Jung Juvenile

         Welcome to the April A to Z Blog Challenge!  My theme this year is Relief Printed Alphabet Squared, an alphabet of alphabets illustrated with relief block prints.  Find out more about the A to Z Challenge here.  (And as always, thanks very much to the organizing team who pulls this all together so that the rest of us have a structure and community in which to share our work this month.)

        The alphabet by Moriz Jung (Austria, 1885-1915) is rich and dramatic.  Not only does it have a bold animal for each letter, but there’s a thick patterned border filling out the whole page.  As an Austrian artist, Jung’s alphabet stands for words in German rather than English, but luckily for us, J is still for Jaguar, and C is still for Chameleon.  I love the patterns all over everything, and how the animals are almost camouflaged in their habitats.

        Because I have only two alphabets to share with you today, and because I 

really like these, I’m going to go ahead and give you a third from Jung.  Here’s I, which is for Igel.  As you can tell from the picture, Igel is a hedgehog, so not all our letters are effectively bilingual.  (If you want to see some of Jung's non-alphabetic work with a humorous sci fi twist, check out this prior post.)

        Today’s second alphabet is Richardson’s Juvenile Cabinet, a chapbook that gives the eager child three alphabets for the price of one.  Each page includes the appropriate line from the “A was an Archer” rhyme that we’ve seen before, plus a person from a particular country or region, as well as one additional random word.  I use the description “random” advisedly because I rather suspect that the

publisher merely rummaged through his box of wood blocks in the basement to see what he could come up with.  Some of them are a bit of a stretch (rather like the idea of assigning Richardson’s Juvenile Cabinet or Fountain of Learning to the letter J).  In any case, J here is represented by two Joiners and a Janizary.  A Janissary was a member of the elite infantry army of the Ottoman Empire.  Four years before the publication of this little educational pamphlet, the Janissary corps had been abolished, with brutal violence, after they had rebelled against Sultan Mahmud II.  I have no idea how aware of these current events the average English person would have been, let alone the average English child just learning their ABC’s.

        As a second letter from the Juvenile Cabinet I give you W, because I particularly like the wood engraving 

of the Windmill in its lovely little landscape.  W is also illustrated by a Watchman and a Welchman.  (As with the J, you can see that spelling was not yet modern.)  Notice that the Welchman has a leek stuck in his hat!  

One more letter from this book was used for the icon in the post for G.  I really like how the Gamester used the G as his table.

        The moral of J is don’t judge a book by its cover, because sometimes a jaguar can change its spots.  (And a chameleon certainly can.)

        Riddle of the day: which letters squawk the loudest?

        So, which elements of today’s children’s books do you think will seem most outdated in 200 years?

[Jaguar, Chamaeleon, woodcuts by Moriz Jung, 1906 (Images from Vienna Secession);

Janizary, Welchman, hand-colored woodcuts from Richardson’s Juvenile Cabinet, 1830 (Images from Toronto Public Library).]