Snail Mail

             No one definitively knows who first coined the term “snail mail.” More than likely it wasn’t Hans Rey, but a letter written to his wife Margret in July 1971 caused me to wonder. At the time I was working at the de Grummond Collection. The curator, Dee Jones, had selected various artifacts from the Rey literary estate for digitization and the image of Hans’ “snail mail” letter was one of those chosen to be imbedded in the online finding aid.

            The text of Hans’ letter was mundane—a simple note to his wife about a list she needed. Worried that Margret would not receive the information she had requested in time, Hans wrote, “In case I don’t get around to writing you tomorrow, or the mail being even slower than usual, here’s the shopping list on a separate sheet.” To emphasize his pique at the slowness of the mail from rural New Hampshire to rural Maine where Margret was attending a pottery workshop, Hans drew a red, white, and blue snail dragging a U.S. mail bag behind its shell.

Letter from Hans Rey to Margret Rey, dated July 6, 1971
McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi

            Where did the term “snail mail” originate, I wondered? How far back did use of the term go? Certainly, Hans’ 1971 letter predated e-mail, or so I thought. I posed my question to a Usenet list-serv in December 2002. Almost immediately, a kind computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California responded. He referred me to the Random House Word of the Day for October 20, 2000, that referenced the term in The Hacker’s Dictionary (Steele, 1983). Yet, sadly, no mention of the term’s origin was given.

            I repeated my question to a friend, who happens to be an editor with an encyclopedic memory. He told me that the term may even go back to the invention of the telegraph. Evidently,  an 1840 article in the Philadelphia North American newspaper comparing the slowness of overland mail delivery to the new telegraph proclaimed, "The markets will no longer be dependent upon snail paced [sic] mails." Since then, a 1969 tongue-in-cheek piece titled “Post Office Considers Ways to Worsen Service,” written by The New York Times' famous humor columnist Russell Baker has been unearthed. “There is a long tradition at the Post Office which its planning department hates to break,” Baker wrote. “Traditionally every time the price of mailing a letter goes up a penny, the Post Office devises a new scheme for making service even worse than it was before…. With the last rise, when postage went to 6 cents, [the department] devised the intricate system known as ‘snail mail.’”  Perhaps Baker’s article had popularized the term and inspired Hans’ 1971 drawing.

            Curiously, that same year—1971—another Bostonian was also searching for a faster way to communicate with colleagues who didn’t return his phone calls. Ray Tomlinson, a computer scientist at BBN Technologies in Cambridge, wanted to send an electronic message from his computer to another computer using the Arpanet network, an early version of today’s Internet. Tomlinson’s problem was how to address the message so that it would be received by a specific person on a computer used by several people. As William F. Allman writes in Smithsonian, “Tomlinson’s eyes fell on @, poised above “P” on his Model 33 teletype…. Using his naming system, he sent himself an e-mail, which travelled from one teletype in his room, through Arpanet, and back to a different teletype machine [in the same room].”

            Tomlinson told NPR in 2009 that he can’t remember what he wrote in that first e-mail. “The first e-mail is completely forgettable, and therefore forgotten.” As for his choice of the @, a symbol which dates back to the 16th century, “The @ sign just made sense; it wasn’t commonly used in computing back then, so there wouldn’t be too much confusion. The symbol turns an e-mail address into a phrase. It means ‘user at host.’”

The originator of the term “snail mail" may be lost to history, but even those who used the term as a synonym for posted mail prior to the invention of electronic mail, could not have foreseen its ubiquity in the jargon of 21st century conversation. Tomlinson’s use of the @ symbol in e-mail created the pretext for the term “snail mail” to become synonymous with posted mail, but ironically, the symbol itself foreshadowed the decline of surface mail delivery. For as William Allman tells us, the @ is “called a ‘snail’ by Italians,” and more interestingly for fans of H. A. Rey's most famous character, George, a ‘monkey tail’ by the Dutch. How curious is that?

