Dolls and toys displayed with a poster

A short history of the toy book: Walter Crane and the chromolithograph revolution

Liverpool, 15 August 1845. That is the birthdate printed in most reference books for Walter Crane, though the detail that matters more for picture-book history is a different date entirely: 1864, the year Crane began to illustrate an admirable series of sixpenny toy books of nursery rhymes for Edmund Evans, the colour printer. What followed over the next two decades quietly invented the picture book as we still understand it.

What a toy book actually was

The name sounds fanciful, and the origin is a little odd. The term toy book originated in the 18th century when John Newbery began printing gift books, such as A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), with small toys such as pincushions for girls included in the packaging. The books themselves were not toys. They were slim, often paperbound, and cheap. The earliest toy books were typically paperbound, with six illustrated pages and sold for sixpence; larger and more elaborate editions became popular later in the century.

Colour, at first, was a hand-applied afterthought. Early toy books, particularly in the 1840s, were hand-coloured often by children apprentices in print-shops, until mechanical colour printing became more prevalent, and toward the end of the century children's books became quite elaborate. By the 1850s, the London house Dean and Son had moved to printing colour using chromolithography, a process that laid pigment from multiple lithographic stones in overlapping passes. The primary publishers of toy books in London were Dean and Son, using popularly coloured chromolithographs for the illustrations. By the end of the 1850s they published more than 200 titles, each book of equal size, each costing sixpence. Volume was there. Artistry was not.

In the mid-19th century picture books began to be made for children, with illustrations dominating the text rather than supplementing the text. That shift, from illustrated text to pictured story, is the hinge on which everything turns. The concept of a picture book for children, with the art dominating the text rather than illustrations supplementing the text, was an invention of the mid-19th century. It needed both an artist willing to take the form seriously and a printer capable of doing the art justice. In 1863 those two requirements walked into the same room.

Edmund Evans, the man behind the blocks

Edmund Evans (23 February 1826 to 21 August 1905) was an English wood-engraver and colour printer during the Victorian era. He specialised in full-colour printing, a technique which, in part because of his work, became popular in the mid-19th century. His process was not chromolithography in the strict sense, the lithographic-stone method that Dean and Son favoured, but something harder to pull off: chromoxylography, colour printing from engraved wooden blocks. Evans used a woodblock printing technique known as chromoxylography, which was used primarily for inexpensive serialised books and children's books requiring few colours, so as to maximise profits. However, chromoxylography allowed a variety of hues and tones to be produced by mixing colours. The process was complicated and required intricate engraving to achieve the best results. Evans possessed a meticulous eye for detail and used a hand-press and as many as a dozen colour blocks for a single image.

The workflow between Evans and Crane is worth pausing on, because it explains how such fine colour ended up on sixpenny paper. The picture was first rendered in black and white only, so that Crane could apply colour. The artist's palette was fairly extensive, so when Evans received the painted drawing, he would make a note of the parts of the illustration which were green, for example, then fashion a woodblock to print green only. Such selected areas would be left in relief when Evans chiselled the rest away. He repeated the process for each colour until he had up to twelve blocks ready for printing. He could achieve even more colours by overlaying one on another. Finally, when all the colours were laid down, he used the original block to print the black outline on top. Twelve blocks for a sixpenny children's book. Evans's cost-cutting instinct and his craftsman's perfectionism were in permanent tension, and the tension produced something remarkable.

Evans reacted against crudely coloured children's book illustrations, which he believed could be beautiful and inexpensive if the print run was large enough to maintain the costs. The economics of that bet required enormous scale. Large print runs, often exceeding 10,000 for first printings, were necessary. Routledge asserted that each title required sales of 50,000 to be profitable. Selling 50,000 copies of a children's book in the 1860s demanded a market that had not quite existed before. Evans helped create it.

Crane arrives, with opinions

Walter Crane was born on August 15, 1845 in Liverpool, England. His father, Thomas Crane, was a portrait painter who encouraged Walter to pursue his interest in art. At a young age, Walter would decorate books with watercolours for amusement, and Thomas, seeing potential in his son, introduced him to William James Linton, the head of one of the best printing and engraving companies in England. Crane's three-year apprenticeship with Linton, from 1859 to 1862, gave him an unusually complete understanding of the printmaking process. As a wood-engraver he had abundant opportunity for the minute study of the contemporary artists whose work passed through his hands, of Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais, as well as Sir John Tenniel, the illustrator of Alice in Wonderland, and Frederick Sandys.

Evans first employed Crane to design book covers for his "yellow back" novels when he was only eighteen years old. Though Crane quickly adapted to the colouring work, it was his difficulty with rendering everyday scenes that prompted Evans to move him from yellow backs to children's books, where he could apply his imagination to illustrate children's nursery rhymes and fairy tales in short, inexpensive picture books referred to as toy books for Routledge Publishing. So Crane's weakness for the mundane became the genre's good fortune.

