Some Margot Tomes illustrations for Wanda Gág's tales from Grimm

When I was actively seeking out the work of Wanda Gág, I found a pair of interesting, sort-of posthumous collaborations between the writer/artist and Margot Tomes, who illustrated around 60 books, including James Still's Jack and the Wonder Beans, Barbara Lalicki's If There Were Dreams to Sell and Jean Fritz's Newberry-winning Homesick: My Own Story.

These were The Earth Gnome (Coward, McCann and Geoghean Inc.; 1979) and The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1985), little, child-sized, four-and-a-half-inch by six-inch hardcovers containing Gág's translations of the Grimm versions of these classic stories (previously discussed here).

I was originally a little perplexed by their existence, as it seemed unusual that a publisher would take a specific translation from a particular writer/artist who went about the project in part to provide her own illustrations to the stories, only to subtract those illustrations and replace them with all new ones but I soon appreciated the opportunity these books gave to compare and contrast the way to gifted illustrators might approach the exact same subject matter.

I looked through the Tomas books for instances of her drawing the exact same story moment that Gág had drawn. I'll present them below, but, as these two stories aren't as widely-known as, say, the Grimm versions of Rapunzel or Hansel and Gretel, I suppose summaries of them might be in order.

In the story of the Earth Gnome, there is a king with a magnificent orchard and three beautiful daughters. Everyone—even the princesses—are forbidden from eating the apples from the king's prized tree, which is cursed with a spell. Whoever eats one of the apples sinks far below the earth.

Naturally, the girls do this one day, and find themselves in a prison, each forced to comb their hair of a many-headed dragon. The king offers the hands of his daughters in marriage to any brave young man who can return them, and the youngest of three brothers happens upon a gnome, whom he bests. Once defeated by the youngest brother, the gnome advises him how to find and rescue the princesses, and he does so—despite the trickery of his older brothers.

In the story of the Sorcerer's Apprentice, a young man feigns illiteracy in order to meet the qualifications of an older man looking for an apprentice. The older man turns out to be a sorcerer, and a wicked one at that. The boy secretly studied his master's magical tomes at night, growing more and more learned in magic, until one day he's caught in the act. The sorcerer acts quickly to destroy the boy, but the boy had learned enough magic at this point to engage in the traditional wizard's battle of turning-into-different-things, and ultimately triumphs by turning into a rooster and gobbling up the sorcerer after the latter had become a kernel of corn.

The apprentice then takes over the magic practice, "And wasn't it fine that all the powers and ingredients which had been used for evil by the sorcerer were now in the hands of a boy who would use them only for the good of man and beast?"

Here is Gág's illustration of the three princesses from the story of the Earth Gnome being swallowed up by the earth, followed by Tomas' illustration of the same:

And here is Gág's illustration of one of the princesses combing the hair of a three-headed dragon, followed by Tomas' image of the same thing:
Finally, here is the image with which Gág ends her story of the Sorcerer's Apprentice, followed by the one that Tomas ends her version with:
Tomes also illustrated Gág's versions of Jorinda and Joringel and The Six Swans. She also illustrated versions of The Fisherman's Wife and Hansel and Gretel, but not Gág's translations of those stories.

Wanda Gág's Tales from Grimm

As a children's author and illustrator who grew up listening to relatives reading her old world fairy tales and who could speak German herself, Wanda Gág was ideally, almost uniquely suited for the task of of translating, editing and illustrating collections of the Brothers Grimm's tales.

Two such volumes exist. The first was 1936's Tales From Grimm, in which the renowned author collected 16 different Grimm's fairy tales to freely translate into English and illustrate.

In her introduction, she explains the genesis of the project:

The magic of Märchen is among my earliest recollections. The dictionary definitions—tale, fable, legend—are all inadequate when I think of my little German Märchenbuch and what it held for me. Often, usually at twilight, some grown up would say, "Sit down, Wanda-chen, and I'll read you a Märchen." Then, as I settled down in my rocker, ready to abandon myself with the utmost credulity to whatever I might hear, everything was changed, exalted. A tingling, anything-may-happen feeling flowed over me, and I had the sensation of being about to bite into a big juicy pear.

