Entries from May 2008 ↓

Broad Grins; Comprising, With New Additional Tales in Verse, Those Formerly Publish’d Under the Title “My Night-Gown and Slippers.”, by George Colman, the Younger. Published 1839.

When I started Post-processing this, I didn’t think much of the verses. They do have their charms, however, even though they are a bit salacious.

Bookp(h)ile

Assimilative Memory or, How to Attend and Never Forget, by Prof. A. Loisette. Published 1899, ©1896.

This is one of the last projects that the late Laura Wisewell post-processed. She is missed.

Bookp(h)ile

“Ruskin,” it says in the introduction to The Crown of Wild Olive which my little friend reads at school, “is certainly one of the greatest masters of English prose.” That has often been declared. But is he? Or is our tribute to Ruskin only a show of gratitude to one who revealed to us the unpleasant character of our national habits when contrasted with a standard for gentlemen? It ought not to have required much eloquence to convince us that Widnes is unlovely; the smell of it should have been enough. It is curious that we needed festoons of chromatic sentences to warn us that cruelty to children, even when profit can be made of it, is not right. But I fear some people really enjoy remorseful sobbing. It is half the fun of doing wrong. Yet I would ask in humility–for it is a fearful thing to doubt Ruskin, the literary divinity of so many right-thinking people–whether English children who are learning the right way to use their language, and the noblest ideas to express, should run the risk of having Ruskin’s example set before them by soft-hearted teachers? I think that a parent who knew a child of his, on a certain day, was to take the example of Ruskin as a prose stylist on the subject of war, would do well, on moral and aesthetic grounds, to keep his child away from school on that day to practise a little roller-skating.

From the essay “Ruskin” in Waiting for Daylight, by H. M. Tomlinson. New York: Knopf, 1922.

The Adventures of Danny Meadow Mouse, by Thornton W. Burgess, Illustrated by Harrison Cady. Published 1915 (1944).

This is another project I picked up randomly. The illustrations turned out quite well, I especially like the top hat on the grumpy owl.

Children’s Book Week is this month, there will be plenty of new Children’s books posted to PG in the coming days.

To The Illustrator

In grateful acknowledgment of his amiable condescension in lending his exquisitely delicate art to the embellishment of these poor verses from his sincerest admirer

The Author

From: The Bashful Earthquake & Other Fables and Verses by Oliver Herford with many pictures by the Author (Scribner’s 1898).