Elizabite: The Story of the Book - Part VI

McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi

           Harper and Row reissued H. A. Rey’s Elizabite in the fall of 1962. The copyright date on the book’s verso remained 1942. There was no mention of a second edition, nor that the book had been revised, yet a major editorial change had been made from the 1942 version. An examination of Rey’s original color separations for the 1942 book tells the story. For the new edition, Rey carefully cut out the head of Mary, the black maid, from the pages where she appeared in the 1942 book, and on each taped patch he painted a Caucasian woman’s face. Her striped stockings and black arms were also erased, painted over in peachy/white tones.

McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi

 

McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi

          Rey's decision to change the maid Mary's race in the 1962 revision is explained in a letter he wrote to Ursula Nordstrom in 1973. "Remember when we changed Mary, the maid from colored to white to avoid the opprobrium of racism?” he wrote. “Well the other day a bright Radcliff girl was looking at the book and I told her that story and she said,   ‘Now with women’s lib[eration], won’t you want to have a butler or a man-servant instead of a maid cleaning up?”
       Rey closed the letter with a drawing of a butler and a rhyme. “The butler Jeeves comes with a broom to tidy up the messy room.”

 “Elizabite: The Story of the Book” is based on “From Elizabite to Spotty: The Reys, Race and Consciousness Raising,” an essay published in the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 35, #4, Winter 2012.

Elizabite: The Story of the Book - Part V

 

          Call Me Charley (Harper, 1945), author Jesse Jackson’s first young adult novel, is dedicated to Hans and Margret Rey. As Leonard Marcus notes in Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom, Jackson had met the couple at a Bread Loaf writer’s conference in the early 1940s. Jackson’s work drew the praise of Wallace Stegner, who advised him to stop by Harper and Brothers on his way home and show his work to Ursula Nordstrom, editor of the juvenile department.          

           Jackson's initial efforts did not meet with approval, however. Upon hearing Nordstrom's doubts about Jackson's ability to produce a publishable book, the Reys became his mentors. Hans provided his studio for Jackson to use, while Margret coached him on writing. 

 

Hans, Jesse Jackson, Margret and Charcoal on 5th Avenue

Curious George Takes a Job

Houghton Mifflin, 1947



          No doubt Jackson told the couple about why he was writing the book and of his experience as a juvenile probation officer in 1936 when three young black boys, fourteen to sixteen years old “had been sentenced to life terms in the Ohio State Penitentiary for robbing a restaurant and killing the owner for five dollars.” As he interviewed the young men, Jackson learned that they had dropped out of school “because they were too embarrassed to tell their teachers they couldn’t read.” 
 

Harper & Brothers, 1945

            During the early months of 1945 Margret too was working on a book about a spotted bunny who also suffered discrimination for being different. Spotty was not the first book published by Margret with her own byline; Pretzel had been issued in 1944. It was, however, with the exception of Curious George Goes to the Hospital (Houghton Mifflin, 1966) the only book the Reys created with a purpose in mind. Hans spoke of this in a 1959 newspaper article when he reflected that Spotty’s “ordeals teach a subtle lesson in mutual tolerance.” In November 1947 Spotty was selected along with Jackson’s second book, Anchor Man, to be included in the 1948 Children’s Reading for Democracy List sponsored by the American Brotherhood of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith included Spotty in its bibliography of recommended books well into the 1950s.

“Elizabite: The Story of the Book” is based on “From Elizabite to Spotty: The Reys, Race and Consciousness Raising,” an essay published in the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 35, #4, Winter 2012.

           

Elizabite: The Story of the Book - Part IV



The Carnivorous Plant (~1939)
McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi

          Ursula Nordstrom wasted no time in signing a contract with Hans Rey for Elizabite: The Adventures of a Carnivorous Plant and by the first of August, Rey was busy preparing his manuscript.  One character in the book that had not been changed from the Portuguese version to the British version was the maid. In both of these versions she was depicted as a tall, attractive brunette wearing a blue dress and apron—a character who could have been easily mistaken for the botanist’s wife.