When, four years ago, I was in the midst of a Hansel and Gretel drawing, the old Märchen magic gripped me again and I felt I could not rest until I had expressed in pictures all that Märchen meant to me.

She read them in their original German, and began by making literal translations of her chosen stories. Finding that some of the stories which seemed so simple and colorful in German turned "think, lifeless and clumsly" when translated literally into English, she decided to try and do a free translation of her own, seeking to preserve the flavor of the originals with her own English words.

Gág discusses her process quite a bit in the introduction to the first volume, why she made the choices she made and how the audience for fairy tales has changed even within her own lifetime.

I can't tell you how good a job she did translating the tales, or how some of her specific translation choices affected the stories, or how they might compare to different choices different storytellers have made over the years. While I've read all 16 of these stories elsewhere, generally in Andrew Lang's "color" anthologies, I think but also in various Grimm-specific collections, I don't know anywhere near enough about the tales to even hazard vague guesses in the direction of criticism of a particular translation or collection. (Not knowing any language but English doesn't help, either).

Among the more popular tales in this volume are "Hansel and Gretel," which leads off the collection just as drawing it set Gág on the path to making the book, "The Musicians of Bremen," "Cinderlla," "Rapunzel," "The Frog Prince" and "The Fisherman and His Wife."

A color illustration of a scene from Rapunzel is used on the cover, and provides a nice example of Gág's plump, young, child heroines and bent, crooked but well-dressed witches, as well as the same sort of dreamy, flowing landscape that was evident in Gág's picture books.

Above the table of contents is this image...It's simple enough in intent and construction, but almost baroque in the amount of swirly little images pouring out of the book at its center. Based on that single image alone, I think Gág succeeded in conveying through a drawing what reading her childhood book of fairy tales must have felt like.

There are a half-dozen full-page illustrations in the first book, and each story begins with a title page, bearing the name of the individual tale and a design-like image to suggest what will follow.

Here are a few from this volume: Smaller illustrations appear throughout the text of each story, and most will begin with an image similar in shape to the one above the table-of-contents, resting atop a block of text like a decorative piece.

Here, from the second volume, 1947's More Tales from Grimm, is an example, from "The Hedgehog and The Rabbit": And here are some of the larger illustrations from the first volume, one of Cinderella beneath her magic tree......(remember, this is a collection of tales from Grimm, not tales from Disney)...and here as an illustration from the climax of "Snow White and Rose Red"... My favorite image in this volume is perhaps a little illustration from "Three Brothers."

That is the story of a father with three sons he loves equally. Unable to decide which of them to leave his house to when he dies, he proposes they each choose a trade and go off to learn and master it, and then they would return and "he who has learned his trade best shall have the house."

One of the brothers has become a barber, and to demonstrate his skill,

He took his mug and soap, and quickly whipped up some suds while the rabbit was running toward them. Then, just as the rabbit ran past them at top speed, he lathered the little animal's chin and shaved it, leaving enough fur for a stylish pointed beard. All this time the rabbit had been running as fast as he could, and yet he wasn't cut in any way.

And this is the image that appears beneath that paragraph: I love everything about that picture, from the look on the rabbit's face, to the style of beard he's sporting to the way Gág expressed motion—you'll see speed lines around the bounding and astonished rabbit, as he apparently looks back at the barber who just shaved him while he was running by, but look closely at the rabbit's hindquarters, and you'll see Gág has drawn suggestions of after-images as well.

The second volume is a much bigger one, but a less complete one—there are over 30 tales included, but Gág passed away before it saw print. There's a long forward written by Carl Zigrosser, one of her two "literary and artistic executors" (with her husband Earle Humprheys being the other) explaining that "the text had reached the stage of final revision," and that while there were about 100 drawings to choose from, only about three-quarters were in their "final pen-and-ink form."

They decided that they were passable illustrations, and to proceed with using them. With many, a reader might not be able to see the difference, yet there are several that are exceptionally sketchy by Gág's standards.

