It's a date: 2016 calendars

Here's a look at details of the images inside the 2016 calendars, all reproductions of my collages. Most of the pieces were created in 2015, and many of them have not been seen before by the public since they were made for a special project or just for the calendar ...

Impossibly sweet ...

Eight new collages were added to the Sweet Petites collection last week, and I have to say that they're adorable. And since adorable is not what I do generally, they came as a surprise.

M.T. Ross' whimsical illustrations from the 1910 edition of Elizabeth Gordon's "Flower Children," were used for the main characters, which may explain how they ended up the way they did. I wrote about my obsession with the images back in May, when I was about to sell some of the other originals at Cincinnati's City Flea.

Of course, I HAVE to create their opposites, or Not-So-Sweet petites. Stay tuned for those ... meanwhile, here are the cutie pies, which can be viewed in the annual "Multiplicity" holiday show at Cincinnati's Brazee Street Studios …

  

Never, never land ...

It was just a coincidence. Cincinnati Ballet is performing "Peter Pan" this weekend, and while in the attic looking for books to serve as props in an exhibit, I found an edition of "Peter Pan" that I'd forgotten about.

It's the Whitman Publishing Company's oversized "Peter Pan Picture Book," published in 1931 and illustrated by Roy Best. Confirming my theory that all roads lead to Ohio, I discovered that Best was born in Waverly, Ohio, and, of course, attended art school in Cincinnati.

The book is falling apart, but even so, its pages are in good condition. The soft, enchanting illustrations of Tinker Bell and Peter are my favorites, even if Tink is a tad too pin-up for me. Little did I know, until I began researching Best, that he's best-known as a pin-up artist. Not racy pin-ups though, a bit more wholesome, girl-next-door.

The bright, cartoonish Captain Hook paintings don't appeal to me, so you won't see them here. Chances are that all the illustrations will find their way into the "Stuff I Can't Bear to Cut Up" files ...

April showers? No. May flowers for The City Flea

Whew. Been scanning every image from a 1910 classic: "The Flower Children" by Elizabeth Gordon. It was published by the P.F. Volland Co. of Chicago and went into a gazillion printings. In the late 1940s, the Wise-Parlow Co. of N.Y. reprinted it. I have copies from each publisher, and am saving one set for future Sweet Petite collages, and selling the other The City Flea (10a-4p, May 17 in Cincinnati's Washington Park). They're packaged on colorful uncut mat boards that can be cut to mat the prints. This way, buyers can select which flower to show (each has another on its back), and whether to include the poem.

It's a surreal world, after all

Sometimes, I buy a book for one image. That's the case here. I was in an antique shop in South Jersey last month and spotted a small book with beautiful, gilded lettering on its dark green cover. "Little Stay-at-home and her friends." I was thinking that the book cover might be something I could work with. Then, I opened it to the page with the lithograph above - "The Baby On the Beach." Sold.

The book - a series of poems about animals, fairies and flowers that, I think, was intended for preschoolers, that is, little stay-at-homes - was written and illustrated by L. Clarkson and published by Philadelphia's F.W. Robinson & Co. in 1879. Clarkson is touted on the title page as the author of "Gathering of the Lilies" and "Violet, with Eyes of Blue." I'm on the hunt for those, because if the illustrations are as surreal as these, well, I'll be snapping them up.

The two illustrations below are already being put to use in a new series of collages. I have high-resolution scans of all the prints, just in case I come up with some other idea for them.

Sumptuous engravings, unscrupulous publisher

I was up in the attic earlier this week rummaging through books for specific images for a few collage series when I came across a battered copy of The Royal Chatterbox. This oversized edition was published by R. Worthington in 1881 and, as I discovered yesterday, the work was pirated. Worthington lifted poems and engravings from the weekly British children's magazine, and repackaged them in a beautiful gift book filled with nostalgic, romantic and idyllic images.

Like many American publishers, Worthington had no qualms about republishing other pubishers' work without their permission. If you think publishing's cut throat now, just return to the 19th century and the early battles over copyright. Publishers Weekly is filled with news stories about copyright infringement.

Worthington won some early fights, defying Estes & Lauriat, the American company with the rights to The Chatterbox, to prove that the Worthington books were identical. "My books are all original in title and matter," he wrote in an ad in the Sept. 27, 1884 issue of Publishers' Weekly. In the end, Worthington got his comeuppance: he went bankrupt after losing the right to publish any book with Chatterbox in the title.

The pages in my book have darkened a bit but the engravings are nothing short of spectacular. I just began scanning them into the digital archive and thought I'd share two examples.

Lost and found

My husband, Mark, and I hunted for years for a box of books that we were certain had to be in the house. We looked high and low, that is, from the basement to the attic, and the rooms in between. I was desperate to find it, because it contained four of the 12 volumes in Andrew Lang's famed, fairy tale collection: Blue Fairy Book (1889), Red Fairy Book (1890), Green Fairy Book (1892) and Yellow Fairy Book (1894). I loved these books and was mystified by their disappearance.

Unfortunately, we found the box after a pipe burst in the basement. Seems it had been mislabeled. Gulp, by me. It broke my heart to discover that not only were my books damaged, but so were a dozen or so books that had belonged to Mark's mother when she was a child.

The fairy books didn't survive but we saved most of my late mother-in-law's books - and that's where the illustrations here come in. They are by Pauli Ebner, who I assumed was a man. Wrong. Pauli, I discovered, was a variation of Pauline or Paula. Ebner (1873-1949) is well-known to postcard collectors but wasn't on my radar even though a quick look through my collection this week turned up quite a few of her postcards (take a peek of four others via the New York Public Library's digital gallery).

The only way to describe her style is as sweet. It's soothing, winsome and oh-so-easy to imagine sharing with a child. I removed damaged areas and managed to save every color plate. Now, I'm at a loss as to whether I should frame them, sell them as is or use them in my collages - my usual dilemma.