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2 Specials for March
"TIP-TO-TIP"
A TUDOR COTTAGE SHAWL KIT
Make your own "Tudor " shawl. The special is for the grey kit only.
Our order #21827
March price $30.00
regularly sold for $45.00
The Golden Key DVD
Tasha Tudor's dolls' wedding.
Our order #25600
March Price 20.00
regularly, $29.95
*When ordering mention "March newsletter" in the special instructions block on line or when you phone in your order.
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Reproduced from Thistly B, Oxford University Press, 1949. Page [17], Godmummy with Tom Tom and Efner
and Thistly's new wife.
Reproduced from Amanda and the Bear, Oxford University Press, 1951. Page [17], One night her brother had two
visitors and Adam was smuggled into their room after they had gone to
sleep.
Reproduced from Edgar Allan Crow, Oxford University Press, 1953.
Page [11], Crow then became the youngest member of a large family of
children, beagles, cats, canaries, and an elderly goldfish.
Reproduced from
Biggity Bantam, Ariel Books, 1954.
Page [17], The McCready family at their barn.
SPECIAL REQUEST
Now we're going to ask for your assistance. As you know Tasha Tudor appeared regularly at libraries, book fairs, book shops, department stores and other places throughout her long career. She generally did a 45-minute performance recounting life stories as she sketched on a large pad of newsprint. The sketches were often left with the audience, and Tudor signed numerous books at each appearance.
No complete list exists of these many appearances. We've compiled a list as a result of our research, but we know it is incomplete. Can you help us by supplying information about a Tudor presentation you know about. We'd like to be quite specific: place, occasion, sponsoring agent, times (Did she do more than one "show" on this day?). We're not sure what we'll do with the information, but we know there should be such a list for the record. And to our knowledge, Tasha kept no such diary herself.
We'd be happy to share your reminiscences with other collectors via our Newsletter. Elaine Hollobaugh used to do this through her L.E.T.T.E.R. We'll need your permission, of course, in order to reprint your stories with our readers.
Thank you.
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photo by Richard Brown
IT'S A SNOW DAY IN NEW HAMPSHIRE ! ! !
Perhaps you followed Monday's news and heard of
our latest snow, about 10 inches at Cellar Door Books. We moved snow in the morning and then had to
do it all over again before dark.
We remember
that under the three feet of snow covering our gardens are many bulbs waiting
for their proper time. It's amazing to
think that in 8 more weeks there will be a color other than white when
daffodils, tulips and grape hyacinths all Spring forth.
Thinking of those fruitful days ahead, this
month we're going to start a short discussion of books about Tom and Tasha
McCready's farm in Webster, NH. It was the inspiration for a fruitful series of books
60 years ago.
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THE
WEBSTER FARM BOOKS
Biggety Bantam. endpapers, front and back, the view of the McCready home, Webster, NH, from the southwest.
Among other books of the 1950s Tasha Tudor
illustrated seven books delineating life at the McCready farm in Webster, NH. An eighth title was of the genre, though not of
the family's farm. Tasha wrote three new books
of her own: Thistly B, Amanda and the Bear and Edgar Allan Crow. Five titles by Thomas L. McCready, Jr.,
followed: Adventures of a Beagle, Biggity Bantam,
Increase Rabbit, Mr. Stubbs and Pekin
White. These books introduced a personal
side of Tudor's family life to the world.
All eight books were illustrated by Tasha Tudor. Bethany says the paintings for
her father's books were not a task her mother enjoyed. They were tedious and unimaginative work. They required Tasha to draw mid-20th
century costumes, certainly not her forte.
And for Adventures..., she had
to draw a Ford car! Contemporary scenes
and current events were beyond her comfort zone.
Nonetheless, all of the books are
illustrative of the family's life as their children were growing into their
teen years. The landscapes show how the
farm looked 50 years ago. The faces and
bodies are the McCready family - and sometimes other relatives and friends. The typography and lay-out of the McCready books
will look very familiar to people who learned to read with Dick and Jane and
Baby Sally. There is a strong
resemblance to the series of 1950 primers written by Dr. William S. Gray indicating that the publisher Ariel saw these as first readers for children.
