Katherine Milhous (1894-1977) and Frances Lichten (1889-1961) were life partners and artistic collaborators who shared several passions: creating vibrant artwork for children and adults, entertaining in their homey studio on Pine Street, and corresponding with treasured longtime friends. They also shared a love of Philadelphia and respect for the history and cultural traditions of the region.

The Katherine Milhous and Frances Lichten papers, an impressive 40 linear feet of personal and professional correspondence, fan mail, published and unpublished artwork, research notes, photographs, journals, and scrapbooks, is now available at the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Children’s Literature Research Collection (CLRC). In 1967, Milhous donated the majority of her manuscripts, illustrations, and papers as well as several boxes of Lichten’s papers to the library, and researchers will benefit from the artist’s handwritten comments, labeled research files, and extensive notes on her own work. 

Katherine Milhous was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Pitman, New Jersey. The activities, culture, and opportunities of her birthplace beckoned, and she returned to the city to study at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she met Frances Lichten, an artist specializing in Pennsylvania folk art.  Influenced by Pennsylvania Dutch designs and crafts, Milhous is primarily known for writing and illustrating children’s books such as The Egg Tree, for which she won the Caldecott medal in 1951, and Through These Arches: The Story of Independence Hall (1964), a thorough and reverent history of the Native American settlers through the building’s restoration to its original design in 1950. The positive impact she had on audiences of all ages is reflected by the folders of fan mail, including photos of her young readers decorating their own egg trees, notes from appreciative librarians, a letter from Pat Nixon praising Through These Arches, and a letter from Philadelphia mayor Bernard Samuel referencing Patrick and the Golden Slippers (1951), her book about the Mummer’s Parade.

Researchers can explore the relationship of author and publisher through the professional and personal letters written to Milhous by Alice Dalgliesh, children’s book editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York City.  Dalgliesh, also an author, saw Milhous’s Works Progress Administration posters featuring rural life; she promptly invited Milhous to create the illustrations for her children’s books and then encouraged her to write her own, sparking a twenty-seven-year friendship.  Lichten and Milhous worked together on the artwork for Dalgliesh’s They Live in South America (1942).

Milhous kept many files of clippings, notes, poems, and greeting cards from which she drew inspiration for her work. In addition, those interested in physical representations of the mid-twentieth century publishing process can examine outlines, galleys, preliminary and final artwork, as well as a complete dummy for Through These Arches, which Milhous considered her most important book.

Like Katherine Milhous, Frances Lichten left a tremendous impact on her chosen field. She was born in Bellafonte, Pennsylvania (near State College), and studied art in Philadelphia. She worked as a commercial artist, served as the State Supervisor for the Index of American Design, a WPA initiative, and was the Research Associate in the Decorative Arts department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, home of the Frances Lichten Research Collection. She wrote several books on decorative and folk art as well as two featuring her own illustrations. The collection features smaller publications in which Lichten published scholarly articles, artwork including bookplates and drawings from her childhood, and several research and subject files pertaining to her research interests.

Sadly, Lichten suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), which eventually took her life. The debilitating disease robbed her of muscle movement, a particularly cruel fate for an artist. The collection holds several folders of correspondence documenting her condition, condolence letters from friends and family to Milhous upon Lichten’s death in 1961, and her personal effects collected by Milhous from the nursing home where her beloved Frances, her partner of 40 years, spent her final months.

For additional biographical information as well as a complete inventory of the collection, please see the finding aid for the Katherine Milhous and Frances Lichten Papers.

For more on all of the CLRC collections visit our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter for more updates from the Children’s Literature Research Collection.

- Jennifer Schnabel

Tags: CLIR Grant, Children's Literature Research Collection, archives

How do you write a children’s book about political corruption? It becomes quite simple when the real life story features a rhinoceros. Little Una by Elizabeth Olds is about a rhino that lives in a zoo and is beloved by the city’s children. When the mayor and city council decide to sell the rhino in order to build a monument to themselves, the children decide to teach them a lesson. They nominate Little Una for mayor and on election day the rhino wins by a landslide! Appropriately humbled, the city council leads a parade to the zoo and agrees not to sell Little Una.