         The maid in the Harper edition was strikingly different, redrawn as a heavy-set, thick-lipped black servant wearing a blue bandana and buffoonish red and white striped hose. There are no clues as to why Rey made

Color separation for Elizabite (1942)
McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi

 this change. Perhaps he sought to redraw the maid to mirror the stereotyped images of African Americans commonly published in books, newspapers, and the mainstream magazines of the day—images that reflected the Jim Crow humor many Americans were accustomed to seeing.  Perhaps he had observed domestic servants in New York who dressed in a similar fashion.  In any case, both Rey and his editor Ursula Nordstrom felt the characterization to be appropriate.          

          Criteria for evaluating books "by and about the Negro suitable for children" had been developed as early as 1938 by Augusta Baker, a librarian at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. However, only a handful of books by mainstream trade publishers before 1940 met the standards outlined by Baker. 

Charlemae Hill Rollins
McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi

In 1941, Charlemae Hill Rollins, head of the children’s room at the South Side Branch of the Chicago Public Library, wrote We Build Together: A Reader’s Guide to Negro Life and Literature for Elementary and High School Use, published by the National Council of Teachers of English. Rollins maintained that the continued use of stereotyped images in children books was due to authors and editors who were “either unaware of the danger or writing to satisfy a popular demand for humorous books, which amuse white children, but present the Negro in a false light, thus ridiculing him.” This criticism could have certainly been made of Elizabite. However, it was received by reviewers and most librarians at the time as “sheer nonsense” (Kirkus Review) and “a bright spot of hilarity in a darkened world” (New York Times)

            Little more than two years later, Hans Rey would encounter a man who would raise his awareness of racist images and the hurt they can cause. Their friendship would ultimately change both their lives and impact the world of children’s literature as well.

            “Elizabite: The Story of the Book” is based on “From Elizabite to Spotty: The Reys, Race and Consciousness Raising,” an essay published in the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 35, #4, Winter 2012.

Elizabite: The Story of the Book - Part III

McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi

            In June 1941, Hans Rey was finishing the illustrations for Margaret Wise Brown’s The Polite Penguin, his first contract for Harper and Brothers. Anxious to retain Rey on her list, Ursula Nordstrom, director of the Department of Books for Boys and Girls at Harper, proposed the following in a letter dated July 16, 1941: “Now about the picture book to be written and illustrated by you. I am so enthusiastic over your work that we are eager to give you a contract even though the story for us is yet unwritten.”

            Rey responded the next day: “I am giving it some thought

McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi

and some of my night's sleep, and I hope I can put something before you soon." Significant changes were made to the 1938 version of The Carnivorous Plant to transform it into the manuscript Rey showed Nordstrom on July 29, 1941. First, text was added. The British Bobbies were redrawn as New York City policemen, and the main character was given a name, although readers had to wait until the very last page to discover it was "Elizabite," which was printed on the sign affixed to her zoo enclosure. 

            “Elizabite: The Story of the Book” is based on “From Elizabite to Spotty: The Reys, Race and Consciousness Raising,” an essay published in the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 35, #4, Winter 2012.

Elizabite: The Story of the Book - Part II

McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi

           After the Reys married in August 1935, Margret and Hans took a belated honeymoon trip to Europe in 1936. Their “honeymoon” lasted four years and during their stay in Paris, the couple began their publishing career. On a visit to friends in London, Hans met with editors at Chatto & Windus, who agreed to publish Zebrology, another of Rey’s wordless books. This success prompted him to revise a Planta Carnivora: Romance Botanico em 26 Capitulos, in order to make it more appealing for a British audience.  

McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi

            Using the same format of three pictures to a page, Rey redrew the book replacing the few Portuguese words with English. A professor, called to examine the strange plant, is given a proper English pinstripe coat, and the small brown dachshund is replaced by a black Scottish terrier. Lastly, Rey added British Bobbies to the story to serve as guards when the plant is escorted to the zoo.

