THE DENSLOW ARCHIVES MYSTERIES

by Michael Gessel

Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 59, no. 1 (Spring 2015), pgs. 26–29

Citations

Chicago 17th ed.:

Gessel, Michael. “The Denslow Archives Mysteries.” Baum Bugle 59, no. 1 (2015): 26–29.

MLA 9th ed.:

Gessel, Michael. “The Denslow Archives Mysteries.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 59, no. 1, 2015, pp. 26–29.

(Note: In print, this article was supplemented with photographs and illustrations that have not been reproduced here.)

A surprising amount of original art, sketches, printers’ proofs, personal records, and ephemera created by W. W. Denslow survives in the hands of collectors. This is probably because much of the material came from Denslow’s personal archive, which he took care to preserve during his life as he continually moved from place to place around the country. It seems that the mass of personal material he collected surfaced in at least four large accumulations. Neither he nor the early collectors of his works kept records that survive, so there is some speculation in piecing together the mystery of his archives.

When Denslow moved for the last time to New York in 1913 he had little money and little space in his apartment. However, he still held on to his personal memorabilia. In W. W. Denslow, Douglas G. Greene and Michael Patrick Hearn write that at the end of his life Denslow stored boxes of papers, including his personal scrapbooks, at the art studio where he worked.[1] He also rented a storage facility in New York.

In March 1916, a year after his death, an advertisement in The New York Evening Telegram announced a sale of the “RARE collection of W. W. Denslow, the famous artist,” including Denslow’s original pen-and-ink and watercolor sketches. One of the buyers was likely Henry Goldsmith, a New York collector who had assembled important collections of autographs, presidential memorabilia, Walt Whitman, and prints, drawings, and maps of New York City. Goldsmith was treasurer of David Aaron & Co., a lace manufacturer located just a few blocks from Denslow’s apartment and the Flatiron Building, the address for Denslow’s estate sale in the Telegram advertisement.

Goldsmith left no clue as to why he included Denslow material among the fabulous historical rarities that he collected, though he had a well-known interest in drawings related to New York. In April 1926, Goldsmith donated fifty-nine Denslow drawings from his collection to the New York Public Library, including thirty-seven pen-and-ink illustrations from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. (Of these, twenty-seven have been digitized and can be viewed on the library’s website.[2]) They include ten of the twenty-four color plates and many of the decorative chapter title pages and headings. These drawings—considerably larger than the published versions—are among his finest work.

One important non-Oz drawing from the Goldsmith collection is for the cover of Father Goose: His Book with Denslow’s original pencil design visible, giving Denslow a more important billing than the author, L. Frank Baum. There are six pencil or watercolor sketches for Denslow’s Mother Goose, including a pencil-and-watercolor sketch of the cover design created to indicate to the printers the colors to be used because the pen and ink cover illustration was not in color. Another drawing is a watercolor of a character dressed as a fried egg, a costume sketch for the proposed, but never produced, play based on the book Billy Bounce, which Denslow illustrated and coauthored with Dudley A. Bragdon.

The other drawings are a curious mix of published and unpublished work, including Denslow’s bookplate, a cartoon of Elbert Hubbard, a self-caricature published in The Inland Printer, a watercolor sketch for a menu for the Columbia Yacht Club, and pencil sketches. Goldsmith moved to the Los Angeles area where he likely made the acquaintance of Whitney T. Genns, a California antiquarian bookseller who acquired another part of Goldsmith’s Denslow collection. Genns split the material into two lots, selling the most important items to Bennett and Marshall, a major rare book firm in Los Angeles. He sold the second lot to Max Richter, owner of The Book Den, which was a general used-book store in Santa Barbara.*

* Genns got his start in bookselling in San Diego in 1938 but probably didn’t acquire the Denslow material until some time after he moved to Santa Barbara in the late 1950s. Genns’s business practice was to buy important collections and quickly resell them. Peter Hanff, who acquired the Denslow lot from The Book Den, later learned from Genns’s close friend, bookseller and printer Roger Levenson, that Genns probably acquired the Denslow material in 1963. Goldsmith died in 1948, so Genns might have bought the collection from Goldsmith’s widow who still lived in the Los Angeles area.