The book was inspired by real events that took place in São Paulo, Brazil in 1959. The citizens were so fed up with the rampant government corruption that they created a campaign to write in the rhinoceros from the local zoo. Her name was Cacareco, which makes “rubbish” in Portuguese, and she became the mascot for a reform movement. People printed up ballots that listed her as part of the “Independent Party” and her unofficial slogan was, “Better a rhino, than an a**.” When all the ballots were counted she had received a stunning 100,000 votes and beat 11 different political parties in a massive victory!

Elizabeth Olds based her book Little Una on these real life events, but it takes place in a land “far, far away.” The colorful pictures Olds created of the children and animals in the zoo are a combination of several artistic techniques including collage and wood block printing. At the end of the book, the animals watch a wonderful fireworks display and the children bring Little Una flowers on the anniversary of the election. The election in São Paulo was not such a happy tale and was not so easily resolved. Olds’s version makes for a much better picture book.

-Lindsay Friedman

To find out more about the real life story of Cacareco, check out this article from Life Magazine, " Rhino Horns in on a Brazilian Election."

For more about Elizabeth Olds and all of our other authors and illustrators, visit our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter for more updates from the Children’s Literature Research Collection.

Tags: CLIR Grant, Children's Literature Research Collection, Children's books, archives

As archivists at the Children’s Literature Research Collection, it’s not surprising that most of the materials we work with are children’s book materials: drafts of manuscripts, sketches for story ideas, original illustrations in all kinds of media. But sometimes we come across a few more… unusual items. A promotional matchbook, a papier mache doll used as a banquet dinner’s centerpiece, a charm bracelet. We call these objects “realia,” and they're some of the most interesting objects we have.

The first collection we processed here at the Free Library was the Tomi Ungerer papers. Ungerer gave us hundreds of beautiful and whimsical illustrations, plus a promotional matchbox for his book Allumette (1974). Making the matchbox more clever than bizarre, Allumette was a retelling of the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairytale “The Little Match Girl.” Perhaps we’re biased, but it does seem that promotional items used to be a lot more interesting  - we’d prefer an artfully designed matchbox to another branded stress ball any day.

Not all of our unusual favorites are strange promotional items. In the Carolyn Haywood papers, there is a large collection of family photographs. One of the most interesting is a gem photograph – sometimes called a jewel tintype – from around 1900. The photograph, most likely of a very young Haywood and her mother, is set into a jewelry pin about 1” in diameter. While it makes us a little sad that no one accessorizes with family photos anymore, the gem photograph made for a great find.

Another remarkable photograph is from the Marguerite de Angeli papers. It’s a panoramic group portrait from the 1937 reception for the Newbery Medal winners. While panoramic photography is quite common for landscapes, it’s more striking when used for a portrait of a few hundred people. The depth of field is flattened, so that the faces of people in the very back of the reception hall are just as focused as those in the very foreground. While examining this unusual photograph, our Special Collections Archivist focused on a woman who she thought she recognized. Maybe another author whose papers we have? With a closer look, however, we established that it was Eleanor Roosevelt, who apparently enjoyed the reception very much.

If you are a fan of the CLRC on Facebook, you might already be familiar with our recent “Weird Doll Wednesdays.” We have a few dozen dolls here at the CLRC, some more “unusual” than others. One particularly terrifying example is from the Scott O’Dell papers. O’Dell was awarded the Regina Medal Award in 1978 by the Catholic Library Association’s Children’s Library Services. In honor of his most famous book, Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960), the Regina Medal Award reception included a papier-mache doll centerpiece made to resemble the main character.

Unsurprisingly, some of the most fascinating realia in the collection comes courtesy of the Walt Disney Company. In 1938, Disney made a short animated film, “Ferdinand the Bull,” based on Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson’s book The Story of Ferdinand (1936). We’re lucky enough to have both Leaf and Lawson’s papers here at the Library, and along with drafts and art from the book we have a nice selection of Disney tie-in merchandise. There’s a candy wrapper (free of 75-year-old candy, thankfully), fabric swatches, quilt squares, greeting cards, stationery, decorative buttons, a pencil sharpener, and acharm bracelet.