            In spite of his best efforts, The Carnivorous Plant was never published. A rejection letter dated September 18, 1938, from I. M. Parsons stated that while the story had “great charm,” the timing for its publication was not convenient, given that Chatto & Windus was publishing two of Rey’s other works in the next twelve months. With that news the bound watercolor manuscripts were forgotten until a letter from Ursula Nordstrom, their editor at Harper & Brothers in New York, arrived at the Rey apartment in July 1941.

            “Elizabite: The Story of the Book” is based on “From Elizabite to Spotty: The Reys, Race and Consciousness Raising,” an essay published in the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 35, #4, Winter 2012.

Where's Charcoal?

 

Hans Rey with Charcoal, c. 1944
McCain Library & Archives
University of Southern Mississippi



            Most people associate the names Hans and Margret Rey with a curious little monkey named George. However, when Charcoal, a small black cocker spaniel, joined the family in 1942, “Charkie” became a regular feature in Margret and Hans Rey’s children’s books. Charcoal was also included on the couple’s annual New Year’s card. Click the dates below to see two of these cards posted on January 10, 2012 and March 9, 2012.  
            The Reys befriended an assortment of animals during the 42 years they were together—marmoset monkeys in Brazil, turtles in Paris, and a tamed chipmunk at their summer home in New Hampshire.

Margret and Charcoal in the park, c. 1944
McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi

            “Animals have always played an important part in our lives,” Hans is quoted as saying. Animals were important, both personally and professionally. “We live off the profits of ‘monkey business,’” he added wryly.

            Want to play “Where’s Charcoal?”  The next time you visit the children’s department in your local public library, check out The Complete Adventures of Curious George (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). Beginning with Curious George Takes a Job, count how many times you can “spy” Charcoal in the background. One hint: Curious George Learns the Alphabet doesn’t have any dogs pictured, but there are lots of other animals to see. How many different animals can you find?

The Park Book - Part Three

The Park Book by Charlotte Zolowtow,
illus. by H. A. Rey (Harper Brothers, 1944)

Did you notice Hans Rey sitting on the park bench by the fountain reading his paper in The Park Book – Part Two? Look for a bald-headed man in a brown suit.  There is another reason to look closely at this image. What else might you notice that would be out-of-the-ordinary in picture books published by the trade houses in 1944?  If you spotted the singular African American child at the fountain you would be on to something. 

Few illustrators in 1944 included African American children in their books; fewer still drew them without prejudice, in non-stereotypical fashion. Erick Berry and Ellis Credle come to mind as illustrators who represented African American children realistically, and not as “clowns or darky types” as Charlemae Hill Rollins noted in her book “We Build Together.”  As head of the children’s room at the South Side Branch of the Chicago Public Library, Rollins was concerned because most children’s books written in the 1940s featured “only the lower class and plantation Negro.” Too few, in her opinion, featured African Americans as the cultured professionals, educators, and artists she knew.

The Park Book by Charlotte Zolowtow,
illus. by H. A. Rey (Harper Brothers, 1944)

Making Rollins' point, Barbara Bader notes in "Negro Identification, Black Identity” (American Picture Books from Noah’s Ark to the Beast Within, Macmillan, 1976), that “If a single Negro child appeared in a picturebook—the little girl twice seen in The Park Book—it was cause for favorable comment” (p. 379).

The Park Book - Part Two

Perhaps the best known feature of Washington Square is its marble arch, modeled after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and erected in 1892 to honor our first president. However, if you were to ask the children of Greenwich Village which feature of the park they liked the best, most would probably say the fountain. The year 1852 marked the first fountain in the park, preceding the original wooden arch by 37 years. Today the fountain sits directly in front of the arch, in the middle of a plaza that is encircled by shade trees and benches. The scene looks very much much like it appears in The Park Book.

The Park Book by Charlotte Zolotow, illus. by Hans Rey
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944

Ironically, that was not how the park was configured in 1944, when Hans Rey sat making his sketches. Unlike today, Fifth Avenue dissected the park, curving around the fountain on its eastern side. An aerial photograph taken in 1947, four years after The Park Book was published, illustrates the way the park was configured. Traffic through the park stopped in 1964 when Fifth Avenue was closed at Waverley Place (Washington Square North). Later, in 1995, the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Washington Square Association voted to “shift the fountain into precise alignment with the arch as seen from Fifth Avenue.”

