It began as a simple collection of books Lloyd Cotson bought to read to his children.
It has since grown into one of the finest collections of children's literature, original
artwork, prints, and educational toys in the world.
This is a series of different characters.
These are essentially paper dolls.
It's the Cotson Children's Library at Princeton University.
A Sleeping Beauty has been Disney-fied.
Coming up on Great Libraries of the World.
We're here in front of the incomparable Firestone Library at Princeton University.
But we're going to visit a library within a library, the Cotson Children's Library.
He got interested in collecting children's books really because he was a dad.
And as the father of four children, he and his late wife haunted library discard sales.
They used to go down to acres of books in Long Beach and pick up anything that they
thought the kids might like as long as it didn't cost more than a dollar.
And so they accumulated a family library and they designed a book plate to go in them.
Then when the kids got older, in the 70s, too old to be read to, he got bitten by the
antiquarian book bug.
He made the acquaintance of a number of dealers, including Justin Schiller and New York City
who's really the dean of American antiquarian booksellers who deal in children's books.
He never looked back.
He bid at those sales.
He didn't really start buying manuscripts and artwork until later, but that was the
beginning of the end.
He was really the person who built this collection.
Andrea was his librarian out in California for a number of years.
I was out there once and watched him at a whole stack of books and they went through
them and he said yes to some and no to others and how he decided that, purely his own view
of what belonged in this collection.
The most important thing for him was that books that he acquired have images in them.
So a chapter book that doesn't have an image in it isn't a part of the library here.
Lloyd Coatson in 1996 donated his library to the Firestone.
In 1994 he signed a pledge letter with the university announcing that he intended to
give the collection.
It actually came in three transfers, each filling an 18 wheeler.
What you see here is a tiny portion of one corner of an 18 wheeler.
And you came with it?
No, not in the 18 wheeler.
I did help unpack.
I'd done a lot of shifting the collection around when it was in LA because it went in
various corners of Neutrogena, it went to the house, then it went to the Bibliocondos
which were near UCLA and then the collection started coming in pieces and the last transfer
was in 2006.
All told we're talking about 100,000 volumes.
Books, manuscripts, original art, prints and educational toys.
Not just books.
When this was originally proposed it was a lot of feeling on campus, both among the
faculty and among the library staff, like why do we want children's books?
This isn't appropriate for a place like Princeton.
The sheer will of Lloyd and his willingness to underwrite and to endow this really made
it happen.
He had a vision for what he wanted here and we turned this space where we are right now
into the principal location and what has happened over time is that faculty on campus have
discovered this is just a fabulous collection, principally because he didn't just buy western
materials, tremendous collection of East Asian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean.
The result of that is increasingly people are coming here on research grants to use
the Coates and Children's Library and its collections as testament I think to why this
really works for Princeton.
Last spring, the largest class on campus was a course on children's literature taught
by William Gleason, 500 students, all of whom came through here in groups to use the material
to have that size class.
The largest class?
The largest class on campus.
He made friends with Walter Schatzke and he was the first one to set up a shop dedicated
to old and rare children's books and Schatzke's idea, which he expressed in the first catalog
he published in America, was children's library of the future represent all countries at all
times and I think that very much motivated Lloyd in his approach that he didn't just
want to focus on children's books that were published in English.
He wanted really to go everywhere and bring back what caught his eyes.
He does really have a remarkable eye.
The nice thing about children's books is that they often capture cultural fables and sort
of things that adults wouldn't want to say they believe but are influenced by.
Yes, yes, I'll buy that.
As a history major we have to write two research papers and the first one I wrote about teddy
bears and I was taking a class on material culture and came across a lot of books on
teddy bears and so there's a lot of very fun things in the Coats and Collection.
This is a book from the early 20th century and it shows sort of how the image of the
bear changed because traditionally the bear was sort of the scary frightening thing.
And these are the Roosevelt bears, it's by Marieton and these bears are jumping around
on the seats and I mean they look like bears, they're very big, they're very scary but
they're also, they're playing like teddy bears and so then using the Coats and Collection
I was able to sort of trace the evolution of bears and so then you have these really
silly bears and they're scaring the doll.
And all of these books are from the early 20th century, this one as well.
