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Lichten papers, an impressive 40 linear feet of personal and professional correspondence, fan mail, published and unpublished artwork, research notes, photographs, journals, and scrapbooks, is now available at the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Children’s Literature Research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

Scott O’Dell once summed up being an author in three simple words: “Writing is hard.” As a writer of children’s historical fiction, he excelled in creating his own story out of real events. He found inspiration in history books and in oral histories. He said, “Research is what I enjoy most. I often write of events, people, and backgrounds that I know little about, just because I want to know more.”  

Scott O’Dell was born Odell Gabriel Scott in Los Angeles, California on May 23, 1898. His father, Bennett Mason Scott, worked for the Union Pacific Railroad and the family frequently moved throughout Southern California during his childhood. At that time, California was still the frontier and still held the footprints of Spanish settlers, fortune hunters from the Gold Rush, and native Indian peoples. He would later recall, “This was a small world, but a world in microcosm. It was bounded by the deep water and wharves and mud flats of San Pedro Harbor. By the cliffs and reeds of Point Firmin and Portuguese Bend. By the hills of Palos Verdes, aflame with wild mustard in spring, lion-colored in summer.”

After graduating high school, he enlisted in the Army during World War I. He attended several colleges, but said he never learned to study and could not muster any enthusiasm for memorizing textbooks. Instead, he moved to Hollywood and taught classes in writing screenplays while working for Paramount Pictures. In 1925, he served as a cameraman on the 1925 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production of Ben Hur in Rome, where he also attended classes at the University of Rome. Returning to California, he worked in journalism and released three novels for adults. While at the Los Angeles Daily News, a typesetter transposed his name from “Odell Scott” into “Scott O’Dell” and he liked it so much that he had it legally changed. With the encouragement of his friend, the children’s book author Maud Lovelace, he decided to publish Island of the Blue Dolphins as his first children’s novel.

Island of the Blue Dolphins is based on the legend of “The Lost Woman of San Nicholas Island.” O’Dell adapted the true story of a native woman from the Channel Islands who was left behind in 1835 when the dwindling populations of Indians were removed from the islands. Subsequent rescue parties were unsuccessful in locating her until 1853, when Captain George Nidever arrived on the island to find a 50-year-old woman who smiled and talked in an “unintelligible” language. She was taken to the Mission Santa Barbara and given the name “Juana Maria.”

When Scott O’Dell published Island of the Blue Dolphins in 1960, it became a worldwide success and went on to win the Newbery Medal and was adapted into a motion picture. He continued writing historical fiction for children, winning the Newbery Honor for his next two novels, The King’s Fifth (1966) and The Black Pearl (1967). O’Dell would later write the sequel to Island of the Blue Dolphins, called Zia, in addition to 25 novels over the course of his career. In 1982, O’Dell established an award to honor authors, especially new authors, of historical fiction for children and young adults. The Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction is given annually and seeks to continue O’Dell’s efforts to create interest in the genre.

A manuscript for Island of the Blue Dolphins is part of the Children’s Literature Research Collection here at the Free Library of Philadelphia. The opening page of the manuscript is handwritten by Scott O’Dell. The remainder of the document is a typescript that includes notes between O’Dell and his editor at Houghton Mifflin. Though it only highlights the end of the creative process, this final draft includes supplemental pages and revisions that allow researchers to understand the amount of work that goes into each book. This collection, though small, represents the best of children’s historical fiction. For more in-depth information about the Scott O'Dell papers, please see our online finding aid!

For more about Scott O'Dell 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.

-Lindsay Friedman

Tags: 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