The Definitive Dwiggins no. 702—Textbooks in the 1920s (Part II): How the Old World Found the New
Even as he was trying to shift his career from advertising design to book design, W.A. Dwiggins found himself still contributing to textbooks in the 1920s, something which seemed to have been in his past. For Ginn and Company, a client he had worked with sporadically since 1905, he contributed numerous illustrations to two books: Open Doors to Science with Experiments by Otis Caldwell and William Herman Dietrich Meier (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1926) and How the Old World Found the New by Eunice Fuller Barnard and Lida Lee Tall (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1929). [1] The nature of those illustrations was vastly different, however.
For Open Doors to Science Dwiggins drew vignettes to serve as headpieces for each of the book’s nineteen chapters. Although small, these were original illustrations. In contrast, for How the Old World Found the New he reworked, in varying degrees of fidelity, over fifty existing illustrations. This was a surprising throwback to his work for Daniel Berkeley Updike and The Merrymount Press over fifteen years earlier, work that he had come to see as “hack carpentering”. His willingness to accept the assignment can partly be explained by the usual need for money. But more importantly it was completed in 1925, even though the book was not published until 1929. If Ginn had offered the job to him a year later, it is likely that Dwiggins would have turned it down since by then he had finally snagged an opportunity to illustrate a book on his own terms. That book was My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather, Dwiggins’ first job for Alfred A. Knopf, the publisher who defined his subsequent career as a book designer. [2]
“Pehriska-Ruhpa: Moennitarri Warrior in the Costume of the Dog Danse [sic]” Handcolored aquatint engraving by René Rollet after Karl Bodmer (Paris, Coblenz, and London: 1839–1842).
“A Warrior of the Plains Dressed for the Dance” from How the Old World Found the New by Eunice Fuller Barnard and Lida Lee Tall (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1929), p. 205. Illustration by W.A. Dwiggins after René Rollet and Karl Bodmer.
How the Old World Found the New
Although written by Eunice Fuller Barnard (1888–1944) and Lida Lee Tall (1873–1942), How the Old World Found the New was conceived by J. Montgomery Gambrill (1880–1953), a history professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. “This little volume has been a long time in the making,” Gambrill wrote in the Preface. He went on to explain that,
The editor [Gambrill] began experimenting with large units and topical organization more than twenty years ago, and later worked out materials for the grades with the assistance of Miss Lida Lee Tall, then supervisor and afterward assistant superintendent of schools in Baltimore County, Maryland. Tentative courses for Grades V-VIII, arranging the materials for interpretative organization in large units under carefully phrased topics, were worked out and embodied in the curriculum of Baltimore County published in 1915. [3]
The new approach to history that Gambrill was advocating was the “Problems in Democracy” movement led by philosopher and educator John Dewey (1859–1952). The intent was to teach history as a means of preparing students to understand contemporary public affairs, to enable them to “learn how to gather facts,” and to have a “healthy skepticism toward propaganda”. [4]
Gambrill explained the division of labor among the authors and himself as editor:
The stories in the present volume, whose scope and purpose are explained in the “Introduction for Teachers,” have been worked out in accordance with the detailed plans of the editor through the combined labors of Miss Tall and Mrs. Barnard. Miss Tall did the pioneer work in exploring the literature of the field, locating the materials, and making extended drafts of more than half the stories. Mrs. Barnard, who, as a publisher’s editor, had assisted us in seeing through the press an earlier text which dealt briefly with the age of discovery, gave us her aid at this point. She has worked over all the materials previously accumulated, completing and rewriting the stories and preparing new ones to fill out the series, so that their present literary form is chiefly her work, while the preparation of the illustrations and maps is also to be credited to her. [5]
Gambrill had met Tall while he was a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University in the years before World War I. There is evidence they served together on a Maryland state committee for educational reform in 1909. Gambrill’s description of Barnard as a “publisher’s editor” implies she worked for a book publisher, but there is no evidence supporting that idea. In the 1920s she was a journalist and, after the publication of How the Old World Found the New, she became an educationalist. As early as 1921 she was writing for The New Republic and from 1925 to 1937 she was a writer and editor for The New York Times. In 1938 she joined the nascent Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. Foundation as its Educational Director. [6]
How Gambrill met Barnard and hooked her up with Tall is unclear. Given Barnard’s role in rewriting Tall’s text it seems likely that she was hired after the manuscript was prepared and thus after she had begun making a name for herself with her reporting for The New York Times. [7] If she was a late addition to the project it would explain the long lag—nearly twenty-six months—between the time that Dwiggins completed his work on the illustrations of the book and its publication.
