Picture Geography for Little Children. Part One: Asia.
Bryher. A Picture Geography for Little Children. Part One: Asia. With illustrations by M.D. Cole. London: Jonathan Cape, (1925).
Horizontal 8vo.; endpapers faintly offset; pages lightly browned; grey paper-covered boards; browned; cornflower blue cloth spine; stamped in black; light edgewear. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of Bryher’s fifth book, with which she had intended to inaugurate a series, though no further volumes appeared. A thematic departure from Bryher’s previously published work, it presents her childhood experiences traveling with her family through the Middle East and Egypt.
In twenty chapters, each accompanied by a black ink drawing brightly accented in red and yellow at the beginning of each, she tells the story of Asia through its animals. She writes at the outset: “Asia is a big continent. It is hard sometimes to remember names, but it is always easy to remember animals. So it will not be difficult to learn what the different countries of Asia are called, if you remember the animals that come from them” (p. 8). The drawings of fauna specific to each region in Asia that Bryher discusses include Siamese cats, yaks, Arabian horses, tigers, elephants and chimpanzees.
A Picture Geography prints short paragraphs about various countries, like “Turkey In Asia,” Arabia, Persia, Burma and Siam, complete with mock-phonetic spellings of each country (for example, “Je-ru-sa-lem”), and explains the landscape of the country as well as the habits and customs of its people. The paragraph for “Turkey In Asia” distinguishes gender roles there: “Little girls in Turkey are shut up in the house and are seldom allowed to go out. If they have a garden they may play in it, but they almost never go out into the streets. Little boys go to school. They have to sit cross-legged on the floor, saying their lessons over and over” (p. 11).
OCLC lists only five copies.
Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2006. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2006. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC.
(#8188)
Print Inquire