Thistly B (Oxford, 1949) was the first of
the set. It was an imaginative retelling
of real events concerning two canaries that raise a family in a famous doll
house. The canaries were of the
McCready household, and the doll house was part of what people came to see in
the Webster house. This book is also
important to Tudor bibliography because it includes Nell Dorr. Nell Dorr was Tudor's long-time friend from Connecticut and later a New Hampshire neighbor. But most importantly, she was Bethany's godmother. Page [14]:
One day Efner and Tom Tom and
Thistly B were given a great surprise.
Godmummy came to see them, and being a very magic godmother, she never
came without something exciting in her green carpetbag. This time she had the most exciting present
ever... On page [17] Tudor painted two
children and her friend opening the exciting present beside the doll
house. Sethany Ann and Nicey Melinda, Tudor's
dolls, appear later in the book. They
are sharing tea with the children, and canaries, and are using the proper Canton ware.
Efner was a McCready family name. Tasha and Tom's daughter Efner was only a
few months old when this book was published.
But her mother already anticipates her as a girl of four in the book's
illustrations. Thistly B was reprinted a number of times and mostly in a mint green
linen over boards. One printing was
bound in maroon paper. In 1954 Nell Dorr
published Mother and Child, a photo
album with pictures of her family and of the McCreadys.
This book has the famous photograph of Tasha nursing Bethany which was in the
1954 exhibit The Family of Man.
Amanda and
the Bear
(Oxford, 1951) has a plot
involving a family who adopts a bear cub, lets it roam in their house, and must
deal with the ensuing escapades. An
older woman remembering her own childhood told the story to Tasha. Because Tasha had not lived the events, she
could imagine the Edwardian settings and paint them as she saw them in her
mind's eye. Tasha dedicated the book to
the lady's three grandchildren who were family friends from St. Paul's School in Concord, NH. Most copies of this book were bound in blue
paper over boards embossed with a weave pattern. The earliest copies distributed and most
difficult to locate were cased in light blue linen. Both bindings carried a printed title label
pasted onto the front cover.
Edgar Allan
Crow (Oxford, 1953) brings us into the
McCready farm activities for the first time. The
story begins with a crime: baby Edgar is kidnapped from his nest in a pine tree
by a "very tall boy" - Seth McCready.
There are portraits of the four McCready children and their beagles and
the many misadventures a pet crow brings to the household. Bethany has always been a bird
woman; her mother dedicated Edgar Allan Crow to "Bethany and the Lovely Fowl." We've seen the book only in a dark blue paper
with a paste-on label on the front cover.
Tasha's husband became an author for the first
time with his book Biggity Bantam
(Ariel, 1954). The book was published February
23, 1954,
and is dedicated by McCready "To My Mother and Father on Their Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary." Perhaps this was a way he could present his parents with a gift of his own making. Details of the story are true to life. A banty rooster is shipped from Redding, CT, to Webster, NH, because its owners
haven't the patience to deal with him. In
his story McCready changed his family's name to Warner - which happens to be the
next town west from Webster. Tudor did a
pencil drawing action portrait of her family entering their barn, and a watercolor
view of the farmstead from the south pasture.
The details of the latter endpaper illustration include the greenhouse and
the large rock in the pasture. Tasha added
the greenhouse to the red farmhouse in the family's earliest renovations. The pasture rock appears in several of her
other book illustrations and is on the puzzle "I Shot an Arrow into the Air." Trade editions of the book were bound in yellow
linen with an embossed title and sketch of Biggity. Library bindings were in red buckram with an
image of a crowing Biggity painted on the front. There is also a Prebound binding in a finer
red linen from Sapsis, Carmel, CA. This binding reproduced the dust jacket
illustration on the front cover in yellow and black inks.
To
be Continued...
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Thanks for Coming !!
It is indeed our pleasure to meet so many of you who stop by
to visit our shop. Cellar Door Books is by appointment only. We always welcome visitors but be sure to call in advance to set an appointment. That ensures that we'll be "on the job" when you arrive. We'll give you lots of reasons to take happy memories home to California, or South Carolina, or Michigan, or any other place in the world you may live.
Best Spring Greetings to you and your families from all of us at Cellar Door Books.
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We hope you will enjoy hearing future news and upcoming events.
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John and Jill Hare
61 Borough Road
Concord, NH 03303-1833
Toll free: (800) 818-8419
Entire contents © 2008 Cellar Door Books
 Visiting New England? You're invited to stop by Cellar Door Books by appointment. We are an hour and a half east of Marlboro VT, and an hour and a half north of Boston.
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