It is unclear what Gambrill meant in crediting Barnard with “the preparation of the illustrations and maps” in How the Old World Met the New. It is highly improbable she had anything to do with their preparation in terms of production and printing since there is no indication she had any training or experience in those areas. Instead, it is most likely that she was responsible for collating the illustrations and determining where they were to be placed within the narrative. Gambrill makes no mention of Dwiggins’ role regarding the illustrations, presumably because—with one exception—they were not original drawings. (That also explains why none of them are signed.) But Gambrill was probably the person responsible for initiating the illustrations since the book was his vision. He described the illustrations as providing color and a sense of reality to the text, “most of them being drawn from contemporary or nearly contemporary sources, and in several respects, as for example the history of ships, tracing interesting developments in a series of pictures.” [8] Dwiggins’ account book often refers to his work on the book as “Ginn Gambrill drawings,” further supporting the idea that Gambrill had a major hand in determining which illustrations were included in the book—and which ones needed Dwiggins’ intervention. [9]
Illustrations and Maps: Primary and Secondary Sources
There are fourteen maps, 86 illustrations, and one photograph in How the Old World Found the New. [10] With one exception, all of the illustrations are from sources contemporary with (or nearly so) to the adventures and explorations of Europeans in the New World that the book chronicles. Most of them are identified—if at all—in vague terms: e.g. “from a wood-cut made in 1497,” “from a sixteenth-century print,” or simply “from an old picture”. In reality, fifty-one of the illustrations (in my estimation) were redrawn to one degree or another by Dwiggins. This conclusion is based on the quality of reproduction of the illustrations in the book, which varies greatly, and on comparisons of them with other versions of the identical subject found in older books.
The majority, if not all, of the illustrations appear to have been taken or based upon illustrations in a range of books documenting the evolution of sailing ships, chronicling the adventures of European explorers from Marco Polo to René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle (e.g. The Life of Christopher Columbus for Boys and Girls by Charles W. Moores [1912]), and recounting the pre-Colonial history of the United States (e.g. Our Ancestors: An Introduction to American History by Jennie Hall [1916]). [11] Much of this material is the visual basis of the myths that have dominated Americans’ notion of their history from Columbus “discovery” of the New World to the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs to Champlain’s encounters with the Algonquin and Iroquois tribes. [12]
A major source of the illustrations in these books was Theodor de Bry (1528–1598), a Dutch engraver, goldsmith, editor and publisher. De Bry’s engravings were themselves secondhand. In “Inventing ‘America,’ The Engravings of Theodore de Bry,”
Though de Bry is most famous for his engravings of European voyages to the Americas (and Africa, and Asia), he never actually traveled across the Atlantic. It is not surprising then that de Bry’s depiction of the indigenous peoples of the Americas was a combination of the work of other artists who had accompanied Europeans to the Americas (artists were often brought on journeys in order to document the lands and peoples of the Americas for a European audience) as well as his own artistic inventions. For instance, he adapted (without credit) some of the images created by Johannes Stradanus, a well-known illustrator who created early images of the Americas. In his Collected travels in the east Indies and west Indies, de Bry republished (and translated into multiple languages) the accounts of others who had spent time traveling around the globe, and created more than 600 engravings to illustrate the volumes. [13]
Among the other artists whose work de Bry turned into engravings were John White, who had settled on Roanoke Island in 1585, and Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (c.1533–1588), who was part of the French expeditions to Florida that were headed by Jean Ribault in 1562 and Rene Goulaine de Laudonnière in 1564. [14] De Bry’s engravings were spread far and wide through his own publishing efforts as well as those of his family. From 1598, the year of his death, to 1634 his family continued to issue volumes in his Grand Voyages series, many of them slanted to appeal either to Catholic or Protestant groups.