A 1995 New York Times article said the park’s redesign was needed to “level off the park’s quirky changes in elevation, replace a large plaza with lawn, and fix the fountain’s leaks.” That’s one explanation. I happen to think the members of the Landmark Preservation Commission and the Washington Square Association had read The Park Book as children and grew up picturing the park as Hans did in his imagination. Instead of drawing the park as it was in the 19^th century, perhaps Hans Rey was creating a plan for what it could become in the 21^st. What do you think? Visit the Washington Square Park blog to see aerial photographs of the park reconfigured according to Rey's design.

The Park Book - Part One

The Park Book by Charlotte Zolotow, illus. by H. A. Rey,
Harper & Brothers, 1944

The Park Book, published in 1944, was a collaboration between neighbors. Charlotte Zolotow and her husband Maurice lived just a few blocks from Hans and Margret Rey’s Washington Square South apartment at 15 Washington Place. At the time Zolotow was employed as Ursula Nordstrom’s editorial assistant in the Department of Books for Boys and Girls at Harper & Brothers.

42 Washington Sq. South is depicted by the blue marker on the left.
Charlotte Zolotow's apartment was located at 15 Washington Place.
The red marker notes Ursula Nordstrom's apartment at 44 W. 10th.

1945 New York City Directory

     One day Zolotow wrote a memo to her boss, proposing an idea for a book about the park, and suggested that, perhaps, they could get Margaret Wise Brown to write it. Nordstrom’s reaction was less than favorable. As Leonard Marcus writes in Dear Genius, the legendary editor was known to use a variety of means “to coax authors toward perfection” (xxviii). In this case, she used a dare. According to Zolotow’s account, “After what seemed to be great irritation, Ursula asked her to expand on the memo. ‘Just what,’ she asked Charlotte, slightly combatively, ‘do you think is so special about the park?’ Charlotte elaborated on the memo, in writing... and was totally unprepared for Ursula's sudden appearance at her desk. 'Congratulations,' said Ursula to Charlotte. 'You've just sold your first children's book.'"

            Nordstrom paired Zolotow’s prose with Hans Rey’s art, himself a park devotee. Using a four-color palette, Rey’s illustrations captured Zolotow’s “observations of a bustling Washington Square and the changing activities and moods of the park from early morning until late at night” (Something About the Author, Vol. 138, p. 233). Saturday Review of Literature described their collaboration as “A gay picture book with a friendly rhythmic text that tells of a day in a city park that looks very much like Washington Square.”

            Part of the action includes Rey sketching by the fountain, as seen on the end pages, and in the playground with a young admirer looking on. A more formal Rey, dressed in a brown suit, sits reading his afternoon paper by the fountain. Not to be forgotten are Charcoal and Margret. I’ll leave it to you to spy them. Hint: Look on the end pages.

Washington Square Park



© Ann Mulloy Ashmore 2012

      “The Village is New York to me,” Hans once told a reporter for The Villager newspaper in 1962.  If Greenwich Village was their neighborhood, Washington Square Park was their front yard. It was where they walked their black cocker spaniel, Charcoal, where Hans sat and read his morning papers, where the couple greeted friends walking to and from shops and restaurants. In less than a year after their arrival in the United States, the couple had settled into an apartment located at 42 Washington Square South. Their front window faced the park with a view of the stately Greek Revival homes along its northern boundary and the Washington Arch, erected in 1889 from a design by noted architect,

© Ann Mulloy Ashmore 2012

Stanford White. Land for the park had been acquired by the city in 1795. Originally used as a Potter's Field, or burial ground for the poor, it was converted into a parade ground in 1826. Subsequently, New Yorkers began to build townhouses along its perimeter. The first fountain appeared in 1852, and over the years various statues and monuments have been added. Today the park serves as a "quad" for New York University (NYU) whose buildings, (noted in blue in the image below) almost completely surround it on three sides. In 1949, when NYU claimed the southwestern corner of  Washington Square South for its new law school, the Reys were forced to relinquish their park side home and move a few blocks away to 82 Washington Place.

