Toys & Novelties

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My Little Television Set, (Nine Tom Thumb Books) Boxed Set. Rand McNally & Company, 1949.

How do children spend their play time? How should children spend their play time? When grownups purchase toys for children, they express their opinion and values about leisure. Educational toys may reinforce lessons while recreational toys may relax and rejuvenate. Some amusements do both. The Prelutsky Collection includes numerous, well-preserved miniature, craft, and activity books.

Children play with toys, sometimes to the point of loving them into oblivion. There are few items more challenging for historic preservation than toys. It’s rare, in fact, to find antiquarian children’s books that are not at least a little tattered or written in. The impulse to scribble in the margins of books is as natural to children as it is to adults. Beloved children’s author Kenneth Grahame, a self-confessing composer in the margins, wrote an essay titled “Marginalia” that was published in the journal Pagan Papers (1895). He asks, “When shall that true poet arise who, disdaining the trivialities of text, shall give the world a book of verse consisting of margin?”

The earliest miniature books were produced mainly for personal convenience, carried in waistcoat pockets and handbags. As their popularity increased, the variety of texts expanded and, by the eighteenth century, included titles for children. Because of their size, they became known as toy books. Mirroring their larger contemporaries, the texts were moral, the bindings plain. In her preface to Poems for Children (1836), Lydia Huntley Sigourney states that poetry’s “principal affinity is with the heart.” Embracing this sentiment, we can imagine small hands holding a precious book. Several toy books in the Prelutsky Collection are whipstitched along the spine, evidence of the owner’s affection and desire to preserve the book.

Painting and watercolor books for young people appeared in the late 1800s. The Prize Painting Book: Good Times (1881) was printed on “paper that has been expressly manufactured for water-color work.” Children were encouraged to send in their completed books, with the top three winning books becoming property of the publisher. First prize was a whopping $75.00 (equivalent to around $3000.00 today). By the early 1900s, coinciding with direct marketing to young people, most coloring books were comparatively modest and unpretentious. One of the pristine examples in the Prelutsky Collection is the Mother Goose Coloring Book (1954), which includes a complimentary box of crayons.

By the middle of the twentieth century, televisions were commonplace in middle-class homes. My Little Television Set (1949) employed a TV cutout at the top of the packaging box. A fragile cellophane film printed with lever lines produced animation when moved, mimicking motion. Crude by today’s standards, this must have been great fun at the time. Supplementing the screen action were nine Tom Thumb miniature books. Shared leisure activities that children and adults enjoy together are an expression of values. The Mother Goose Cookbook (1970) pairs traditional rhymes with simple recipes like the “Queen of Heart’s Purloined Tarts” and “Peter’s Pickled Peppers.” The variety of toys in the Prelutsky Collection adds to our understanding of childhood diversions and childlike play.