Take, for example, this image that appears above the first page of "The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids": This was what Gág's images look like before completion, a sort of final draft. While it's not her best work, it is fascinating to be able to see a sort of in-progress image like this, and to be able to compare it to her other, more finished work.

Even the cover of More Tales has an unfinished, sketchy look—it appears to be an image from "The Star Dollars," in which stars rain down from heaven, becoming silver dollars before they hit the ground. As you can see, the shapes are quite indistinct.

The tales collected herein are probably a bit more obscure than those of the first. "Thorn Rose, The Sleeping Beauty" being the most well-known today, although "The Shoemaker and The Elves," "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" and the aforementioned story of the wolf and the seven little goats are probably still fairly well known. One of my personal favorites, "Jorinda and Joringel" is also in here, and I think "The Six Swans" is probably pretty well-known—if not in this exact form, then from other variants.

One of my favorite stories in this collection turned out to be—quite to my own surprise—was "The Mouse, The Bird and the Sausage." I've read this one before, but it didn't really strike me as terribly interesting. An anthropomorphic foodstuff—made from pieces of an animal, no less—living with anthropomorphic animals just never sat well with me, conceptually.

Gág's version opens like this:

Once there was a tiny cottage and in it lived no people, only a mouse, a bird, and a sausage. There they had kept house most joyously together for many years, and had even been able to save some money besides.

Each of the three cottage-mates had a daily task to do: The bird flew out to get wood for the fire, the mouse got water from the brook and set the table, and "the big, fat, jolly sausage cooked the meals.

If you're wondering hos a sausage cooks, well, when it's time for dinner, he gets into the pot and swishes himself a round a little in the soup or vegetables, "so as to salt or flavor them."

Gross.

But Gág's drawing of the sausage is so charming! The three little friends' idyllic life comes to an end when the bird listens to some gossip from another bird, becomes convinced that the others are taking advantage of it, and so they all switch jobs and, as a result, die horribly.

Gág depicts her sausage moments before his rather predictable death, when he still looks cute and funny......Aw, look at his darling little shoes!

Gág does a similarly strong job in anthropomorphizing the stars of "The Straw, The Coal and The Bean."

Let's look at two more images from More Tales, which illustrate the unique nature of the book's illustrations, given there are some unfinished ones alongside finished ones within.

Here is an image from the climax of "Iron Hans":It's a fairly finished image, but there's still a degree of sketchiness to it, mainly in the shadows in the folds of the characters' clothes, and in the lines of their hair and on the ground they stand upon. It's all there, of course, but the line work isn't as crisp as usual, the image not as bold. I'm not sure how much more Gág had to do here, but it looks like an illustration some 90% or so finished, just missing the final touches.

Earlier in the book is a full-page illustration for "The Six Swans," and while it's a more ambitious image, filling a page and boasting a rather elaborate setting and background for its two characters, one can still see pencil guide lines around the girl and her hair:Note how finished the vegetation looks, too. In this image, the forest seems to be as important a character as the protagonist, and the secondary character who finds her hidden in a tree.

The Grimm's stories are well worth reading wherever you can find them, but obviously I recommend seeking out Gág's versions. There's a folksier, home-ier, more child-like feel to them than those lush, lavish illustrations you'll find in, say, the Lang color fairy collections, and it's interesting to see a writer translating and re-writing them and then illustrating them herself.

Essentially, Gág developed a dream project for herself, went ahead and did it and, in the process, demonstrated some of her greatest strengths...while accentuating the strengths of her source material.

Two children's books about children's book author Wanda Gág

As an artist and writer, Wanda Gág is known for her fairy tales, those she invented herself, and those her old world ancestors used to tell, the ones collected by the Grimm brothers, and translated into English and illustrated by Gág.

But as has often been pointed out, Gág herself resembles a plucky fairy tale heroine. The first of seven children, a magical number, she was born at the end of the 19th century to Bohemian immigrants with a connection to a rural enclave of barely-changed immigrants—her Grandma lived in a place called Goosetown, and the Gág children referred to the people there as “Grandma folks.”