 



 

42 Washington Square South

McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi

1945 New Years Card



“We came to the U. S. A. with the idea that it was a progressive and liberal country,” Margret Rey recalled shortly after the couple became citizens in 1946.  In the six years they had called New York home, the couple published twenty children’s books. 

“We had prepared ourselves for a difficult start,” Hans added,  “but fate was kind—within a month four of the manuscripts I had brought along were accepted for publication.”          

The Reys chose New York for several reasons. First, Margret’s sister, Mary Waldstein Eichenberg, and her husband had lived on Long Island since the mid-1930s. Second, Hans knew the city. Prior to immigrating to Rio de Janeiro, he spent several months working in the New York office of his brother-in-laws’ import-export firm. Finally, New York was the epicenter for trade publishing, and the Reys were determined to make their mark.

Within months of their arrival, the couple had found an apartment on Washington Square, in Greenwich Village. Like many authors and artists before them, the aesthetics of The Village—its irregular streets, classical architecture, diverse cultural life—seeped into their souls. Hans featured their third floor walk-up on South Square in the couple’s 1945 New Year’s card, and in a small sketch depicting its interior.

McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi



Here they entertained family and friends, listened to music, argued over politics, chatted about movies and reviews in The New York Times. Ironically, their biggest success, the Curious George series, was with a Boston-based publishing house, Houghton Mifflin. Yet for nearly a quarter of a century, the Reys (and Curious George) roamed the streets of New York, rode its subways and buses, and called it home. George liked to ride on top of the bus. Don’t believe me? Re-read Curious George Takes a Job. You’ll see them all on 5th Avenue—George, riding the bus, Hans in a blue suit walking beside his friend and author, Jesse Jackson (Call Me Charley, 1945), and Margret with Charcoal, their black cocker spaniel, a little to the right greeting a four-legged friend.

Happy New Year!  1942

 by Ann Mulloy Ashmore

McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi
1942 New Year's Card

     “The Statue of Liberty greeted us through the morning mist,” Hans recalled. It was a cold, crisp October day in 1940 when the ship bringing the Reys to New York from Rio de Janeiro sailed past Lady Liberty. Fifty-four years earlier, on another foggy October day, President Grover Cleveland dedicated the statue, a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States, with these words: “We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home, nor shall her chosen altar be neglected. Willing votaries will constantly keep alive its fires and these shall gleam upon the shores of our sister Republic thence, and joined with answering rays a stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man's oppression, until Liberty enlightens the world.”

But in 1940, “our sister Republic” could only remember with longing the sweetness of liberty and freedom. Crushed beneath the boot heel of the Nazi war machine, the fires of Liberty’s torch no longer gleamed on the shores of occupied France, a fact Hans and Margret Rey knew only too well.  Since June of that year, they had been on the run. First, escaping on bicycles as the German army marched into Paris. Later, avoiding a narrow brush with authorities on the Spanish border on their way to Lisbon, and passage to Brazil. As Louise Borden has written in The Journey that Saved Curious George, ironically, it was the pictures of the loveable monkey that Hans carried in his knapsack that saved the day.

Mississippians, young and old, will soon be able to view Hans’ 1942 New Year’s greeting card when the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson hosts Curious George Saves the Day: The Art of Margret and H. A. Rey exhibit March 3 through July 22, 2012.  Until then,  visit your local library and read more about the Reys in “Curious About Them: Reliving the Magnificent  Margret and H. A. Rey” in the Winter 2010 issue of Children & Libraries. The llustrated, full-text article is provided through Mississippi’s MAGNOLIA  Academic Search Premier database.  



