Animals Are Us: Anthropomorphism in Children’s Literature; Celebrating the Peter J. Solomon Collection

finance, two areas in which I have spent considerable time.
Limericks attracted me, so Edward Lear became an anchor of
the collection. In the exhibit, you will find Lear’s manuscript
for a pictorial alphabet, presented to the son of Poet Laureate
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (cat. no. 28). The collection includes a
number of other Lear items, including Arthur A. Houghton
Jr.’s own two-volume set of the first printing of Lear’s seventythree
limericks.
Of course, Alice is at the confluence of both children’s
literature and nonsense. As I became more adventuresome,
I acquired a copy of the virtually unobtainable 1865
“suppressed” Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (cat. no. 49d)
and a first edition of Through the Looking Glass with thirtyeight
bound-in original drawings by John Tenniel, as well as a
number of other books, letters, and drawings by Carroll and
Tenniel. The exhibit includes Carroll’s nine ink drawings—the
copies of Tenniel’s illustrations he created for Alice Liddell
so she could see them prior to the book’s publication. I even
bought the pocket watch owned by Oxford don Charles
Dodgson (cat. no. 49a). Fifth, Josh Solomon (Class of 1990),
our son, has always favored Oz stories, so we collected most of
the Oz titles, as well as several illustrated manuscripts created
by L. Frank Baum’s successors, Ruth Plumly Thompson and
John Neill. L. Frank Baum’s Mother Goose in Prose is displayed
in the exhibit (cat. no. 20).
More recently, we discovered the genius of Maurice
Sendak, whose poster drawing for the nonprofit group Reading
Is Fun-damental is on display (cat. no. 60). We have since
broadened our Sendak collection and believe that he, as well as
Potter, Caldecott, and others, deserve to be recognized as fine
artists and should not be relegated to the category of illustrators.
Peter J. Solomon presenting a copy of the 1865 “suppressed” Alice
to Thomas Hyry and Sarah Thomas for Houghton.
My mother would say that the process of buying an
item adds to its enjoyment. This is true, but equally true are
our memories of the material that has eluded us. The most
unfortunate was my short-lived acquisition of one of the few
Hans Christian Andersen picture book manuscripts still in
private hands. Having purchased it over the telephone at a
Danish auction, the Hans Christian Andersen Birthplace
Museum in Odense exercised its right to refuse an export
license despite our promise to gift it to Houghton. But such is
life in the auction arena.
Photograph: Harvard Library
4