And it gives you an idea of the teddy bear craze so that's why I wrote an entire paper
about the teddy bear craze in the United States in the early 20th century.
Mr. Kotzen was very interested also in fascist texts, communist texts, Japanese books written
during World War II which you know are nowhere as readily available as here.
I was reshelving books, just doing my work for Kotzen and I came across an alphabet book
of the Gronger which is World War I and this gave me the idea that maybe I'd want to do
something with that and when it came time to start thinking about a senior thesis I
said okay I'm going to go back to that, I'm going to write about childhood during World
War I and I used books from Kotzen again with like Little Toy Soldiers and Child Martyrs.
It really is sort of an economy between the adult side, the very research oriented professor
people come in from the outside world and they do scholarly research on our collections
and the part where we really are connecting with the community.
We have a lot of children's programming, we have resources available for kids, kids are
in the gallery all the time, they come in after school and that I think means a lot
not only because it's a great resource for everyone but I think it really shows that
Princeton as a university is committed to working with the town in addition to just pursuing
its own research goals.
When Mr. Kotzen donated his collection he also stipulated that there would be a public gallery
for children to come and read and that there would be outreach programs for children that
promote a level of literacy and that both of these things would be open to the public
and free of charge and so my wonderful job is to bring the collections to life and literacy
to life for children through an expansive array of activities, demonstrations, live shows,
food samples, and amen.
This is the kindergarten drunk.
We go through the life story of Beatrix Potter.
This is our second grade program, it's called Mr. Anderson, it's about Hans Christian Anderson.
This is our guy right here.
This is colonial classroom, this one, very popular.
It's a recreation of a colonial school day in 1700s New Jersey.
This is our Kamishiba trunk, our first grade trunk.
Kamishiba was a type of theater performance art that started in Japan in 1930 and then
basically stopped in 1951, television was introduced and Kamishiba men were candy sellers and they
rode around with these boxes on the back of their bikes and they would pull up a stage
and tell stories so I start here with the children imagining that they're flying to
Japan and going back in time with me.
I have them close their eyes and then right when we get to the part where they're going
to find out about Kamishiba, I take my hoshigi, these wooden clappers and I bang them together
really loudly, that's what they would do to draw attention to the performance and then
all their eyes pop open and they're very excited.
I show them images of the kind of candy that a Kamishiba storyteller would sell and then
I start telling them Kamishiba stories by actually bringing out a stage.
Not so long ago there lived a snake.
Now he was an enormous snake and he went around everywhere saying that he was the biggest,
the most magnificent, the longest snake in the whole world.
But he wasn't sure if this was true and so he set off to find out.
First he traveled over the land and where is this?
The Great Wall of China.
Everybody knows this, it's amazing.
And next he traveled over the sea, where is he now?
In New York.
But one day he saw a snake that looked just like him, so what do you think he did?
Did it.
Yes.
Kaboom!
Only to find out that he was indeed the longest snake in the whole world.
They would only tell the story to the most exciting point and then they would say to
be continued.
So next day they would come and buy more candy and hear the next episode.
One of the reasons, Kamisubhai is so popular, the world over right now is that people are
beginning to realize that it's a precursor of manga cartoons and animated films that
have become very popular in America and Europe.
So I have a lot of interest from young people to learn how to make Kamisubhai because of
their interest in manga and anime.
Part of Mr. Kotsun's idea was to immediately have visitors when they enter Kotsun Library,
sort of have a sense of some of the amazing treasures that we have on display here.
He knew that a lot of the families and children who are going to be coming here for some of
our programming, some of our outreach activities may never see the real jewels of the collection.
They may never come as researchers, but he really wanted there to be not the sharp divide
between people who visit Kotsun.
So the idea of having these beautiful exhibition cases which are modeled after miniature libraries
that we have in our collection is to immediately give visitors a sort of closer, more intimate
sense of some of the things that they otherwise really wouldn't see.
So we always have different coats of material on display.
This is a toy theater manufacturing company.
Toy theaters were a form of really popular entertainment in the 19th century.
I really like to think of it as a very early precursor of the do-it-yourself movement because
this really was a very interactive form of entertainment, a chance for children to become
tiny dramaturgs.