Holiday Wishes!
 by Ann Mulloy Ashmore

Ann Mulloy Ashmore 1999

         Christmas came early to the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection in 1999. At the beginning of the year boxes began arriving from Boston—boxes containing the literary estate of Margret and H. A. Rey. As staff unpacked and documented treasure after treasure, it was clear the Reys and Curious George had given the University of Southern Mississippi an unbelievable gift—the legacy of 42 years of creative collaboration. By fall semester it was time to share the Reys’ gift with the university community and the public at large.  “Curious George Comes to Hattiesburg: The Life and Work of H. A. and Margret Rey” opened September 1, 1999. The exhibit, designed and mounted by curator, Dee Jones, displayed more than 400 illustrations, manuscripts, photographs, diaries, letters, books, pottery, and needlepoint, as well as the original drawings for Curious George, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1941.

One could say that Curious George was quite the Santa in 1999 and as the holidays approached, Jones, an accomplished seamstress, decided the collection’s 6-foot tall stuffed Curious George needed a make-over. Previously owned by the public library in Clarksdale, Mississippi, George came to the collection wearing a pair of print overalls. After many years of children crawling into his lap for story time, the pants were a little grimy. “I thought it would be neat to have him dressed as Santa for our Holiday Book Fair that year,” Jones responded. “So I put my sewing skills to good use and whipped up his outfit.”  It took nearly five yards of red velvet and a size 4X tee shirt for a pattern, but thanks to Jones’ skill, George was dressed as Santa in time for the November event.  “The nice part was that after Christmas, we took off his hat and he was good for Valentine’s Day.”

After working 23 years at de Grummond, Jones moved to Louisiana in 2003. Today she is head of cataloging in the Department of Medical Library Science at LSUHealth in Shreveport. Still, she remembers her tenure at de Grummond with fondness. Like the day she and archives director Toby Graham had to carry George across the courtyard from the McCain Library to the Cook Library for an event, or the time the she asked him to “introduce” one of the librarians dressed in a Curious George costume handing out bananas to members of the audience at the first de Grummond Seminar funded by the Mississippi Endowment for the Humanities. “No one ever told me when I was in library school that I’d be carrying a giant monkey around,” Jones recalled the director’s remark. “At de Grummond, we always considered George things as “other duties as assigned.”

How Curious George Came to Live in Hattiesburg  

 by Ann Mulloy Ashmore



Lena Y. de Grummond

Photograph courtesy of
McCain Library and Archives
University of Southern Mississippi



       Whenever I give a presentation about Hans and Margret Rey and their children’s books, one of the first questions I’m asked is “Why did they leave their literary estate to a university in Mississippi? The answer lies in the personality and perseverance of Lena Y. de Grummond, professor of children’s literature in the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Southern Mississippi, and founder of the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection in 1966. 

       A children's author herself, de Grummond wanted to demonstrate to her students the steps required in publishing a children's book--from the first glimpse of an idea to the final published volume. To accomplish her goal, she wrote personal notes in longhand to each of the major authors and illustrators of the time asking them if they would like to contribute their manuscripts, illustrations and publishing production items, galleys, page proofs, color separations, etc., to the collection. “Sometimes I wrote 400 to 500 letters a week,” she recalled in a brochure detailing the history of the collection in 1972. “Some were surprised and wrote that they had never saved any of their materials….” Her reply: “Please mail your trash basket to us.” Hans Rey was one of many authors and illustrators who responded to Lena’s warm, charismatic Southern charm. In customary fashion Hans illustrated his reply with a drawing of George on his way to Hattiesburg, books and manuscripts in hand. To see the image, go the collection’s home page.

            Now internationally known as a premier children’s literature depository, the de Grummond Collection’s online contributor list reads like the index to Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults. Strengths include 18th, 19th and 20th century American and British children’s literature with more than 250 editions of fable books, including thirty pre-1750 imprints. Other highlights include hornbooks and early primers, woodblocks engraved by Edmund Evans for six of Randolph Caldecott’s picture books, 300 original watercolors and pencil sketches by Kate Greenaway, and an extensive collection of 20th century production materials from McLoughlin Brothers Publishers.