Her father died when she was 15, still a maid, and she began to live a life of hard work that makes it look like Cinderella had it easy—in addition to caring for her often sick mother and helping keep house for six younger siblings, she also went to school and stayed up late nights, drawing things she could sell and drawing things simply because she loved drawing things, and would spend all day doing so if she could.

By virtue of her years of hard work, perseverance and talent, she earned a scholarship, then another and moved to New York City. A successful gallery show later, a publisher asked if she ever thought about publishing a kids book—she had and, as a teenager, had little stories and poems published in children’s magazines—and published 1928’s Millions of Cats, a massively successful book. She bought a ramshackle New Jersey farmhouse, dubbed it “Tumble Timbers,” and lived her own version of living happily ever after—writing and drawing whatever she wanted. It’s no surprise then that a modern children’s book author would want to tell that fairy tale in a book of their own, and that’s precisely what Deborah Kogan Ray did with her 2008 book, Wanda Gág: The Girl Who Lived to Draw (Viking).

Ray’s book takes a rather Hollywood biopic approach, beginning at a moment of personal triumph, and then flashing back to the beginning of the story.

The first image is of Gág’s Tumble Timers, the mailbox with her name in the foreground, and the a figure in a hat standing on the porch. The text tells us that it’s 1928 and “an artist named Wanda Gág” has just created her first book for children.

“That rainy spring, as she polished the words and prepared to draw the illustrations in her studio,” the narration tells us, “she would often think of her own childhood.”

A turn of the page starts the story proper. Each two-page spread features an image of Ray’s, which fills at least one of those pages, but in many cases stretches over the gutter and onto the second page.

The text portion of the spread begins with an italicized quote from Gág, taken from her Growing Pains, a publication of her girlhood diary, in italics. Below that Ray tells the appropriate part of the story.Ray focuses quite a bit on Gág’s childhood, her family’s encouragement of their children to be creative, their journey’s to Goosetown and, especially, Wanda’s special connection to her father, an artist who made his living by painting decorations on buildings and churches six days a week, and spent Sunday’s painting what he wanted for himself.

His last words to Wanda on his deathbed were, translated to English as Ray recounts them, “What Papa couldn’t do, Wanda will have to finish,” a too-perfect to be fictional hook that provides a story arc to Wanda Gág’s biography—first by working hard at keeping the home together and taking care of her mother and siblings, and then by achieving fame as an artist, Gág finished her father’s two callings for him. Ray traces Wanda’s life back up until the starting point, and ends with how successful her book turned out—“In 1929, Millions of Cats was awarded a John Newberry Honor…Many now consider it to be the first modern picture book”—and sort of happily ever after that calls back to her father’s last words:

Wanda went on to create many other picture books and make many more prints and drawings that she exhibited.

The girl who lived to draw carried out her father’s wish.

“What Papa couldn’t do, Wanda will have to finish”

The book features three one-page epilogues: After Millions of Cats, recounting highlights from Gág’s professional and publishing career; Wanda’s Diary, about the diary she kept and which much of her biographical information came; and Author’s Note, telling a little bit about the creation of this book.

It’s a rather wonderful little biography of the artist, one perfectly suited to what I would like to think is her ideal audience, little girls who also like to draw, and would also like to one day become artists—in that respect, I think Gág in an ideal hero and role model. I sincerely wish I had learned her story at six or seven instead of in my mid-thirties.

Because Gág was, as Ray says in her author’s note, “a saver,” Gág provided her own biography, although she did so in a strange way. When asked to write an autobiography, Ray tells us Gág demurred, as “a book of recollections about her girlhood would not have the freshness and sense of wonder that she sought in all her work.” So they published her diary instead, which has the freshness of immediacy.

Ray is quite an accomplished artist, as the small samples I’ve chosen to highlight here will hopefully convey, although hers is not a style I’ve ever particularly been enamored with. The artwork is alive with lines, and thus a very organic, very living set of drawn pictures, but there’s a slight, impressionistic blur to the work, and an unnatural warmth. Her art is realistic in design, but obviously artificial as drawn art simultaneously—It’s fine work, but it’s not the sort I naturally gravitate towards.

