Eighteen months on from our first descent into the Museum of Childhood’s basement vault and every box still tells a story. In one we opened lay two beautifully illustrated volumes from the early twentieth century. Several threads bound them together — pooled from the same body of legends and stories …
One of the authors whose well-thumbed books we frequently discover in the Museum’s long-untouched boxes is Juliana Horatia Ewing. Once a popular and celebrated writer of late Victorian children’s fiction, her achievements – as so often the case with women writers of – have been overlooked. Here, Lois marks Ewing’s importance in the …
Children’s literature has a long history of being ‘entertaining and instructing’. I’ve taken this week’s blog title from a specific chapbook: The Entertaining and Instructing History of Little Jack. This copy belongs to Glasgow University Library’s Special Collections, and I am very grateful for their permission to include some …
Every Thursday afternoon the SELCIE team descend the long winding stairs which lead down into the Museum of Childhood’s book vault, as if entering a series of secret chambers! Every box of unpacked books holds secrets – you never know what lies inside. So too does every book. Except sometimes when opening …
This special blog post has been written by our new artist-in-residence, Katie Forrester. Katie is a PhD research student of Illustration at Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland, UK. You can find her blog, ‘Katie’s Illustration’, here. Scotland’s Early Literature for Children Initiative (SELCIE) is an organisation which aims …
In celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8th, our blog this week is the first in a series on the unmarked contributions of early women writers to the history of Scottish children’s literature. Today it’s the turn of the prolific Jessie Margaret Edmonston Saxby (1842-1940) who transposed the Victorian …
Sometimes amazing wonders can be found in the most unexpected places. A few weeks ago the Museum of Childhood book collection revealed to us a treasure hidden within a tiny book in a box filled with other tiny books, within an even larger box initially thought to contain only magazines. …
The treasure that emerged from today’s investigations of the Museum of Childhood book collection was a small red book with gold writing tooled on its binding announcing that it contained Tales from Catland. While kittens and cats are currently the most popular posts on the internet and social media, this popularity …
Meet Helen Douglas Adam – the ‘infant poetess’ from Glasgow whose uncanny ballad poetry would find a home in the radical San Francisco artistic scene… ♦ ‘A little wee elf in coat of green / Dwelt in a tree so gray, / In the tiniest house that ever …
The great thing about our trips to the City Chambers for the Museum of Childhood is that we never know what we will find. Sometimes the most interesting things are not the books themselves, but the things we find inside them. And we don’t just mean the stories on the …
