Colouring Books

Before colour printing became common, most colour was applied to black and white illustrations in books by hand. Children's books with hand-coloured engravings did not appear until the early eighteen hundreds, rather later than in adult books for reasons of cost. To keep the prices of these hand-coloured books low child labour was often employed in a production-line method, each child brushing on a single colour in designated areas. The results were generally both crude and clumsy. More expensive publications might be done by young ladies, sometimes with most artistic and attractive results. By the 1840s chromolithography, a method of printing using colour brushed on stone, was increasingly used for producing children's books though the results were often oily and garish. At the same time the colour printer-engraver Edmund Evans was achieving delicate and handsome results using wood blocks on which he copied the designs of the best artists of the day -Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway and Randolph Caldecott. Before hand-coloured and colour printed books were available children occasionally supplied colour themselves, with enthusiasm if not always with care.

Early educators provided art instruction books with uncoloured outlines to be filled in as tonal exercises, and it required little imagination for publishers to see the possibility of advertising a book that would provide artistic instruction and amusement for children. Parents would be quick to see the advantage in having a child copy the colour work of influential artists, so the reproduction of coloured and uncoloured versions of the same illustration by Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway had the merit of being easy to reproduce and to sell. Colouring books with no colour examples or guidelines later became popular, culminating in recent times in the "magic colouring book" which required only the swish of a water-filled brush to activate colour impregnated in the page.

The plates and cover designs are taken from The baby’s bouquet, The baby’s opera, The baby’s own Aesop and Pan-pipes, which are advertised on the back cover. The first two outline pictures have been coloured by a child owner. Bookseller’s ticket of Neal’s Library, Paris, verso of front cover.

Foster, Vere. Ornamental lettering. Vere Foster’s Writing Copy-Books No. 10. London: Blackie & Son, [ca.1900] Pp. [24]. 17 x 21 cm.

Price Twopence, the tenth of Vere Foster’s practice copy-books includes thirty-three different styles of penmanship ranging from plain roman to decorative script.

Gift of Edna Morden.

Greenaway, Kate, I846-I90I. Kate Greenaway’s painting book with outlines from her various works for boys & girls to paint. London and New York, Frederick Warne and co. [ca. 1900]. Pp. 62. 23.8 x 17.8 cm.

First published by George Routledge in I884. The publisher’s advertisement on the back cover reads: "The pictures to paint in this book are taken from Under the window, Kate Greenaway’s birthday book, A day in a child’s life, Mother Goose. Boys and girls should copy the colours from the volumes." The inscription on the frontispiece is dated Xmas, 1901.