In early 1964, Bennett and Marshall sold its lot to C. Warren Hollister, a professor of medieval English history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The collection contained original color drawings for the covers of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and three original pen-and-ink drawings from the book, including the iconic title page. Like the original drawing for the cover of Father Goose, the original drawing for the title page of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz reveals an earlier Denslow design giving greater prominence to the illustrator. It also shows that an earlier choice of title was The Land of Oz. (See the cover of The Baum Bugle, autumn 1972.) Hollister described the collection in detail in his article, “An Unknown Baum-Denslow Collection,” published in the spring 1964 issue of The Baum Bugle and reprinted in the December 1964 issue of The American Book Collector.

Other items in the collection included Denslow’s personal diary for 1893, an account book for the years 1897–1904, a guest book, an original drawing for a poster advertising The Pearl and the Pumpkin, the drawing for the front cover of Denslow’s Humpty Dumpty and Other Stories, and four small watercolor paintings showing characters from the 1902 stage version of The Wizard of Oz.

Although the lot that Genns sold to The Book Den was less spectacular than the material sold to Bennett and Marshall, it provided insights into the printing history of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and how Denslow interacted with his printers. This collection contained a complete set of the twenty-four untrimmed color plates for the first edition of The Wizard. The collection also included two line-reduction proofs from The Wizard. These are proofs made from the pen-and-ink drawings reduced to page size prior to color separation by the photo-engraver. Other items included a printer’s proof of the front cover design of Denslow’s Mother Goose without lettering. There were also several printer’s proofs for pages from Father Goose: His Book with markings (probably by Denslow) to guide the printer in the color scheme and alterations for the printed image. The Wizard plates and several of these proofs were reproduced in Cyclone on the Prairies: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Arts & Crafts Publishing in Chicago, 1900, by Peter E. Hanff. Hanff had acquired the material from the Book Den in 1964 when he was a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The largest and most intriguing mass of original Denslow material ended up in the basement of the library of the University of Arizona, where it was discovered by Tucson bookseller Fred Ludwig who specialized in back issues of academic journals. Possibly, this was part of the original Goldsmith collection—but stripped of any material easily recognizable as connected with Baum or The Wizard and with few original drawings representing Denslow’s children’s book work. Another possibility is that it was material from Denslow’s estate sale that didn’t find a buyer and that miraculously escaped the scrap heap. This collection contained almost 160 original drawings, about eighty printers’ proofs for his children’s books, and Denslow’s personal scrapbook of about 130 printed illustrations that covered 1885 to 1895. Of the major caches of Denslow material, this was the largest and most eclectic, but of the least interest to collectors of Baum or Denslow’s children’s book illustration.

The most significant drawings came from a sketchbook from 1898, which included six preliminary pencil sketches for Father Goose: His Book. It is easy to imagine Denslow and Baum sitting in Baum’s Chicago home, Denslow with sketchbook in hand scribbling cartoons to match Baum’s verses as the two embarked on their first collaboration. The sketchbook also contained drawings of L. Frank Baum and Elbert Hubbard.

The collection included twenty-two pencil drawings from his student days between 1873 and 1875, the earliest known Denslow drawings. Another sketchbook contained twenty pencil drawings made between June and August 1898 when Denslow accompanied Charles Warren Stoddard in his journey through the Great Lakes region for his article that was published in the September 1899 issue of The Cosmopolitan. The archive contained six finished pen-and-ink drawings of characters from the theatrical version of The Pearl and the Pumpkin, probably costume designs. It also contained several pencil sketches of the characters in the play.

Denslow’s scrapbook contained a sampling of published works, including newspaper clippings, trade cards, magazine illustrations, blotters, calendars, brochures, letterhead, printers’ proofs for book illustrations, and menus. The scrapbook also contained different versions of Denslow’s own trade cards advertising his art services. The scrapbook stops in 1895, several years before Denslow began his children’s book work. This raises the question of whether Denslow ever assembled a scrapbook with his later, more important work that has since been lost.