Crane was not sentimental about the early work. He called the existing nursery books, in his own words, products of "careless" illustration and "reckless" colour, and set out to replace the mediocrity with what he described as "good art in the nursery," available, in the case of the original toy books, for either sixpence or a shilling. Crane illustrated thirty-seven toy books over the next ten years, earning him the title "academician of the nursery," and effectively pigeon-holing his artistic style as that of a children's book illustrator. He found the label irritating for the rest of his life. It was also, from the point of view of picture-book history, entirely accurate.

Japan, Greece, and The Frog Prince

The early sixpenny books, printed in three or four colours, were good. The books Crane began producing around 1874 were something else. By 1874 Crane's pictures had become more elaborate and Evans was forced to revise his thinking about colour printing. The first of Crane's new-look toy books was The Frog Prince, characterised by areas of flat, intense colour outlined in black, a style that reflected Crane's homage to Japanese woodblock printing, known as ukiyo-e, and the restrained classicism of Greek art.

Probably the most important technical development in his art derived from his study of Japanese colour prints, whose methods he used in a series of toy books (1869 to 1875), thereby starting a new fashion. He was allowed more freedom in a series beginning with The Frog Prince (1874), which showed markedly the influence of Japanese art, and of a long visit to Italy following on his marriage in 1871. His work was characterised by sharp outlines and flat tints. This is the aesthetic Crane brought to the nursery: the clean contour and unmodulated colour of a Hiroshige print, applied to Grimm. It looks inevitable in retrospect. At the time it was genuinely strange.

His illustrations incorporated carefully rendered textiles, clothing, furniture designs, and patterns inspired by Japanese art and printmaking. Crane himself acknowledged that he used these picture books as a vehicle for his other ideas about furniture and decoration. A toy book, in Crane's hands, was also a decorating manual for the progressive Victorian nursery. The children were getting the pictures; the parents were getting an Arts and Crafts manifesto at sixpence a copy.

The market that built the picture book

When the English publishing house Routledge and Warne contracted with printer Edmund Evans in 1865 to provide toy books for a growing market, the toy books he printed "revolutionised the field of children's books." Children's illustrated books became fashionable during the Victorian period with an emphasis on the artistic value of the work at a period when the middle and upper classes had funds to spend on books for their offspring. Brightly coloured and well-designed toy books in particular became extremely popular.

The more ambitious titles commanded real money. The more elaborate toy books, such as Walter Crane's The Baby's Opera, brought higher prices, selling for as much as five shillings. Five shillings was, according to Sheldrake Press, the equivalent of roughly £25 today. That is a premium hardcover, not a cheap pamphlet. When the market for toy books exploded, Evans began publishing them himself, choosing and commissioning the artists to design the illustrations. He was, in effect, the first modern art-director of children's picture books, shaping not only the printing but the choice of illustrators.

To illustrate the books he hired and collaborated with Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, known as the triumvirate of children's toy book illustrators. According to Judith Saltman of the University of British Columbia, Evans' work as a printer of children's picture-books is particularly notable; she believes he printed the "most memorable body of illustrated books for children" in the Victorian era, and the three illustrators, whose works he printed, can be regarded as the "founders of the picture-book tradition in English and American children's books."

Crane came first. For three decades Evans produced multiple volumes each year, first illustrated by Crane, and later by Caldecott and Greenaway. The critical response caught up eventually. Children's literature scholar Anne Lundin explains that at the end of the 19th century, as toy books became more elaborate, contemporary reviewers said of them, "Art for the nursery has become Art indeed," in contrast to books of a few decades earlier, described as "plain and clumsy to ugliness in their exterior."

What carried forward

Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway are the best known illustrators of late-Victorian toy books, and "did much to develop the sense, the shape, and the look of the modern picture book." That phrase, the sense, the shape, and the look, is doing a lot of work. It covers the page-turn as a unit of drama, the relationship between image and sparse text, the use of full-bleed colour as emotional register. All of it is present in the toy books.

Crane's designs were based on his observations of young children; he believed that good illustrations would stimulate children's interest in reading books and help them to learn. He put it more precisely in his own writing. Children, he wrote, prefer well-defined forms and bright, frank colour. "Children, like the ancient Egyptians, appear to see most things in profile, and like definite statements in design. They prefer well-defined forms and bright, frank colour. They don't want to bother about three dimensions. They can accept symbolic representations. They themselves employ drawing as a kind of picture-writing, and eagerly follow a picture story." That is a workable theory of picture-book illustration. It was written in the 1890s. It is still being rediscovered.

Crane's populist approach to art ensured that he exerted a great deal of influence on illustration and book design at the end of the 19th century, arguably more than William Morris. Morris gets the museum shows; Crane gets the picture books. The picture books reached more people.

At Albion Press, we spend a lot of time thinking about colour as a structural element: what a hue does to a page before any text arrives, what a flat silhouette tells a child faster than a paragraph can. Crane and Evans worked that problem out on sixpenny paper in the 1860s. The specific answers belong to their era. The questions are still ours.

Sources

Hero image: photo by Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa on Unsplash.

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