A Catalogue of the Cotsen Children's Library Volumes I and II

• The Twentieth Century: A-L, M-Z. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Library, 2000-2003. Small folio, xlvi 656pp and xxxiii 818pp on Mohawk Superfine paper; gilt-stamped pictorial green Japanese cloth, spine gilt with leather label.

  ISBN# 0-87811-045-3

  ISBN# 0-87811-047-X

The Cotsen Children's Library, an historical collection of children's illustrated books and related manuscripts, drawings, prints, ephemera, and educational toys housed in Princeton University's Firestone Library, has produced the first two of a projected five-volume catalogue of its holdings, arranged alphabetically in author/title order. This arrangement emphasizes the collection's international scope and breadth, which distinguishes it from many other great institutional collections in America and Europe: nearly 14,000 twentieth-century imprints in over thirty world languages, including Romance, Germanic, and Slavic language families, as well as Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. Among the significant authors whose works the catalogue describes are Aesop, Andersen, Baum, Chukovsky, Collodi, Grimm, Heinrich Hoffmann, Kipling, La Fontaine, Edward Lear, Beatrix Potter, Maurice Sendak, and many more. Because the Cotsen Children's Library is also a museum of twentieth-century graphic artists and design movements, illustrators such as Mitsumasa Anno, Elsa Beskow, Ivan Bilibin, Louis Maurice Boutet de Monvel, Raymond Briggs, Jean de Brunhoff, Gertrud Caspari, Edmund Dulac, Josef Lada, Sibylle von Olfers, Charles and W. Heath Robinson, Maurice Sendak, and Else Wenz-Viètor. Also significant design movements such as Constructivism, De Stijl, Futurism, Jugendstil, and the Vienna Sezession are well represented. Picture book genres such as alphabet, movable, counting and activity books are another of the Cotsen Collection's strengths. Many innovative publishers' series, as Dietrich's Münchener Künstler Bibderbücher, the Dumpy books, Stalling's Nürnberger Bilderbücher, and Père Castor books, are described. As well as a bibliography of references, the catalogue includes a preface by Princeton University's President Harold Shapiro and an essay about Lloyd E. Cotsen as a collector of children's books by Andrea Immel, Curator of the Cotsen Children's Library and the catalogue's general editor who has been associated with the collection for over a decade.

These elegant and readable volumes are printed and bound to the highest standards, lavishly illustrated reproduced whenever possible at actual size, most of which are in full color. They are printed in duotone and process color on Mohawk Superfine paper and bound in full Japanese silk cloth, the front covers gilt-stamped and with pictorial decorative endpapers also taken from rare first editions. The Cotsen foundation has underwritten the cost of production for these two volumes, which is actually priced below production cost.

Volumes III and IV will describe the Library's pre-twentieth-century holdings of children's books, periodicals, and prints published between 1485 and 1899 in Europe, England, and America. The collection has important holdings in the genres of fables, fairy tales, natural history, emblems, alphabets, writing books, primers, chapbooks, and the Orbis Pictus. Among the pioneering English publishers who shaped the modern children's book, john Newbery, john Marshall, Joseph Johnson, John Wallis, John Harris, Benjamin Tabart, and William Darton, father and son, are all well represented. Various non-book formats, such as educational playing cards, jigsaw puzzles, table games and early examples of novelty formats, such as harlequinades, panoramas, and transformations, will also be included. Volume V will provide detailed indices of the four volumes, with categories covering author, illustrator, publisher, place of publication, genre, and a wide range of subjects.

The cost of the first two volumes is US $200.00 each + shipping/insurance; subscriptions for Volumes 3-5 upon application with prices and publication dates yet to be announced.

Discounts for non-profit institutional libraries and limited trade terms are available to bona fide applicants on request.