Quadrupeds #AtoZChallenge

         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 the master list of participating blogs here and visit some of my fellow A to Z Bloggers.

        Today I have An Alphabet of Quadrupeds.  That’s right, if you thought it was too easy to make alphabets of animals back at A (not to mention more alphabets of animals at D, F, G, N, O and P - and we’re not even through the alphabet yet), how about narrowing down the focus just a bit, for more of a challenge?  This tome from 1852 is 

no mere primer, either.  It includes two detailed wood engravings for each animal, plus a page and a half of natural history.  It dismisses X, stating “We could not procure the drawing of any quadruped whose name begins with this letter.”  But it compensates at least somewhat by including six additional non-alphabetic animals at the end.  Q itself is for Quagga, but most of the creatures are not terribly exciting.  Perhaps influenced by what drawings they could procure, they’re heavy on ordinary farm animals.  But for my favorites I’ve chosen J for Jerboa and P for Porcupine.  (I include both porcupine pictures, because they represent two different kinds.)

        Q is also for Quack alphabet.  No, the publishers didn’t call it that, but this is another of those nineteenth-century advertising giveaways, and it touts the remarkable virtues of patent medicines White-Pine Compound and Fellows’ Worm Lozenge.  As it happens, in this alphabet Q actually is for Quack, although not in the same sense I was thinking.  From this alphabet I had to include H, which puts its Hares in the Quadruped category, and also C for Cinderella.  This is my favorite of the letters because its claim is just so over-the-top.  But my favorite block print in the entire booklet is actually the image on the back cover showing the Boston premises of George W. Swett’s New England Botanic Drug Store.  Clearly plenty of doting parents were willing to hand over vast sums of money for the incomparable pleasure of a swift and complete cure for coughs, colds, and worms!

        Finally, since I filled out K with an assortment of Kings, equality demands that I supplement Q with Queens.  I enjoyed finding queens from a range of eras.  The first queen is in the fashion of the early 1800’s, but is probably just a generic figure.  The others I’ve selected, however, are all portraits of real people.  We’ve got Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Elizabeth II, Henry VIII’s six Queens, and two Queen Victorias.  The second, it is explained in the caption, is taking a ride in the park with Prince Albert.  I also found a pre-Victoria Q defining queen as “the wife of a king,” and then later a number of encomiums to Victoria (reigned 1837-1901) along with images of Victoria on the throne, Victoria being crowned, Victoria memorialized in a statue, Victoria aboard her royal train car, and more.  As it turns out, the depictions of queens were a lot more varied and interesting than those of kings!

        The moral of Q is that quality is more important than quantity - but I think I’ve got both!

        Riddle of the day: which letters have to wait the longest?

        So, if the lion is King of the Quadrupeds, which quadruped is queen?

Quagga, Jerboa, Porcupines, wood engravings from An Alphabet of Quadrupeds, 1852 (Images from International Children’s Digital Library);

Quack, Hares, Cinderella, wood block prints from The Illuminated White Pine Alphabet, c. 1875 (Images from Harvard Library);

Queen, wood block print from The Picture Alphabet, 1830 (Image from Toronto Public Library);

Queen, hand-colored wood block print from The Nursery Present, 1830 (Image from University of California);

Queen, linocut by Caroline Nuttal Smith, c. 2017 (Image from Etsy shop cnuttalsmith);

The Six Queens of Henry VIII, linocut by Christopher Brown from An Alphabet of London, 2012;

Queen, wood block print from The Princess Royal’s First Step to Learning, 1846 (Image from Toronto Public Library);

Queen, hand-colored wood block print from The Colored Nursery Picture Every Day Book, 1854 (Image from Toronto Public Library).]