Part 2 Journey through the Rare Books Room

Here's Part 2 of the visual tour through the Baldwin!  If you missed part 1 here's the link: http://alice-peregrinations.blogspot.com/2012/12/part-1-of-journey-through-rare-books.html

One of the treasures we found was this beautiful edition of Cinderella from the 1880s, illustrated by Eduard De Beaumont (who I want to learn more about now, because it was lovely!)  There were two copies, one which was a finished book and the other which contained sketches for the same book; it was awesome to see the process of transformation from manuscript to published work!  First here are the sketches and then the final book:

If you follow Brain Pickings, you may have seen Maria's post on Salvador Dali and his illustrated Alice in Wonderland...well here's one of the few original copies, it was AWESOME!

Hope you enjoyed the tour!!

Part 1 of a Journey through the Rare Books Room

Merry Christmas to all of you!  Hope your Holiday season has been off to a wonderful start!  As a special gift, I'm posting Part 1 of my visual journey through a Rare Books Library of Children's books!!  Enjoy:

Earlier this past semester, I had a chance to delve into the Baldwin Library for my classes.  The Baldwin is a library of historical children's literature, so pretty much an awesome rare books collections filled with children's books, old and new!  So I wanted to post a here a sort of visual tour, not a exhaustive one, but just some of the treasures I saw that day during our class time there.  Hope you enjoy (There are even a few videos I took, one with one of the original pop up books, look for them below!)!

So, this library has more than 130,000 books and periodicals in it's collection, so we got a sampling of some of the best and most interesting pieces:

A tiny "thumbnail" Bible:

A really old and AMAZING pop up book!!:

Peter Pan Portfolio of Arthur Rackham's illustrations!

Thought I'd include this video as well, to get a sense of the texture of working with this portfolio:

More from the collection:

I had never seen these illustrations for James and the Giant Peach, but I just fell in love with them:

Really old Red Riding Hood, I wish I could remember the dates!

This book was a collection of tons of illustrations from Randolph Caldecott, and there were just some of the most beautiful illustrations in here, every time I flipped to a random page I'd just find another wonderful image!