赛场游戏棋 [An Olympic Board Game]. Wenzhou, China: between 1992 and 2000. (Cotsen 92091)
In this undated game produced in China, players compete in five sports—long-distance running, diving, soccer, vault, and swimming—at the 2000 Summer Olympics. Participants may represent one of six teams: the United States, Italy, Japan, China, North Korea, or the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
Strategically, the CIS would not be an unreasonable choice. Formed after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the CIS initially included former Soviet republics such as Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. The CIS competed as a “Unified Team” only in the 1992 Olympics. In Barcelona, it finished first in both the overall medal standings and the gold medal count, while the United States placed second in both categories.
If another player lands on the square you occupy, a “collision” occurs—but only you are injured and must lose one turn in the hospital.
An Olympic Board Game (Cotsen 92091). Uncut medal cards assign 10 points for gold, 8 for silver, and 6 for bronze.
An Olympic board game (Cotsen 92091). Uncut referee cards.
After winning a medal, a player draws a referee card. Card no. 3 awards five bonus points for breaking a world record. Some cards impose penalties. If you draw card no. 7, your medal is revoked, because…sorry, you have been caught doping.
Update
Now I don’t know about you who might be fortunate enough to live in warmer regions of the Earth, but here in the Northeastern United States, I have participated in an occasional heavy winter sport: snow shuffling. After the blizzard that started Sunday, I secured fourth place as the earliest person on my corner of the neighborhood to unveil my car from beneath 12.5 inches of snow–just missing the medal podium.
[1] You may want to look up the famous story of how Garrett, in preparation for the Olympics, made a practice discus weighing seven times as heavy as that of the actual ones used for competition and nearly gave up the event.
