Category Archives: ABCs, Alphabets, Hornbooks

Curator’s Choice: A .J. F. Freville’s French Puzzle-picture Alphabet

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When people ask me to name my favorite book in the collection, there’s never have a good answer on the tip of the tongue.  But If a heartless desperado were holding my cat for ransom and the conditions for her release were to name to a favorite book, I might be able to do it as long as I stuck to alphabet books.

One of my favorite alphabets is L’alphabet personnife ou Les lettres rendues sensibles par les figures de 25 enfants in action et portant le nom des 25 lettres elles-memes  [The Personified Alphabet or the Letters Animated by the Figures of 25 Children in Action Bearing the Names of the Letters].  Cotsen just purchased the first edition of 1801, where it joins a copy of the 1809 third edition.

7307668tp151195tpIts author, the teacher Anne-Francois-Joachim de Freville, is a rather interesting person, even if he is not an immortal of French children’s literature.  Freville’s most famous works were two collections of anecdotes about extraordinary real children.  Vies des enfans celebres (1798) included the story of Irish youngster Volney Becker, who saved his father from a shark and was bitten in half while being lifted to safety on a boat.  Vies circulated in English translation under the title The Juvenile Plutarch between 1801 and 1820. The second collection, Beaux traits du jeune age (1813), closes with an ambitious proposal for a pantheon to be built to honor the memory of notable children.  He was arrested for Jacobin sympathies during the French Revolution but acquitted by the tribunal and kept his head. During the Directory, he continued to produce books that incorporated a range of educational games like the one below designed to turn children into active participants in their education.

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A.-F.-J. Freville, Jeu d’alphabet, chiffres, et symbols.

L’Alphabet personnifie is perhaps the most ingenious and charming of them all and its design suggests that Freville was no ordinary teacher.  Like many enlightened educators who came after John Locke, Freville tried to invent ways to reduce the drudgery associated with learning to read.  Of course, he recommended using illustrated texts for that purpose, but on a different and more ambitious plan.  While it was true that children enjoyed illustrated alphabets of  animals in their primers, he observed,  they usually retained more information about the animals’ appearance and characteristics than they did of the letters of the alphabet, the real object of the exercise.

A better approach, Freville argued, was to anthropomorphize the letters, because children would take greater interest in the symbols if they resembled children the same age as themselves engaged in enjoyable activities (the different costumes and hats were also supposed to be a source of amusement).  The skillful use of alliteration increased the fun of learning, as well as an way of organizing the visual material so that it was more likely to impress associations on children’s minds.  Verbs are the heart of Freville’s method, which is somewhat unusual, as alphabets are more likely to focus on  substantives or nouns rather than actions.

Here is the letter “A,” impersonated by a boy watering [arrose].  When the children turn to the description of the plate, they will discover that it contains other objects beginning with the letter A: “Le petit Arlequin, arrose un Artichaut, fleuri dans son jardin” [Little Harlequin waters an artichoke blooming in his garden].   But if they look at the picture again, they will find even more objects whose names begin with “A” the description omits–“abeille” [bee] and “arraignee” [spider] to mention just two.  The engraver signed his name below the greenery in the lower right and I think it says “J. Le Roy.”

151195leaf1This being a French alphabet, the pleasures of the table must be shown.   Here is “B” for “boit” [drink] and “M” for “mange” [eat].

151195leaf2151195leaf13And the noblest of the fruits also makes an appearance in “V” for “vendange” [grape harvest].  More French fruits can be seen in a previous post on a new acquisition.

151195leaf22Plenty of ways to work off the food and drink are also illustrated, such as “H” for “hache” [chop] and “N” for “nage” [swim].

151195leaf8151195leaf14The boy is also shown practicing his handwriting in “E” for “ecrit” and playing in “J” for “joue.”151195leaf5151195leaf10The two editions are not identical.  A careful comparison established that the reading exercises had been revised, but the differences are to complicated to describe here. A more amusing change was made to the plate for the letter Z.  In the 1801 edition, “Z” pursued the zebra through the woods completely naked, whereas in the 3rd edition, he is draped in a diaphanous robe for the hunt, still with no shoes.

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Perhaps the revised plate is having a little fun at the expense of the merveilleuses, the fashion victims of their times, who fancied dresses so sheer that they left very little to the imagination….

1799-Cruikshank-Paris-ladies-full-winter-dress-caricature

An English satirist like Isaac Cruikshank was probably not the most objective observer of French fashion…

Dating Sets of Ivory Alphabet Letters

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Many sets of ivory (or bone) alphabet letters have survived in private and institutional collections: the British Library has the one Jane Austen and her family used for playing word games.  Perhaps they were taken out to solve riddles.

Here is a classic one Austen almost certainly would have known, because it was reprinted so often of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collections of word games, usually without credit to its ingenious creator Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels. 

We are little airy creatures,

All of diff’rent voice and features;

One of us in glass is set,

One of us you’ll find in jet,

One of us is set in tin,

And the fourth a box within;

If the last you should pursue,

They can never fly from you.

aeiou

[Alphabet of Bone Letters]. [England, 183-?]. (Cotsen 3507)

The riddle’s answer, the vowels, has been spelled out with one of the sets of bone alphabet letters in the collection.  They have been laid into a cunningly carved wooden box with a sliding lid that resembles a book.  It is more usual to find them in plain wooden boxes with sliding lids decorated with inlaid “cover titles” of bone or ivory.  It’s unclear if the manufacturer or the retailer was responsible for the packaging.  If their names appeared anywhere on the box, they would be clues as to the date of the pastime.  Cotsen’s set has no “cover title” or trace of the maker of the book box.   Perhaps the original container was broken or lost and this one as a replacement.  Another possibility is that this is a remnant of a much larger set of letters transferred to this box because it was the right size.

spinebottomsidePerhaps customers were been offered a choice of boxes at point of sale. The Puzzle Museum owns a carved bone box containing bone letters with a sliding lid about the same size and shape as Cotsen’s, but with different decorations.ivory boxThe distinctive letter forms of the bone ones, however, offer some evidence for dating them.  They are clearly copies of  the early nineteenth-century  Roman “fat faces”  made popular by Robert Thorne, Vincent Figgins, and William Thorowgood, that are the  forerunners of slab serif and typewriter fonts.  Here’s an early nineteenth-century handbill that uses one of these wonderful in-your-face fonts that were designed for use in advertising.

2014-01-19th-century-advertising-handbill1And here are the words “Turnip Seeds” spelled out in the Cotsen set of bone letters.

turnipThe resemblance is unmistakable, even though the bone letters’ serifs are not as skinny and spiky as in the fat faces and the contrasts between the thick and thin strokes not as exaggerated.  If the bone letters had been more faithful copies of the typeforms, they probably would have been much too fragile to hold up to extended play.  Here’s second comparison of type and bone letter:

figgins fat faceAnd here is ” Durham” spelled out in Cotsen’s bone letters:durhamWhile redescribing Cotsen’s collection of alphabet tiles and letters this summer,  I noticed that all but this set used some variation of the slab serif, instead of the Figgins fat face.  This could mean that those alphabet letters can’t possibly date before 1815 or so, when the faces they were modeled after began to appear in type specimens and in job printing.  So much for the common misconception that they are relics of eighteenth-century nursery artifacts….  In fact, I strongly suspect most of Cotsen’s sets could date to the mid- to late nineteenth century, but that’s a riddle for  another time.