You would be creating the scenery, the characters, the backgrounds, the backdrops, putting on
a play from start to finish.
I'm here with Jeffrey Barton, who is a librarian here at the Kotsun Library and at the Firestone
Library, and we're finally going to be looking at some of these wonderful books.
We've been talking to the users, we've been talking to enthusiasts, we've been talking
to people who take this library and bring it to the community, but this is what it's
all about.
Tell us what you've got for us here.
Sure.
I thought I would show you some toy books and illustrated books because one of the things
that I found interesting is that when people think about rare book libraries or special
collections, they tend to think about leather-bound books with fancy tooling on the binding and
gold stamping or first folios by Shakespeare and Chaucer.
In fact, a lot of books, particularly children's books, were things more like chat books, which
were originally sold by chat men who were itinerant salesmen, so they weren't produced
or marketed by booksellers, often on a single sheet of paper, which would be folded up and
put together in a book and with little paper wrappers, and they were very cheap.
On the children's book market, sort of developed in the late 1700s and early 1800s in particular,
a lot of manufacturers realized that this was something that would appeal to children.
One interesting thing about children's literature is that it really appeals to a multi-leveled
audience so that undergraduates are sort of an ideal audience because they remember some
of these texts, particularly fairy tales, but also picture books and so on as children,
but then comes Professor Knufflemarker, and he gives it this sort of adult interpretation
that, oh, do you have to analyze it and break that simplicity so they realize that they're
not simple at all.
I'll give you an example of that.
A Sleeping Beauty has been disnified, and that's, of course, another thing.
And you say, aren't they simple, is that to some extent they've been dumbed down.
The story of Sleeping Beauty, originally the first version that we have is by an Italian
Renaissance writer called Giambattista Basile, and it's actually a rape story.
There is a king, a married man, who's hunting in a forest and his falcon flies in a deserted
house where a father has abandoned his daughter because she fell into a coma, and he rapes
her and then forgets all about her.
She has two children called Daylight, or maybe that's a later version, Sun and Moon or something
like that.
And then, so he remembers the years later, well, I remember there was this handsome woman,
you know, I think I might go there again, and lo and behold, she's there now with two
little kids, and they're his kids, and his wife did not give him any kids, so he takes
her as his mistress.
And then when Perot adapts his tale, he has problems with the sexual charges, so he manipulates
and makes it kind of an ironic tale, and the prince now is really much more so tentative.
By the time the Grimm's take over this tale, it becomes really just, let me see, we get
this little teenage prince who comes in there and deposits a little kiss on the Sleeping
Beauty, and then they have to ask the permission of dad and mom, you know, who have woken up
from their sleep to get married and so on, so it becomes progressively altered.
And then this text begins to present problems for other writers, particularly women writers.
This tale in Cinderella gets worked over by Beauty and the Beast, which is an 18th century
text by a woman also called Marie de Beaumont.
It gets into novels like Jane Eyre, where Rochester, when he sees Jane, speaks to her
in a voice that Beast speaks to Beauty and so on, so it becomes a tremendously innovative
and pliable kind of text, and that every sort of different cultural moment, every civilization
interprets it in different ways, reinterprets it.
One of these was owned by a girl named Hibernia Dukin, who apart from having a wonderful name
like something out of a novel, you piece that together as you catalog the individual books
and eventually you get a sense, well, this is the library that this person had, and so
you begin to get a sense of what books somebody would have had.
And that's one of the things we're studying, is not just the text of the books or the illustration,
but how a user would have used the book and how a child user, what they would have done,
what books they would have had.
And another thing that's interesting about this book, and you need to this copy, here's
the book plate.
I mean, some of our books, we're still acquiring new books, but a lot of the books in the collection
were the original Coates and Family books, so here's the book plate that they had designed,
and they would note who bought it and the date, and in many cases where they bought it.
So this is, again, another aspect that enables us, in this case, to piece together the history
of the Coates and Family collection.
Goody, two shoes.
I've heard about Goody two shoes since I was a little kid.
And then we all know the term Goody two shoes, which applies to somebody who's not very interesting
and prissy and good.
And in point of fact, the story, as it's written, is a very 17th, 18th sort of allegorical sort
of a thing.