I’m of two minds over how appropriate it is as well. Both Wanda and her father longed to create the images they wanted in their lives, and it therefore seems appropriate that Ray illustrates their story in her own style, whatever that style may be.

But if form is to reflect content, then I wonder if a book about Gág drawn in a style similar to Gág’s, with its big, bold, black and white figures and rolling settings winding their way from one page to the next might not have been more appropriate.

Ray tells Gág’s fairy tale life like a fairy tales, but not as one of Gág’s own fairy tales.

I’m not sure if that would have been preferable—I think it would have been clever, but perhaps too clever?—and it would have run the risk of seeming like a pastiche more than an original work.

It’s something I’d like to see done at some point, though.

The Girlhood Diary of Wanda Gág, 1908-1909: Portrait of a Young Artist (Capstone Press; 2000) also uses Gág’s diaries as source material for her story, but this work is meant as a more straightforward educational tool, and while the story is still there, it’s obviously not as engagingly told.

This slim, 32-page volume is part of a Diaries, Letters and Memoirs series, meant to educate young readers on different time periods. Other books include A Civil War Drummer Boy, A Colonial Quaker Girl, A Pioneer Farm Girl and so on. Other recognizable names in the series include Louisa May Alcott, Charles Lindbergh and Theodore Roosevelt.

There is a two page summary of Gág’s childhood, and then excerpts from the diary entries themselves, which account for the bulk of the book. I’ve read the entries in their entirety in Growing Pains, and these are mostly shortened versions, using ellipses to edit them down into shorter, more child-friendly chunks. They aren’t bowdlerized or anything, though; Gág’s industriousness, ambition and dreaminess shines through, and I think it’s probably enough of a taste of Growing Pains that a young reader might want to follow up with that book when their older.

An afterword tells readers the rest of Gág’s story, up to her death and legacy, and there’s a timeline, page of places to find out more, and a “words to know” glossary (“deplorable,” “glee club”, “tuberculosis,” etc).

The book is also full of little activities to do—“Draw a Profile Face,” “Making Spaetzle”—and a few sidebars expounding on things referenced in the diary—“German and Bohemian Traditions,” “Ladies’ Turner Society.”

The images in this book—which is fairly heavily illustrated—consist mainly of photographs and images of Gág’s art, particularly that from the time period in which she was keeping the diary.

As more of a teacher’s aid than a book-book, I’m not sure how to recommend this one to interested parties. I suppose I’d recommend it to grade school teachers who want to teach their kids about Wanda Gág.

*****************

The Girlhood Diary's timeline included several photos. Here's one of Gág’s father, Anton. Note the way that this image was later echoed by a photograph of Gág from 1916 or 1917...

Wanda Gág’s picture books

Millions of Cats

This is probably Wanda Gág’s signature work. It's the book most often cited as an example of her work, at any rate.

Originally published in 1928, it won a Newbery Honor Award in 1929, which is of course awarded for distinguishing contribution to children’s literature. Newbery Awards are not often awarded to picture books, as the Caldecott Medal (first awarded about a decade after Millions of Cats saw print) is specifically devoted to picture books. (Gág would win a second Newbery in 1934 for ABC Bunny, discussed below; she also won two Caldecott Honor awards for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Nothing At All in 1939 and 1942, respectively).

Millions of Cats also established a format for Gág’s books that a few others would follow almost exactly, including the horizontal, landscape format in which images would sometimes snake across both open, facing pages in a spread, and the image itself winding and flowing across that space to simulate movement or simply a rolling landscape.

The story is a perfect little fairy tale, complete with a “Once upon a time” opening:

Once upon a time there was a very old man and a very old woman. They lived in a nice clean house which had flowers all around it, except where the door was. But they couldn’t be happy because they were so very lonely.

The very old woman decides that a cat is just what they need to feel less lonely, and so the very old man sets out to find her one (leading to one of the many two-page illustrations, showing the old man walking a long trail over hills and valley, a quilt pattern-like landscape below him, and a trail of puffy white clouds in a strip of black fleck-suggested sky above him.Finally, he comes to a hill that “was quite covered with cats,” leading to the first use of a rhythmic, song-like passage Gág returns to several times in the story: “Cats here, cats there, Cats and kittens everywhere, Hundreds of cats, Thousands of cats, Millions and billions and trillions of cats.”