Other primary sources of imagery in How the Old World Found the New were the woodcuts that accompanied the various editions of Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en las Islas y Tierra Firme del mar Océano que llaman Indias Occidentales by Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas (1559-1625); the drawings of Jan Karel Donatus van Beecq (1638–1722) as engraved by Moyse Jean-Baptiste Fouard (1653–1726); and the watercolors of Karl Bodmer (1809–1893), based on his travels with Prince Maximilian of Prussia among the Plains Indians from 1832 to 1834, that were subsequently copied as lithographs. [15]
The tradition of redrawing illustrations
In redrawing old prints for How the Old World Found the New Dwiggins was working, consciously or not, in the spirit of the original engravings by de Bry, Fouard, and others.
The illustrations in How the Old World Found the New include dull halftones that appear to have been made from poor copies of engravings. To show how an image was copied, transformed, and corrupted over the centuries, here is a sequence of portraits of Atahualpa, commonly referred to as the “last of the Incan kings,” beginning with one from a late 17th century Dutch book and concluding with the one in How the Old World Found the New.
“Athabalipa ultimus Rex Peruanorum” from Die Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld: Of Bescryving van America en ‘t Zuid-Land… by Arnoldus Montanus (Amsterdam: Jacob Meurs, 1671). Copperplate engraving.
“Achabalipa der letzte Peruanische Koenig” from Thesaurus exoticorum… by Eberhard Werner Happel (Hamburg: Thomas von Wiering, 1688). Woodcut. Image from the JCB Archive of Early American Images.
“El Inga Atahualpa ultimo Rey, del Peru” from Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos… by Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas (1728), vol. 3. Copperplate engraving. Image from JCB Archive of Early American Images.
“Athabaliba ultimus Rex Peruanorum” from A Separate Account of the Conquest of Mexico and Peru by W.W. Robertson in The Discovery and Conquest of the New World by Washington Irving (Cincinnati: W.H. Ferguson Company, 1902), p. 658. Halftone photoengraving. Image from the Library of Congress.
“Atahualpa” from How the Old World Found the New by Eunice Fuller Barnard and Lida Lee Tall (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1929), p. 156. Halftone photoengraving.
None of the halftone images were reworked by Dwiggins. His contribution to the book was improving (and sometimes revising) the line art derived from a hodgepodge of woodcuts, copperplate engravings, wood engravings, and zinc photoengravings. These illustrations suffered from broken lines, uneven inking, over-inking, or muddiness (especially in the hatching often used to fill in areas of sea, land, and sky). Some of them escaped his ministrations, apparently being judged good enough to be used as is (e.g. “An Eastern King Welcomes Europeans” on p. 109). [16]
“An Eastern King Welcomes Europeans” from How the Old World Found the New by Eunice Fuller Barnard and Lida Lee Tall (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1929), p. 129.
The tonal value of the line art in the illustration “An Eastern King Welcomes Europeans” is uneven. This is especially evident in the lightness of the group of men following the elephant and the crosshatching on the wall above them. The original version of this illustration appeared in Journal oft Dagh-register… (Amsterdam: Cornelis Claesz, 1601) where one can see the right side of the engraving in pristine condition.
