When I began making collages I was hesitant to tear up the books I had collected just for that purpose. Then, I found a bound 1871 edition of the weekly British children's magazine, The Chatterbox. It was in poor condition, at best. Even then, I waffled.
But I was working on honing image transfer techniques at the time and loved the exquisite engravings of birds and insects that were published in the magazine that year. I have an ink jet printer and ink jet prints run when they are wet, making them a mess when working on a transfer. So, I headed to the nearest photocopy shop. It was too hard to copy them with the book intact, which led to removing pages. The floodgates were opened!
I wrote about the illustrations the other day on Collage365, because I used the robin (shown below) in one of the new pieces in my Out On a Limb series. I thought I'd show some of the other illustrations here. They've been scanned and had some work done on them to make them cleaner transfers. I've ended up using a number of the illustrations and find myself returning to them again and again.
Chatterbox books were wonderful for young people in the 19th century and later. An 1895 Chatterbox was my favorite book when I was a boy. Enjoy the pictures by all means, but don't neglect the stories -- great yarns for young people who would rather read than watch TV.
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