The Ludwig archive contained a variety of pencil drawings, mostly from the 1890s, that are unidentified or captioned with short cryptic descriptions. Some of these are theatrical sketches, others are probably colleagues or friends, and others seem to be unusual looking individuals or scenes that Denslow encountered. There are also ten mostly unidentified, finished pen-and-ink drawings, some which were probably prepared for publication.

The engraving proofs are mostly for The Pearl and the Pumpkin and Denslow’s Mother Goose. The one Oz-related item in the archive is an engraving proof of the illustration on the cover of Denslow’s Scarecrow and the Tin-Man and Other Stories, for which the original drawing had been in the part of the Goldsmith collection that Hollister acquired. There are also several engraving proofs of the cover drawing for a pamphlet advertising the theatrical version of The Pearl and the Pumpkin with instructions to the printer in Denslow’s hand.

Ludwig offered the collection as a lot in 1976, but had no takers. In the early 1980s, he sold some of the material through New York bookseller Justin G. Schiller (who was the founder of The International Wizard of Oz Club); however, most of it remained unsold, and it was returned to Ludwig. (After Ludwig died, the remains of the collection were sold to the author of this article.)

There are other large caches of Denslow material that also might have been part of Denslow’s own collection at one time though there is no conclusive evidence. One of these is a set of eleven bound volumes of about sixty sketches, mostly of actors and actresses, made in Chicago in the 1880s and 1890s. These were assembled by Cleveland book and autograph collector Frank Jean Pool and donated to the Cleveland Public Library in 1925 or 1926—the same period when Goldsmith made his donation to the New York Public Library. By 1894, Pool’s theater collection included 45,000 playbills, prints, posters, autographs, souvenirs, and newspaper clippings. At various times, Pool was a director of the New York and East River Railroad Company, the Assistant Secretary and Registrar of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and special agent of the Bureau of Corporations, the predecessor to the Federal Trade Commission during investigations of the Standard Oil Company. (The Pool collection was not examined for this article.) There is no record of when and how Pool acquired this collection.

Jack Snow, author of two books in the Oz series and a major collector of Baum and Denslow, said he owned about two hundred original Denslow drawings, which he acquired in the 1940s. He said in a letter[3] that these “came from a loft in which much of his material was stored.” Among the drawings that Snow owned was a complete set of drawings for Billy Bounce, Scarecrow and Tin-Man comic pages, and illustrations for the toy books Denslow published in 1903 and 1904. About 1950, Snow sold some of the drawings to Jack Tannen of the bookseller Biblo and Tannen. (In an interview in the 1980s, Tannen said he bought “all he could carry.”) Schiller acquired the Billy Bounce drawings, which were later sold at auction. The other drawings were dispersed to other collections, with the largest group now owned by the San Francisco Public Library. It is not known how these drawings ended up in the loft that Snow mentioned.

 Oddly, other Denslow drawings have also turned up in batches, including a near complete set of drawings for Denslow’s Night Before Christmas, many of the drawings for The Pearl and the Pumpkin, and drawings for Father Goose: His Book. In 1948, 127 pen-and-ink drawings from Baum’s Dot and Tot in Merryland were given to the Chicago Historical Society. These came from the collection of Chicago industrialist Joseph Turner Ryerson. Solton and Julia Engel gave Columbia University a collection of twenty-eight Denslow drawings, mostly pen and ink, including twenty-five original drawings for Father Goose. Whether any of these were once part of the Goldsmith collection, purchased from Denslow’s estate sale, came from the publisher, or obtained from Denslow during his life remains a mystery.

The author acknowledges and thanks Atticus Gannaway, Michael Patrick Hearn, and Peter E. Hanff for their assistance with this article.

[1] Douglas G. Greene and Michael Patrick Hearn, W. W. Denslow (Mt Pleasant, MI: Clarke Historical Library/Central Michigan University, 1976), 163, 165.

[2] http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/pen-and-ink-drawings-for-the-wizard-of-oz-by-frank-l-baum#/

[3] Jack Snow in letter to Edward Wagenknecht, February 14, 1947.

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