Another engraving, of a kora-kora of the King of Ternate, in the 1601 Cornelis Claesz book was the original basis for the following illustration (“Barge of a King of the Spice Islands”) in How the Old World Found the New. An edited iteration of it appears as part of Plate 6 of The Voyage of Sir Henry Middleton to the Bantam and the Maluco Islands… (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1855). Dwiggins must have been provided with this degraded version (or a similar one) that needed serious reworking for inclusion in How the Old World Found the New. [17]
Kora-kora of the King of Tenate from Journal oft Dagh-register… (Amsterdam: Cornelis Claesz, 1601). Image from the Internet Archive.
Illustration of a kora-kora from The Voyage of Henry Middleton to Bantam and the Moluca Islands… edited by Bolton Corney (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1855), Plate 6.
“Barge of a King of the Spice Islands” from How the Old World Found the New by Eunice Fuller Barnard and Lida Lee Tall (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1929), p. 110.
Dwiggins has strengthened all of the lines, opened up the cross-hatching or dispensed with it altogether, simplified the waves, changed the shading of the flag, and added the missing part of the tiller at far left. But he has not altered the scene in any material way.
Different types of redrawing by Dwiggins
The work that Dwiggins did on the illustrations in How the Old World Found the New can be separated into five groups, based on differing levels of intervention.
1. Faithful redrawings
The first group is composed of illustrations that have been faithfully redrawn to improve their legibility and printability. An example is “Savages from the Robber Islands Swimming Out to a European Ship”. The original illustration was an engraving by de Bry (fol. 64 I. Ladrones) from his Americæ nona & postrema pars… (Frankfurt: Matth. Beckervum, 1602). It was reprinted in The Golden Book of the Dutch Navigators by Hendrik Willem van Loon (New York: The Century Co., 1916). Dwiggins’ version is nearly an exact copy. He has straightened the border and deleted the title (in the cloud at the top), but otherwise he has done nothing more than clean up the drawing. Nothing in the scene—apparently an attack on the Dutch ship Mauritius by natives of Borneo—has been changed. [18]
Illustration from The Golden Book of Dutch Navigators by Hendrik Willem van Loon (New York: The Century Co., 1916), p. 194.
“Savages from the Robber Islands Swarming out to a European Ship” from How the Old World Found the New by Eunice Fuller Barnard and Lida Lee Tall (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1929), p. 105.
2. Faithful but aesthetically simplified redrawings
In this second group of redrawings Dwiggins has removed shading and altered minor elements of an illustration to create a less cluttered image without sacrificing fidelity of content or style. An example is “The Great Khan Giving the Polos His Golden Tablet” where all shading has been eliminated and some folds of cloth have been changed, but nothing significant has been altered.
“The Great Khan Delivering the Tablet of Gold to the Brothers” from The Travels of Marco Polo for Boys and Girls by Thomas W. Knox (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1885), p. 26.
“The Great Khan Giving the Polos His Golden Tablet” from How the Old World Found the New by Eunice Fuller Barnard and Lida Lee tall (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1929), p. 8.
3. Faithful but bowlderized redrawings
The difference between this group and the second one is that the impulse for changes to the original image is editorial rather than aesthetic. There is only one illustration in this group, but is a telling one. It is “First Picture of the ‘Indians’,” based on a woodcut published in 1505 by Johann Froschauer of Augsburg. The woodcut, which accompanied Amerigo Vespucci’s Mundus Novus letter about his voyage to the New World, is notorious for its depiction of “cannibalism and open love-making”. [19] Dwiggins’ redrawing leaves out these aspects, undoubtedly at the request of Gambrill.
“The First Representation of the People of the New World” from A Book of Discovery: The History of the World’s Exploration, from the Earliest Times to the Finding of the South Pole by M.B. Synge (London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, Ltd., 1912), p. 163.
“First Picture of the ‘Indians'” from How the Old World Found the New by Eunice Fuller Barnard and Lida Lee Tall (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1929), p. 72.
In Dwiggins’ redrawing the severed arm being eaten by the figure at the top left and the body parts hanging from a tree in the middle of the illustration are gone. The man and woman kissing at the left have been transformed into two men talking, and the infant in the foreground is no longer suckling at his mother’s breast. Dwiggins has done such an excellent job of preserving the visual look of the original woodcut that these editorial modifications are nearly invisible.