I think her name is Meanwhile, and the way she has her name is originally she's so poor
that she has only one shoe.
She teaches herself to read and becomes a teacher, a very idyllic country setting, which
at the time Crane would be doing this, was already probably beginning to vanish, or at
least coming under threat.
You find that often in children, there's this sense of real nostalgia.
Yes, yes, absolutely right.
And I love this business of her alphabets.
Exactly.
Yeah, there's an ABC down here, and you see these children, he's placed them in this kind
of Elizabethan setting, and it really is kind of amazing, just the level of complexity
in the illustrations for what was it, what was a children's book.
It must have been captivating.
It really must have been.
You try to put yourself in the mindset of what it must have been like to see the world
in this level of color.
But the other thing that's clear is that this is a upper class being illustrated.
And so that the child that would have received this would either aspire to or would have
been a part of the upper class.
Some of the cheaper books would have a broader ends, but that was certainly who they were
marketing this book for.
And Crane has done some fabulous exhibitions over the years that have dealt with how the
Nazis used children's literature, how the Soviets used children's literature, dealing
with questions like, little black samba.
These are difficult things, and yet this is part of how we all learned our culture.
That I think is very influential in shaping young people's views of the world and what
they read, and I, you know, and unfortunately not always to the good.
The fact that it's international makes a collection like this pretty interesting for
researchers.
They're constantly amazed at what they find.
We had a 19th century French historian looking at religion in France, institutionalized religion
versus personal devotion.
I pulled her out some paper doll books, which showed like the rise and fall of two girls,
one who was giddy, disrespectful, and of course came to a terrible end.
You know, she didn't properly grieve her mother when she died, and of course ended up becoming
a servant and catching a loathsome disease and dying in the street, and the other a very
good conventional prudent girl who was looking for the main chance, and did everything absolutely
right and landed herself a very wealthy husband.
It's a very unique place because as you can see from the voices in the background, there
are little children here as well, and I think sometimes the sort of scholarly librarian
sound on this is an important research librarian sound, but that was Mr. Kutzen's deliberate
intention to make it a haven not only for scholars but for children.
Artifacts, puzzles, games, blocks, playing cards, non-standard decks of playing cards.
We don't do Kings, Queens, Spades.
These are all educational decks.
It could be authors, it could be games based on popular dramatic productions like the
HMS Pinafore game, I'm not sure what's in that one.
There are conversation cards, which are a combination of emblems and fortune telling.
No one's quite sure how they work, and they're very scarce, but we've got a couple sets of
those.
We have cards for learning, mythology, natural history, almost any topic you can think of.
Do you have the things that turn in that you can watch, motion pictures sort of, right?
Joy tropes, we have good selection of those, had someone using those last summer who's
in a film program and was interested in visual education, so she was looking at not so much
from the standpoint of the history of cinema, but how people were using these devices to
teach children to look and observe.
Soft toys, aside for the ones in the gallery, tend to be owned by authors.
We have, for example, the Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle Duck doll that Beatrix Potter
made to get copyrighted.
We have several suitcases of all the little stuffed animals that Honor Appleton used for
the models for her series of books about Josephine and her toys, so there's a Japanese doll who's
missing one leg, who hops everywhere.
This sounds to me like a fun library to work in.
A huge part of my undergraduate experience and a huge part of my thesis came from working
here, talking to the people here, it will be very, very strange in grad school not to
have this.
Well, you could pick a subject that allowed you to continue this.
Oh, I will, but just not to have coats in, because the environment is part of it, even
if I can continue doing children's history, you won't get to have little kids running
in the background while you're reading.
So they don't bother you?
Oh, no.
But the best part is when they come tumbling in and they're like walking and we look over
the edge and there's something little kid that's big and we're like, no, no, no, no,
no, let's go outside and play.
Children's literature has become a fast-growing area of study, yielding surprising insights
into history, culture, sociology, and psychology.
At Coats and Children's Library, researchers can tease meaning out of a hundred thousand
texts and artifacts, or they can just bring their children and see what they think.
Scholars and children are equally welcome at the Coats and Children's Library.
I'm Chet Gritch.
You can meet next time on Great Libraries of the World.
Thank you.