The very old man sets about shopping for the prettiest cat, and just one he thinks he’s found it, he notices another one with some particularly pretty and unique aspect, and so he takes that one as well. Eventually, the millions and billions and trillions of cats go home with him.That is a lot of cats. Even for a cat person.

As you can probably guess, that many cats lead to some problems, particularly when they began to quarrel over who is the prettiest cat, which leads to an all-out cat war in which they apparently all eat one another (a rather grim detail perhaps, but one of the many markers of the story that indicate it was inspired by the märchen of Gág’s youth and old country, and that she would devote herself to translating and illustrating in her Tales From Grimm and More Tales From Grimm).

I won’t spoil what happens next, and I hope it’s not spoiling things too much to note that it ends happily ever after, although Gág chooses not to end it with those words, but instead with a final, novel repetition of the “millions and billions and trillions of” phrase.



The Funny Thing

Gág followed Millions of Cats with The Funny Thing, which is similarly formatted and similarly reads like a classic fairy tale, albeit a very idiosyncratic one.

The protagonist isn’t the title character, but Bobo, “the good little man of the mountains.” He lives in a cave, and sets out food for the birds and animals, specific to their tastes: nut cakes for the squirrels, seed pudding for the birds, cabbage salads for rabbits and so on.Then the title character arrives and complicates Bobo’s system. The Funny Thing, which looks “something like a dog and also a little like a giraffe,” and has a long tail and blue points along its back, and it isn’t any type of animal, but instead, it insists, an aminal.

And it is hungry.

It turns its nose at all of the treats in Bobo’s spread, in a series of lovely drawings in which the strange beast melodramatically refuses each with haughty posture and offended expressions, revealing what it most likes to eat: dolls.When Bobo objects to the eating of dolls by saying he would think it would make children very unhappy to have their dolls eaten.

“So it does,” said the Funny Thing, smiling pleasantly, “but very good they are—dolls.”

Bobo tries to come to terms with its diet, and tries to rationalize it, “perhaps you take only naughty children’s dolls,” Bobo asks, and the Funny Thing, replies, “No, I take them specially from good children.”

Unable to countenance a monster that eats only the dolls of especially good children, Bobo launches a plan, which involves inventing “jum-jills,”something he hopes will be even more delicious than the dolls of good children.

There’s much less action in this story than in most of Gág’s other picture books, even ABC Bunny, but the art is exceptionally lively, with the double-page spreads illustrations used to illustrate the twisty interior of Bobo’s deep but homey cave and a few images in which the illustrations seems as carefully constructed as they are drawn, such as the one near the front in which the various animal species come to enjoy their treats, and one near the end where a fire-brigade formation of little flying birds and The Funny Thing’s long tail form long, long lines twisting in opposite directions. In two sequences the picture-to-word ratio flip-flops dramatically, with a large illustration devoted to just a handful of spoken words of dialogue, such as when Bobo attempts to sell his aminal visitor on the virtues of his various animal treats, and another near the end in which The Funny Thing tries his first plate of jum-jills (I was so charmed by the story that I would attempt to come up with a recipe to make them, but cheese in one of the main ingredients, and thus jum-jills violate my strictly vegetarian diet).



The ABC Bunny

This 1933 picture book reveals the depth of talent in the Gág family, and that while eldest daughter Wanda Hazel was the one who grew up to be the most successful and famous, her own talents and interests were steeped in a particularly creative household.

Gág has written and drawn the book, and the title page reads “Hand Lettered By Howard Gág,” her younger brother, and the “ABC Song” that appears with notes and lyrics before and after the main text of the story, bears the notations “Music By Flavia Gág,” one of Wanda’s five younger sisters.

The song isn’t the one preschoolers learn to sing (I can’t read music anymore, but I noticed the lyrics could be sung to that tune, although I suppose it’s such a simple tune that anything can be sung to it), but is the story of a bunny and a little adventure he has. It’s the story that the book tells.