Notably, the illustration in A Book of Discovery by M.B. Synge (London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, Ltd., 1912) is captioned “The First Representation of the People of the New World,” avoiding the word “Indian”. Its description summarizes the one that accompanied the original Froschauer woodcut. In contrast, Barnard and Tall’s caption puts “Indians” in quote marks and its description deliberately sidesteps the issue of cannibalism, focusing instead on clothing and weapons. [20]
4. Recreations
The large majority of illustrations in How the Old World Found the New can best described as recreations rather than as redrawings. These illustrations hew to the essential aspects of the engraving or woodcut they are derived from, but they are not faithful copies. Instead, Dwiggins has removed elements extraneous to the main story or purpose of the illustration. [21] In some cases he has also adjusted the framing of the illustration to strengthen its focus. “Seamen Studying Navigation” is a good example of this fourth group.
The original illustration, entitled “Licht der Zeevaert” (The Light of Navigation), was the frontispiece to Segelhandbuch by Willem Janszoon Blaeu (Amsterdam: 1608), the celebrated cartographer. Dwiggins most likely copied the version in Ships & Ways by E. Keble Chatterton (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 1913). His recreation boils Blaeu’s image down to its essence, stripping away the metaphorical and allegorical components, to concentrate attention on the seamen and their instruments of navigation.
“Sixteenth-Century Seamen Studying the Art of Navigation” from Ships & Ways by E. Keble Chatterton (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 1913), opposite p. 207.
“Seamen Studying Navigation” from How the Old World Found the New by Eunice Fuller Barnard and Lida Lee Tall (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1929), p. 41.
In 1927 Dwiggins complained to his friend Carl Purington Rollins, Printer to Yale University, that he was discontinuing his “hack-carpentering” business, referring to redrawing and making over existing designs. [22] His willingness to take on the Gambrill book commission can be explained partly by a need to earn a living, but also because the bulk of the redrawings he did for it fall into category 4 (and category 5). Working on them involved more than mere carpentering. Simplifying old engravings was a greater challenge, even if it did not rise to the level of creating original art. Furthermore, the subject of How the West Found the Old World would have greatly excited him. He had a life-long interest in tales of adventure and exploration—and he particularly enjoyed ships. [23] Redrawing illustrations of Marco Polo, Magellan, Cortes et al would not have been the same kind of drudgery as remaking university seals.
5. Revisions
The fifth and last group consists of illustrations where Dwiggins went beyond recreating the essence of an existing image by simplifying things. In these illustrations he strayed from copying their details faithfully and instead rendered their elements more loosely. Most of these occur toward the end of How the Old World Found the New, including one based—at a distance—on Samuel de Champlain’s drawing of the defeat of the Iroquois at what is now Lake Champlain. The illustration is one that has been widely copied, making it difficult to know which version Dwiggins reworked.
Drawing by Samuel de Champlain of the defeat of the Iroquois by the French from Voyages of Samuel de Champlain translated by Charles Pomeroy Otis (Boston: Prince Society, 1880), vol. 2, after p. 220.
“Champlain and the Indians” from Pioneers on Land and Sea: Stories of the Eastern States and of Ocean Explorers by Charles A. McMurry (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1904), p. 17.
“The Defeat of the Iroquois by Champlain and His Party on Lake Champlain” from A Book of Discovery by M.B. Synge (London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, Ltd., 1912), p. 293.
“‘I rested my arquebus against my cheek'” from How the Old World Found the New by Eunice Fuller Barnard and Lida Lee Tall (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1929), p. 219.
