Archival material Archives - Cotsen Children’s LibraryCotsen Children’s Library

As a collector, Mr. Cotsen was nothing if not adventurous. One of his most ambitious purchases was the archive of the publishers of juvenile theater, Skelt and Webb, at auction in the early 1990s. At well over 300 linear feet, Cotsen’s toy theater collection dwarfs every other notable American institutional collection, such as the Arthur Weyhe Collection in the Billy Rose Theater Division in the Performing Arts Division of the New York Public Library or Ohio State University Lawrence & Lee Theatre Research Institute.

Perhaps the curators of those collections have been releasing explosive sighs of relief for years because they dodged the interesting challenge of figuring out what to do. The Skelt & Webb collection contains much of the contents the shop owned first by the Skelts and then their successors the Webbs when it finally closed in the early twentieth century (it is said that the member of the Webb family who had been its keeper stowed things under the floor boards, up the chimney, and beneath the beds because the house was so small). The play scripts and prints were the devils we knew being on paper. It was the bundles of heavy metal stamps for the foil used to decorating the cut-out characters, copper plates used to print full-length portraits, sheets of grouped characters, scene drops, almost two hundred lithographic stones for reproducing prosceniums and sets, and tools. Here’s a detail from a copperplate of a backdrop for Shakespeare’s Othello and a machine whose purpose is still to be determined…The first stage of processing the Skelt and Webb archive was the monumental task of sorting the materials, housing, and photographing as many of the objects as possible before sending them to Princeton’s remote storage. Cotsen’s redoubtable curatorial assistant Aaron Pickett set the course of steering between mounting a full-fledged digitization project and compiling a conventional finding aid..

Without Aaron’s can-do attitude and a flock of student assistants, the collection would be virtually inaccessible. This month two of England’s leading experts on the toy theater, Alan Powers and David Powell, are able to take a second deeper dive into Skelt and Webb during their tenure this month as Friends of the Princeton University Library’s Research Grant winners. Their goal to is rethink the history of the English toy theater using the resources of the Skelt & Webb Collection…

Because they will be going through as much as possible while they are in Princeton, I’ve had a chance to do some exploring in corners I didn’t get see years ago, such as the boxes containing drawings. There are literally hundreds of them… Here’s a pencil sketch of great actor Edmund Kean as Shakespeare’s Richard III and a more finished one of a fight shipboard between an English tar and a dastardly pirate wearing a skirt with a ring of skulls and crossbones around the hem.There are marvelous full-length portraits of characters which I’m longing to identify, like this Roman soldier, the deadly damsel with a tambourine and a dagger, and a sprite in fancy fishy-scale tights. This summer a cadre of us will be working hard to improve the bare bones record for the collection by adding measurements, names of authors, works, and performers, as well as all the foundational information in the Excel spreadsheets Aaron’s team made which at the time couldn’t be inserted. Already I’ve matched up one drawing with its lithographic print captioned “Bob Cousens Pantaloon!”We’re excited at the prospect of making more marvelous material available for performers, historians of the genre and of illegitimate theater in general, plus collectors and any other enthusiasts on Cotsen’s digital library module.

Type two words—“creativity” and “children”—into the search bar, hit the magnifying glass icon, and watch the results cascade down the screen. The tenor of all these hits to scholarly articles in psychology, curriculum on public television for carers, websites devoted to child development, Ideas.Ted.com, etc. is unlocking every child’s imaginative potential is crucial to their intellectual and emotional progress.

Art instruction emphasizing creative self-expression through craft projects is believed to be among the best ways of opening up children’s minds to this process. The idea that children should be inspired to discover within the seeds of creativity and to release their individuality through art for its own sake rather than to prepare for careers dates back to early twentieth-century Vienna. Franz Cizek (1765-1943), the most celebrated professor of art education of his generation, promoted a method which encouraged pupils to teach themselves, discarding the traditional formal study of technique for the exploration of a wide variety of media.

Cizek’s course inaugurated in 1903 at the School of Applied Arts, with its strong ties to the Viennese Sezession, was not the only place in Austria where boys and girls were taught according to this philosophy. Emmy Zweybrück-Prochaska (1890-1956) opened a school just for girls in 1915. nfluenced by Cizek’s progressive, “permissive” methods, she brought deep interests in applied design, and the so-called naïve design language of indigenous peoples, and women’s handwork in the textile arts. Zweybruck parted company from Cizek in her practice in bringing out self-expressive potential through achievement of technical proficiency and her dedication to training both amateurs and young women aspiring to careers as artists.

A sample of work by some of Zweybruck’s students has been preserved in the Cotsen collection. Among the most delightful are the hand-drawn postcards. The assignment seems to have been to illustrate the front of a commercially printed card and write a message to their teacher. The illustration shown below is signed “E. C.” and the signature is “your Evelyn.” The back is postmarked “1916.” Lisbeth Haase is one of the most accomplished artists in the archive. Here is her design of a girl watering a cactus for a postcard. The black and white drawing is the right-hand half of a frame for a double-page spread in a book. The third is a clever jumble perhaps of Lisbeth’s favorite things or an assortment of subjects Zweybruck suggested be incorporated into some kind of picture.The largest group reflects the method’s foundational principle of letting children try their hands at different media and includes linocuts, collages, papercuts, and drawings, some signed by the young creators. One of Zweybruck’s techniques was to read aloud detailed descriptions or little stories lasting around 5 minutes and allowed the students “to find their way as best they can and will” in their responses. One day’s project must have been based on the legend of St. George and the dragon and it’s fascinating to notice the differences between these two attempts. Unfortunately they are both anonymous designs.Perhaps this whimsical collage of an elephant by “N. J.” was a design for a toy or figurine. N. J. used silver paper and sequins in addition to different colored papers.The horizontal borders in watercolor or cut papers are unsigned, but the linocut of the fence is credited to Zviki Abramowicz. The unsigned designs for borders range from abstraction to the highly stylized “primitive. It’s also possible to compare two versions of the same image within the archive. This design was executed in black and white and in full color. The black and white version of the Virgin and Christ Child was mounted on the same sheet as a quick sketch of several faces. This ambitious image is also unsigned.In the coming months, all the materials by Zweybruck’s students in the collection will be reorganized so they will be more accessible to researchers. The names of all the students who signed their work will also be recorded. Perhaps someone some day will try to identify the girls who studied with Zweybruck and establish how many went on to be artists.