Each page features a big, gray-and-paper colored drawing which accounts for about half of the space on the page, given a generous border of white space above and to its sides. The bottom quarter or so of the page contains a large red capital letter (the only color in the book) and a phrase making some prominent use of the letter, and a part of the story.For example, the first spread features a close, focused drawing of an apple hanging heavily from the bough of a tree, and the text “A for Apple, big and red,” while the facing page shows a sleeping rabbit in a nest of grasses, the apple swaying in the bunny’s direction, with the words “B for Bunny snug a-bed.”

The story continues in such fashion, with the next spread showing an image of the rabbit jumping from bed as the apple falls to the ground (Gág drawing a sort of comet trail of white space around it to illustrate the motion of the fall) and the words “C for Crash! D for Dash!” and on the next page we see the bunny springing down a little lane, a pointing sign on a crooked post reading “ELSEWHERE,” while the text reads “E for Elsewhere in a flash.”

Along his journey, and the alphabet, he encounters various challenges and meets other animal characters, before finally arriving at his home town in a valley.

As for the more challenging letters, Q is for quail, X is “for exit—off, away! That’s enough for us today,” (the words stretched below images of a group of rabbits leaping into their holes), Y if for “You, take one last look (below an image of a child reading a book and using the Y of the word You as a book holder) and Z is for “Zero—close the book!”

Compared to some of her other books, the images in ABC Bunny are quite large (both in the publisher’s presentation—I’m looking at an edition published by Coward-McCann, Inc of New York from what seems to be 1977 or ‘78—and in relation to the amount of page-space devoted to words and white space on each page.The art, all gray and seemingly drawn with either pencil or fine charcoal, is rather dark, and the animal characters bear quite representational forms, with great attention paid to their fur and feathers, even if their eyes and gestures betray the animation of a human-like intelligences within them.

The settings are all quite covered in similarly rendered, realistic looking foliage, although in many cases the plants are applied with a decorator’s eye, like pencil-gray frosting flowers on an elaborate birthday cake of imagery.



Snippy and Snappy

This tale of two little field mice, brother and sister, is a 1931 book in Gág’s horizontal, landscape picture book format.

The two siblings are drawn almost identically, with only the frill on Snippy’s waistcoat distinguishing her from her brother Snappy. The pair “lived with their father and mother in a cozy nook in a hay field…Snippy and Snappy liked this big grassy hay field and played in it all day long.”On one day, the pair are out playing with a big ball of string or yarn that belongs to their mother, Mother Mouse. It’s human-sized, rather than mouse-sized, and is therefore quite large. They roll it that so far away that they eventually have to stop and take a nap, at which point a human child picks up the ball and wanders off with it.

They have no choice but to follow the child, and it leads them to a human home, which the mice have never visited, but only heard their dad, Father Mouse, talk about, whenever he would read aloud to them from his newspaper.

“This newspaper was small enough for a mouse to read,” Gág writes, “and it was called THE MOUSE PAPER.”

Our little heroes have some interesting adventures in the house, which is presented as especially mysterious and exotic, effectively enough that the everyday seems a bit more magical to the reader when filtered through the mice’s eyes (and, no doubt, the decades since the story was written).

They also encounter a quite grave danger to mice, and come very close to meeting their ends, but, so you don’t worry too much about their fates between now and the time you read the book for yourself, I will tell you this—they survive and live happily ever after. Actually, they “lived happily ever, ever, ever after,” as Gág writes, echoing a poetical use of “never never never never”, formatted in a little stairway of words, on the very last page of the book.

As you can see from the cover, the book features the same rolling landscapes that Millions of Cats did, and there is a bit of walking and traveling in it, usually over such little hills.


Gone Is Gone; or, The Story of a Man Who Wanted to Do Housework

The gender politics of this 1935 story might seem pretty out-of-date, as does the assumption that men do a certain kind of work and women do another kind of work, but do consider that non only was it published in 1935, it is, Gág wrote in a little introduction, “an old, old story which my grandmother told me when I was a little girl. When she was a little girl, her grandfather had told it to her, and when he was a little peasant boy in Bohemia, his mother had told it to him.”