Dwiggins’ version of the battle of the Montagnais and French against the Iroquois differs from previous ones in several respects. He has added feathered headdresses and loincloths to the Indian at the far left and those on the outside of the two warring groups; created larger puffs of smoke from two of the three arquebuses; changed the postures of two of the three Indians lying on the ground; redrawn all of the trees; deleted the shading indicating the lake; excised the letters identifying the canoes; and cropped the right side. None of these changes affected the narrative of the illustration, though the addition of headdresses and loincloths turns the Montagnais and Iroquois into Indian stereotypes. Was that something that Dwiggins did on his own or at the request of Gambrill?
The caption for the illustration in How the Old World Found the New is intriguing. The quotation “I rested my arquebus against my cheek” is from a translation of Champlain’s account of his voyages. [24] It is a much more subjective view of the event than the captions of other versions which tend to be variants of “The Defeat of the Iroquois at Lake Champlain.” [25] It is surprising that the description of the illustration—”Champlain’s own drawing of the defeat of the Iroquois” (italics added)—is so blatantly misleading. Elsewhere in the book the credits are more accurate, although imprecise (e.g. “From a sixteenth-century drawing.”)
There is one illustration in How the Old World Found the New which does not fit into any of these categories. It is “‘A Little Crowded Village’ / An Indian pueblo today”. The quotation comes from Pedro Castañeda, the historian of Coronado’s expedition, but the illustration is based on a late 19th century photograph of Zuñi terraces in the town of Cibola that so disappointed the Spaniards seeking gold. [26] Dwiggins has altered the perspective a little and added figures of Zuñi Indians.
“Zuñi Terraces” from A Study of Pueblo Architecture in Tusayan and Cibola by Victor Mindeleff (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), Plate LXXIX. Photograph by the United States Bureau of Ethnology.
“‘A Little Crowded Village'” from How the Old World Found the New by Eunice Fuller Barnard and Lida Lee Tall (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1929), p. 201.
Dwiggins began work on Gambrill (as he called it) on May 19, 1925, three-and-a-half months after he had completed his last drawing for Open Doors to Science. He finished in November 1925. How the Old World Found the New was his last assignment for Ginn and Company. [27]
For details of each illustration that Dwiggins may have worked on see the five parts of The Definitive Dwiggins no. 703.
Coda
At the top of this post is a handcolored aquatint engraving of “Pehriska-Ruhpa: Moennitarri Warrior in the Costume of the Dog Danse [sic]” by René Rollet (between 1839 and 1842). It is based on a watercolor painting by Karl Bodmer made five or so years earlier when Bodmer accompanied Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied on his travels in North America. [28] Rollet’s engraving or, more likely, a halftone photoengraving of it, was the basis of Dwiggins’ illustration of “A Warrior of the Plains Dressed for the Dance” in How the Old World Found the New. What is notable about Dwiggins’ drawing is not how well he translated the large colored engraving into line art, but that he reinvented Pehriska-Ruhpa’s face.
Notes
1. How the Old World Found the New is not listed in The Books of WAD: A Bibliography of the Books Designed by W. A. Dwiggins by Dwight Agner (Baton Rouge: Press of the Nightowl, 1974). It is also not mentioned in W.A. Dwiggins: A Life in Design by Bruce Kennett (San Francisco: Letterform Archive, 2018). Since there is no credit to Dwiggins in the book, the only evidence for his participation are his account books and a close examination of the illustrations. Unfortunately, he had no input on the design of the interior of the book or its bindings. How the Old World Found the New looks like a textbook published in 1900.
2. Although Knopf published My Mortal Enemy (in both a limited edition and a trade one), he did not hire Dwiggins. Elmer Adler of Pynson Printers, the firm that typeset and printed both books, commissioned Dwiggins.
3. How the Old World Found the New by Eunice Fuller Barnard and Lida Lee Tall (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1929), p. iii.
4. The quotations by Gambrill are from the syndicated “Washington Letter” column by Rodney Dutcher in The Greenville [Ohio] Daily Advocate (16 March 1929) and other newspapers. For some background on the “Problems in Democracy” movement in historical teaching see “The Historical Origins of Social Studies Teacher as Athletic Coach” by Michelle Stacy in American Educational History Journal vol. 41, no. 2 (2014), p. 307. Also see Experimental Curriculum-Making in the Social Studies by J. Montgomery gambrill (Philadelphia: McKinley Publishing Co., 1924).
