Cotsen Curatorial | Cotsen Children’s Library

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…

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).

Skelt and Webb Toy Theater Collection. (Cotsen 149996)

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.