The edition I’m looking at is a tiny, child’s-sized book, akin to the Beatrix Potter books I read when I was small, and still occasionally see old copies of in libraries. It’s about four-and-a-half-inches across, six-and-a-half-inches high, and a quarter of an inch thick, and the cover is golden yellow with orange and black, as most of the Gág books I find.

Also unlike some of the others in this little bibliography I’m compiling, it is not written in Gág signature, hand-written font, but in type.

The pictures are all quite small, and none sprawl from one page to the next, but are set purposefully and comfortably within single pages; sometimes filling them entirely, other times occupying part of the space on a page, which will otherwise be devoted to bearing the text of the story.

The man who wanted to do housework is Fritzl, a farmer and father. He is married to Liesi. They each work very, very hard, with Fritzl tending to the farming, while his wife cleaned, cooked and cared for the baby.

“They both worked hard, Fritzl always thought he worked hard,” Gág writes, and so one night when he dismisses her work with a “All you do is to putter an dpotter around the house a bit—surely there’ sn othing hard about such things,” Liesi suggests that the next day they trade duties.

Fritzl learns the hard way that housework actually is hard work, as little mistakes lead to big, spectacular disasters. Whenever something goes wrong, like the dog Spitz running away with the sausages when Fritzl turns away, he shrugs off the loss, saying “Na, na! What’s gone is gone.” That’s where the title comes from, and that’s what Fritzl says more than once throughout his disastrous day as a housekeeper. Gág’s art style is instantly recognizable, but looser and more exaggerated than in some of her other works, with the animal characters especially behaving in a somewhat cartoonish fashion. There’s an extremely interesting afterword about the story, which the title page says is “Retold” by the artist, and which her introduction says was passed down from generation to generation in her family.

According to Gág, “Gone is Gone” was her favorite märchen growing up, and she just assumed it was one of the tales the Grimms had collected. Later in her life, she would go on to translate and illustrate two collections of the Brothers Grimm’s stories, and in this afterward she notes, “I could hardly wait to come upon that old peasant fairy tale of my childhood. To my surprise and disappointment, it was not in Grimm at all.”

She had found a story sort of similar, and talked to other people who remember similar stories from their youth, but the version she grew up hearing wasn’t committed to paper yet, and so she “decided to make a little book of the story, consulting no other sources except one—my own memory of how the tale was told to me when I was a little girl.”



Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Gág’s picture book version of the classic fairy tale came out the year after the Disney movie, a movie that was so popular that it can be kind of hard for those of us born into a post-Star Wars pop cultural landscape to even comprehend.

Gág’s Snow White must have proved quite a contrast with Disney’s though, as it follows the original so much more closely. In fact, the words of it are that of the original, albeit here translated by Gág herself. Certain elements seen in the movie remain here, but if you’ve only seen the movie, then this one might seem a bit more strange, as it reduces the roles of the dwarves, who are nameless and identical, and increases the role of the evil queen, who makes several magical attempts on Snow White’s life before succeeding with the poisoned apple.

It opens with the story of how Snow White’s mother conceived of her before physically conceiving her and how she got that name, before the bit with the mirror, the jealousy, the instructions to have Snow White killed, the dwarves, the witch-attacks and so on. Gág’s illustrations are all smallish, black-and-white, and charmingly simple. Only a few take advantage of the page to great effect—like an almost-full-page image of the Queen posed with a peacock before here mirror, or an actual full-page illustration of Snow running into the woods, watched by animals hidden among the plant-life—and the work is thus more that of an illustrated prose storybook, rather than a picture book of the sort we normally think of when we hear that word.

Among Gág’s particular design choices of note here are her quite child-like version of Snow White—who is short and plump and pre-pubescent looking compared to the Disney teenager and the adolescent Snow Whites who have followed—and her dwarves with long, white beards, erect, pointy caps and simle, matching peasant garb, all of whom more closely resemble the image most of us get when we hear the word “gnome” today, thanks in large part to Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet’s gnome book and lawn gnomes.