5. How the Old World Found the New by Eunice Fuller Barnard and Lida Lee Tall (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1929), pp. iii–iv.
6. Eunice Fuller Barnard does not appear in the 1920 United States Census. But she listed herself as a journalist in the 1930 United States Census. For The New York Times Barnard wrote about nursery schools, fraternities, women investing in the stock market, noise in cities, and the founding of Bennington College before becoming the paper’s Educational Editor around 1930.
7. Barnard might have attracted Gambrill’s attention with her article “‘Modern’ Teaching Now a Century Old: To Pestalozzi the World Owes Initiation of Education through Sense Perception” in The New York Times Sunday Magazine (February 13, 1927), p. 6.
8. “Introduction for Teachers” by J. Montgomery Gambrill in How the Old World Found the New by Eunice Fuller Barnard and Lida Lee Tall (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1929), p. xi.
9. The lack of mention is in stark contrast to Collar and Daniell’s First Year Latin revised by Thornton Jenkins (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1918) where the author specifically thanked Dwiggins, T.M. Cleland, and Adrian Iorio for their artistic contributions. Dwiggins’ account books list work on the book for twenty-one days between 19 May 1925 and 5 November 1925. See Folder 6, Box 81(1), 1974 W.A. Dwiggins Collection, Boston Public Library.
10. None of the maps in How the Old World Found the New were designed by Dwiggins or Barnard. Eleven of them bear the monogram RW (or WR) and two others are lettered in the same style. The remaining map is a recreation of a thirteenth-century T-map with its secondary text stripped out. The photograph, captioned “A Water-Street in Venice Today,” depicts the Grand Canal.
11. The bibliography below lists the books I was able to find which had relevant illustrations in them. There are undoubtedly others given that many of these illustrations were copied and recopied from book to book. Hall’s book is especially significant since Gambrill was its consulting editor.
12. Here is a sample of Barnard’s writing that accompanied an illustration of an Algonquin warrior: “[T]he Indians were to Champlain a vital part of his plan for New France. They alone could bring him the furs the French traders sought. They could help him find his waterway to the Pacific, and besides, they were heathen whom he was genuinely anxious to win for the Church.” How the Old World Found the New by Eunice Fuller Barnard and Lida Lee Tall (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1929), p. 216.
13. See “Inventing ‘America,’ The Engravings of Theodore de Bry” by 14. “Inventing ‘America,’ The Engravings of Theodore de Bry” by
15. Herrera’s book was translated into several other languages over the centuries. Hand-colored lithographs by Bodmer based on his watercolor paintings were originally issued in Travels in the Interior of North America in the Years 1832 to 1834 in London between 1839 and 1843. For more on Bodmer see Karl Bodmer’s North American Prints by Ronnie C. Tyler (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press; Omaha: Joslyn Art Museum, 2004).
16. Two other possible explanations are that Ginn and Company had a limit to their budget or that Dwiggins lacked time to them. The latter seems unlikely since there more than two years elapsed between the time Dwiggins submitted his last drawing and the date the book was published.
17. Without any documentary evidence of the gestation and production of How the Old World Found the New my comments about specific sources for the book’s illustrations are all speculative. Since many of its illustrations existed in numerous iterations, identifying the exact version for each that Gambrill provided to Dwiggins for reworking is impossible.
18. The illustration in The Golden Book of Dutch Navigators is not labeled. I have taken this description from van Loon’s narrative of Olivier van Noort’s attacks on the Spanish in the Pacific. Several of the captions to illustrations in How the Old World Found the New are bland (and sometimes racist) interpretations of the events depicted.
