About the Collection
Books made especially for children have likely been accumulating at Oberlin College since its inception, but especially since 1894 when the Kindergarten-Primary Training School began, and after 1908 when the college's Carnegie Library opened with a very early dedicated Children's Library. Discussions with faculty on how to adapt this for use with book history, the sociology of reading, folklore studies, and children's literature have been ongoing since the early 2000s.
Illustration from "Told in the Twilight" by F.E. Weatherly, illustration by Mary Ellen Edwards [1880s]
Scope and Contents:
The physical books for children in Oberlin College Libraries Main Special Collections range in date from the 18th to the 20th centuries, emphasis on the 19th century, and display a variety of formats, printing styles, and topics, including a small amount of reference literature. There is no claim (or ambition) regarding efforts to collect comprehensively in any single area, nor to dissect the anatomy of the entire genre. Rather, this collection is a synthetic sampling of both gift and legacy books, with an emphasis on images, new readers, and the older content that is not widely accessible. The collection is meant to serve ongoing local student interests, particularly in the Book Studies Minor. While we have included books written in languages other than English and published in various locations around the world, the collection consists primarily of Anglo-American children’s books, many in a "much loved" condition.
In building the collection, it was decided that the dawn of a new understanding of childhood, and seeing this manifested materially in the physical form of the text was our starting point. Many older books do claim to be concerned with a young audience, yet they do not yet depart from the language, format and textual density of adult books. They could not have suited young readers with quite different intellectual capacities. Not all of our "juvenile literature" therefore, is systematically gathered in our Children's Collection because that was neither our focus, nor have we the capacity to gather everything. It is well known that much remains ignored or undiscovered, particularly in the schoolbook genre where our holdings spiral out in multiple directions and well into the 20th century. Other children's books are already a part of another existing Special Collection such as Anti-slavery or Temperance (where these books serve a different purpose) and they were left there. It is also worth noting that a great deal more early children's books can be accessed online by those with College affiliation.
Our hope is that by grouping and placing the books within a contextual discourse, we can generate more interest in the shared characteristics, and how these books reflect on the mentality of those (primarily in the 19th century) who produced and consumed them. To signify potential curricular interests we have concentrated books into select "series" (borrowing an archival method) which are primarily defined by the book's perceived functional intention. Books within series may be further foldered and boxed with respect to an author, printer/publisher, or illustrator, depending on what lends itself best to our local needs. Strict adherence to genre or chronology is neither strictly possible, nor helpful with such a broad mandate, due to long periods of overlapping book types, and the continued reprinting and/or republishing of popular works. Neither is it possible for books to always belong exclusively to one category or the other; so we have used our judgement to signal the principle intention and assign the book accordingly.
The Children's Collection has been divided into the following series:
- Series 1. Don't Be Naughty: Etiquette and Morality
- Series 2. Belief and Piety: Catechetical Books
- Series 3. Enlightened Children: Influence of Locke and Newbery
- Series 4. Once Upon a Time: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Myths, and Complete Nonsense
- Series 5a. Books for Schooling: Early Spellers, Readers, Histories, and Geographies
- Series 5b. Curious Children: Books of Knowledge
- Series 6. Polite Domesticity: Victorian Colored Picture Books
- Series 7. Iconic Artists: The “Golden Age” of Illustrated Books
- Series 8. "Merch": Cheap Mass Market Publishing
- Series 9. Controversial Books: Ideology and Otherness
Gift inscription inside "Our Village Life" [1884]