19th-Century European Picture-Books in Colour

Project Information

PiCoBoo

Grant agreement ID: 792994

DOI

10.3030/792994

Project closed

EC signature date 23 March 2018

Start date 24 September 2018

End date 13 July 2021

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 195 454,80

EU contribution

€ 195 454,80

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PiCoBoo (19th-Century European Picture-Books in Colour)

Reporting period: 2018-09-24 to 2020-09-23

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The PiCoBoo project investigated 19th-century European picturebooks printed in colour for children. It assessed their significance as a catalyst for major cultural and social changes and offered the first comprehensive analysis of a large genre of books that, although mass-produced and of undoubted significance to the history of print as well as many individuals’ reading experiences, was still almost entirely neglected by scholarship.
From the mid-19th century, the supremacy of monochrome had come to an end. For the first time, large numbers of readers were seeing the world in colour: this had important implications for many aspects of culture, society and the economy, leading to a completely new visual culture. Remarkably, this major revolution in visual culture had its origins in books for children, and yet these colour picturebooks – the first titles successfully published on a mass scale in colour – have seldom been subjected to scholarly consideration.
PiCoBoo filled this lacuna, providing the first detailed account of when, where and how these books were made, of who produced them and for what audiences. It analysed what their long-term influence was, across national boundaries, and placed them in larger cultural, publishing and visual histories. In collaboration with some of the major collections of these books in the world, PiCoBoo brought new attention to this important chapter in the history of the book.
PiCoBoo had two main research objectives: (a) to improve catalogue records and establish new descriptive protocols, achieved through the construction of an international network of institutions and through the creation of an open-access database, and (b) to offer a detailed account of these picturebooks, through publications and exhibitions.
Researcher Francesca Tancini has been supported by the unique expertise of Prof. Matthew Grenby at Newcastle University and of one of the most eminent children’s book historians of his generation, Brian Alderson. PiCoBoo project has been hosted by the Children’s Literature Unit at Newcastle University, in partnership with Seven Stories, The National Centre for Children’s Books, with a secondment at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Work was carried out though five work packages (WPs).
In the absence of European aggregators of children’s books, the goal of WP1 has been to establish a network of high-level international institutions holding relevant collections of picturebooks.
Its major outputs are collected in the PiCoBoo open-access database, outcome of WP2, to which many institutions have participated by waiving publication and reproduction rights for their collections, starting new photographing programmes, or sharing their knowledge and expertise. The database has been online since June 2019, providing images and descriptions no elsewhere retrievable and becoming the major reference point for research in this field.
Detailed accounts of this editorial genre and the results of extensive archival research will be published, as planned for WP3, in a forthcoming descriptive bibliography, and a series of publications on the history of book illustration.
Plans for project exhibitions had to be cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but a series of blog posts has been published in the V&A blog and online exhibitions have been curated within the Adam Matthew Digital collection Children’s Literature and Culture.
The final conference planned as the goal for WP5 did not take place because of the pandemic, nor did the international hands-on workshop on the making of colour-printed picturebooks, but a series of contingency presentations of the project has been carried out throughout the course of the project.

The fellowship has been a turning point in the researcher’s career: actions carried out and training obtained have strongly increased her skills in building new collaborations and reinforcing pre-existing contacts. As a further proof of the impact of the fellowship on the researcher’s career, she has recently been invited to serve as a member of the Justin G. Schiller Prize Committee to appoint the Schiller Prize for bibliographical work conducted on pre-twentieth-century children’s books, possibly the most distinguished award in the field.
The PiCoBoo project also enabled the researcher to work with commercial publishers such as Adam Matthew Digital. The researcher’s skills have been further developed through a series of TV programmes, the first of which expected to go live in December 2021 on Sky Arte.
The amount of data collected and analysed during the fellowship will inform many publications in the coming years, in addition to the ones produced during the fellowship itself.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The PiCoBoo project offered, for the first time, a detailed account of what these picturebooks were, how they were made, for whom, and it assessed their role in cultural, publishing and visual history.
The database has made accessible a large corpus of picturebooks previously dispersed across countries and institutions and only partially retrievable through local catalogues and not always correctly described. Working with network organisations it has been possible to define cataloguing standards and establish agreed practices for describing children’s picturebooks, thus providing a framework for understanding them. The database systematically gathers the results of book-in-hand analysis, archival research and hands-on training carried out at international institutions over collections and materials mostly inaccessible to general users. This also allowed further examinations in underlying changes in style, production, processes and features: progress in printing techniques, bindings, editorial aspects, artistic ambitions, price-points, thus demonstrating the changes in patterns of children’s book consumption and the ways in which publishers responded and sought to create demand. The gender dimension has also been, for the first time, integrated in the analysis, since many picturebook makers were women.
The outcomes of this action also resulted in a re-evaluation of museums and libraries collections, newly unveiled by the research work carried out there, and occasioned corrections and amendments of catalogue records.
In the absence of aggregators (serving as a background for collaborative research projects), and in need of protocols and practices (for recognising and cataloguing these books), the network and the database will substantially outlast the fellowship, therefore expanding the impact of the project and the researcher’s future career prospects. Through PiCoBoo website and database, the researcher is regularly contacted by scholars, collectors, librarians and curators worldwide asking for information, expertise, etc., also in the area of digital humanities.
Communication actions, particularly on social media, have popularised historical children’s picturebooks, their features and their makers, raising discussion and creating awareness.
The forthcoming publications and the implementation of the database, with results being separately published as methodological and research articles, will also further the project’s research goals, outlasting the project’s initial duration.

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