19. For more about this woodcut see The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia edited by Silvio A. Bedini (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992) vol. I, p. 338; and for a discussion of the forces and motivations behind European depictions of Indians of the New World as cannibals see The Return of Hans Staden: A Go-between in the Atlantic World edited by Eve M. Duffy and Alida C. Metcalf (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). Mundus Novus was a pamphlet first published in Latin in 1503. Many scholars believe this to be a highly exaggerated, possibly even fictionalized version of several genuine letters written by Vespucci to Lorenzo di Medici.
20. Bedini (see note 18) says that in this respect, the Froschauer woodcut is considered to be an accurate depiction of the Tupinambá Indians of Brazil.
21. Many of the redrawings in this fourth group resemble the illustrations that Dwiggins contributed to Stories of Our Earth by Nellie B. Allen and Edward K. Robinson (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1927) in their spareness.
22. W.A. Dwiggins to Carl Purington Rollins 15 April 1927 in Dwiggins Folder, Box 2, Carl Purington Rollins Papers (AOB 9), Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library, Yale University.
23. Dwiggins’ fascination with ships began as early as high school where his commencement oration was an illustrated talk on “The Evolution of the Battleship”. See The Guernsey Times 8 June 1899, p. 1.
24. The earliest source of the Champlain quotation I have discovered is The Voyages and Explorations of Samuel de Champlain, (1604-1616) Narrated by Himself translated by Annie Nettleton Bourne (New York: A. S. Barnes & Company, 1906), p. 212:
Our men began to call me with loud cries ; and, to give me a passageway, they divided into two parts and put me at their head, where I marched about twenty paces in front of them until I was thirty paces from the enemy. They at once saw me and halted, looking at me, and I at them. When I saw them making a move to shoot at us, I rested my arquebuse against my cheek and aimed directly at one of the three chiefs. With the same shot two of them fell to the ground, and one of their companions, who was wounded and afterward died. I put four balls into my arquebuse. When our men saw this shot so favorable for them, they began to make cries so loud that one could not have heard it thunder. Meanwhile the arrows did not fail to fly from both sides.
The quotation does not appear in Voyages of Samuel de Champlain translated by Charles Pomeroy Otis (Boston: Prince Society, 1878-1882).
25. This caption is from A First Course in American History by Jeannette Rector Hodgdon (Boston, D.C. Heath & Co., 1906), vol. 1, p. 173. A similar one is “The Defat of the Iroquois by Champlain and His Party on Lake Champlain” A Book of Discovery: The History of the World’s Exploration, from the Earliest Times to the Finding of the South Pole by M.B. Synge (London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, Ltd., 1912), p. 293. A more neutral caption is “Champlain and the Indians” from Pioneers on Land and Sea: Stories of the Eastern States and of Ocean Explorers by Charles A. McMurry (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1904).
26. Castañeda’s full comment was, “When they saw the first village, which was Cibola, such were the curses that some hurled at Friar Marcos that I pray God may protect him from them. It is a little, crowded village, looking as if it had been crumpled all up together.” From The Journey of Coronado, 1540-1542, from the City of Mexico… As Told by Himself and His Followers translated and edited by George Parker Winship (New York: A. S. Barnes & Company, 1904), p. 23. The photograph is in A Study of Pueblo Architecture in Tusayan and Cibola by Victor Mindeleff (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), Plate LXXIX.
27. See Dwiggins’ account book entries for 1925 in Folder 6, Box 81(1), 1974 W.A. Dwiggins Collection, Boston Public Library.
28. Reproduced in Travels in the Interior of North America During the Years 1832–34 by Maximilian, Prince of Wied-Neuwied (Coblenz: Hoelscher; Paris: Bougeard; London: Ackermann & Co., 1839–1842). A halftone photoengraving of Rollet’s aquatint engraving can be found in The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A in the Rocky Mountains and the Far West edited by Washington Irving (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1895), vol. 2, after p. 180. One also appears in “A Trip to the Reservation” by J.H. Danebury in [Boston] Home Journal vol. 60, no. 10 (March 19, 1904), p. 13.
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