As you can see, it’s not all old papers here at the archives. We’re only able to include three images with our post, but hop on over to our Facebook page to see our album of cocktail-chatter-worthy finds, including some we didn’t have room to tell you about here.

- Caitlin Goodman

Tags: CLIR Grant, Children's Literature Research Collection, archives

Hi! I’m Garrett Boos, the most recent archivist to join the “Milestones in 20th Century American Children’s Literature” project at the Free Library of Philadelphia. My particular part of the project involves reformatting finding aids for already processed collections. Since the beginning of November I have been reformatting the information in an old Rare Book Department Access database into easy-to-use finding aids produced with Archivists’ Toolkit. The three collections I have been working on are all Free Library collections of British children’s illustrators, chosen as a natural expansion of our project. They are the Free Library collections of Arthur Rackham, Beatrix Potter, and Kate Greenaway.

The first collection I worked on was the Free Library collection of Kate Greenaway, simply because it was the smallest. Since it is a small collection, even if we had to start over from scratch, I still wouldn’t need to redo too much work. Luckily everything went according to plan and the finding aid was completed relatively easily. With this collection, we worked to establish standards for how the information in the database would be repurposed as a finding aid. While the Access database containing information about these collections was available only to librarians working in the department, our online finding aids can be readily accessed by the public. (You can see the Kate Greenaway finding aid on our website here.)  We want to make these collections easier to find, search, and use; the converted finding aids are joining the findings aids for newly processed collections on our website.  After Greenaway, I was able to finish the The Free Library collection of Arthur Rackham relatively quickly, and now I am finishing up the humungous Beatrix Potter finding aid.

While I was earning my MLIS I did similar work for another Philadelphia area project sponsored by CLIR, the PACSCL/CLIR “Hidden Collections” Project, but I rarely had the chance to see the material I was writing about.  I am very happy to say that at the Free Library I can actually see the items I am writing about in the finding aid.  So far some of my favorite on the job experiences include flipping through a large set of original drawings by Kate Greenaway for Brett Harte’s Queen of the Pirate Isle, and seeing original watercolors by Beatrix Potter, particularly those you wouldn't normally associate with her, such as spiders.  By far my favorite collection has been the Free Library collection of Arthur Rackham.  I found everything from doodles on a menu to an elaborate painting that was used as an illustration in the book Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens to be equally fascinating.  The materials hit home with me when I discovered that the original drawings Rackham did for Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which I saw when working on the finding aid, were the same illustrations in my edition of the book at home.  You can check out our Facebook page to view some of his other sketches, including the hilarious “Sketch of a soldier and a dog going around a corner,” as well as other works by Potter and Greenaway. 

 -Garrett Boos

Tags: CLIR Grant, archives

We are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the classic Life Story by Virginia Lee Burton. First published in 1962, this wonderful book tells the tale of life on Earth from the beginning to the present with intense color and detail. In 1968, Burton gave the drawings for this book to the Children's Literature Research Collection at the Free Library. The collection contains hundreds of illustrations that Burton created over eight years. Every aspect was drawn and redrawn until each was just right and the final product contains striking illustrations that jump off the page. The story of Earth from the Big Bang right up to today is presented as a stage play, starring creatures ranging from giant dinosaurs to tiny plants. Burton herself is the narrator in the last act, telling the story of her own family as it grows over time. Life Story was her final book, and is an amazing piece of art. We were lucky to be given the funds to catalog it as part of a CLIR-funded “Hidden Collections” grant, and we are especially happy to be able to share it with you. An exhibit showcasing Burton's beautiful art is now on display on the ground floor of Parkway Central, outside of the auditorium. Come see it before the curtain closes!

-Lindsay Friedman

Tags: CLIR Grant, Children's Literature Research Collection, archives