具体描述
When was it that someone decided that books might be written and published for child readers? It's fair to say that some kinds of text-alphabets, fables, the Lord's Prayer, may have been seen as fundamental to the process of learning to read from the beginning of book making, but when did children come to be seen as a readership for whom special provision should be made? The child as the audience for books in the English language is the subject of this bibliographical study, which had its origins in an exhibition held at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. From this beginning, Felix de Marez Oyens and Brian Alderson have compiled Be Merry and Wise and shown how certain creative talents, driven by a sense of purpose, or a wish to make some money, attempted to appeal directly to children, and how the publishing industry came to realize that this audience might prove to constitute a profitable market.
In conducting their survey, which is centered upon the books themselves, mostly drawn from the holdings of the Morgan Library, the authors not only plot the chronological development of children's book publishing from almost random beginnings to the diversity of the early Victorian period, they also show how publishers adapted their trade methods to exploit this new market. Sweetness and light did not prevail everywhere, but, even in some of the most forbidding examples presented here, there was a commercial optimism that both merriment and wisdom might be happily combined, within the pages of children's literature. Co-published with the Pierpont Morgan Library, The Bibliographical Society of America, and The British Library.
作者简介
目录信息
Introduction...................................xi
Acknowledgements...............................xv
I. Vestibulum: Theory and Practice...........1
II. The Salvation of Souls...................18
III. Enter Tom Thumb..........................27
IV. Serious Business.........................40
V. The House that Newbery Built.............51
VI. Rivals and Imitators, London.............62
VII. Frances Laetitia Earle: Her Books........83
VIII. Rivals and Imitators, the Provinces......95
IX. Begged, Borrowed, or Stolen.............107
X. "The Dawn of Levity"....................118
XI. The Innovators..........................135
XII. Epigones................................168
XIII. "Chapbooks" for Children................200
XIV. Tracts and Transition...................217
XV. The Road to Paflagonia..................228
XVI. The Rose and the Ring...................248
Introduction to Chapters XVII - XX............257
XVII. Marketing...............................259
XVIII.Bindings................................267
XIX. Special Markets.........................277
XX. Marks of Possession.....................289
References....................................299
Index of Names................................305
Index of Titles...............................307
Index of Printers & Publishers................311
Index of Subjects.............................314
Chronological Index...........................316
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