The Problem Horse (nonfiction)

I saw this little book on the shelf at a library, in amidst more typical old books like How To Ride Western (1970's era with copious dusty black and whites of Quarter Horses) and glossy newer books with titles like Buying Your First Horse. Despite the helpful practicality of the other titles, this sort of period piece draws my eye.


I know this blog is supposed to be fiction, and mostly American, but who could resist these illustrations?



It's smoother, but some of it reminds me of Paul Brown's work. It's that combination of action-striated lines with idealized, slightly vague backgrounds.




Links
Wikipedia on the author

Books by Summerhays
Here's Horse Sense

From Saddle to Fireside

Elements of Riding

Elements of Hunting

Riding For All

Observer's Book of Horses and Ponies

The Problem Horse

It's A Good Life With Horses

Summerhays' Encyclopedia for Horsemen

Our Horses Horses and Ponies

Riding on a Small Income

The Story of the International

The Young Rider's Guide to the Horse World

A Lifetime with Horse


About John Board
1895-1965
A polo player and illustrator.

Books by Board (author)

Horse And Pencil

A Year With Horses (1954)

From Point To Point

Polo

Horses And Horseman
Practical Horsemanship In Show And Field


Books by Board (illustrator only)
Horseback Riding by C.E.G. Hope

Work included in anthologies
The Horseman's Bedside Book (1964)
The Horseman's Year 1958

More examples of Board's art
Polo
Blacklock's Polo Art website

Illustrators - N.C. Wyeth

Once upon a time, there was a family of artists in Pennsylvania's most beautiful valley. Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945), the first to arrive in the Brandywine Valley, came to study with Howard Pyle, and the similarities are evident at a glance; lush, richly colored paintings that are just fantastic enough to be thrilling and just realistic enough to be stirring. N.C. was just the start, though. Two daughters and one son became artists, one daughter a composer. Andrew, his most famous son, had a son who also became an artist.



I have mixed emotions about the Wyeths; it is possible to get a little sick of local heroes. When you're from Philadelphia, there's a certain level of exhaustion surrounding Quakers, Ben Franklin and cheesesteaks. Never soft pretzels. But you see my point. There's something insufferably smug about the Wyeth franchise in the lovely, rolling countryside south of the city. The adorable and disturbingly pristine former grist mill that houses a collection of their work, and which exists as the Wyeth museum to all visitors, though it's formally called the Brandywine River Museum. The endless books about them in local libraries and bookstores. You can get this temptation to mutter "You know, the really big artist was Andrew and he actually seemed to prefer his place in Maine."



But the point here is that N.C., the original artsy Wyeth, did fantastic horse pictures. An illustrator, he created iconic images for several children's classics, including The Yearling and Kidnapped. Despite the fantasy elements he used here for the Arthurian legend, he was also quite the Western artist, and his cowboy paintings are also worth looking up. One thing I find very charming is the tendency his horses have of having vividly expressive faces. Look at the rolling eyes of the black knight's horse below, or the alarmed face on the brown horse of the cover - here are horses who are not quite happy with the shenanigans their riders have gotten up to.




Links
The Brandywine River Museum
The Brandywine River Museum's N.C. Wyeth Catalogue Raisonné

Awkward Art

I'm working on new reviews of a short story collection and a book, but it's going slow for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the weeklong heat wave we've had here. So in the meantime, a quick post on unattractive artwork.




I tend to focus on the good, when it comes to illustrations in books. The dreamy, the vivid, the beautiful, all catch the eye. The covers here aren't all awful, but they're all a little disappointing. Flicka, above, looks like a skyscraper with ears.


Something about this horse's head has just never sat right with me. He looks demonic, like a horse surging out of the sea to eat you.

Not awful, but lacking in any sort of realism or emotion. And orange.

There's just something off-putting about people lying on the ground with a horse running around in the background. It just seems more like a fall than a casual pose.



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Happy Mother's Day!

In celebration of mothers, a couple of quick news items on famous broodmares, and then a semi-review of not a book but the successful publishing saga of the Little Golden Books, illustrated by a painting of a mare and foal.

Back in April, The Kentucky Thoroughbred Association and the Kentucky Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders' Inc. named the 14-year-old mare Sweet Life the 2009 Broodmare Of The Year. Sweet Life is the dam of Sweet Catomine (2004 Champion Two-Year-Old Filly and Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies) and Life Is Sweet (2009 Breeders' Cup Ladies' Classic).

The 1996 Broodmare of the Year died in April. Personal Ensign (1984, bay) came back from a fractured leg at two to beat the Kentucky Derby filly Winning Colors at the Breeders' Cup Distaff in 1988. As a broodmare, she produced several winning racehorses, including the filly My Flag, who in 1995 took the same race her mother won in 1988 and who later produced yet another Breeders' Cup race winner, Storm Flag Flying.

Links
Thoroughbred Times - Sweet Life Named Broodmare Of The Year
The Lady Is A Champ - Ron Hale, 1988 NYT

Horses, Little Golden Book #459
Blanche Chenery Perrin, il. Hamilton Greene
1962, Golden Press

This was one of my earliest horse books, a thin little non-fiction book for very young readers and the lush illustrations (unfortunately somewhat washed out in the above photo, which was not the fault of the book but a result of my own ineptitude) probably helped make me a horse nut. The cover to my battered and loved-half-to-death copy went missing years and year ago, so all I can offer is a link - here's one on eBay.

Little Golden Books are small, square easy reader books designed to be sturdy and affordable, and they have been the very first books for several generations of Americans. They encompass an array of topics, from nursery rhymes to Disney movies, and have attracted some of the best children's authors and illustrators. There are over 1200 titles, and over 2 billion books have been printed. There are also larger books called, appropriately, Big Golden Books, which are basically over-sized versions, and as Golden did many books based on TV series and films, there are several horsey titles related to 1950's Westerns.

Blanche Chenery Perrin, of course, is the author of three children's horse books - Born To Race, Hundred Horse Farm and Thudding Hoofs - as well as another Little Golden Book, The New Pony.

Hamilton Greene also illustrated the Little Golden Books Walt Disney's Tonka and Zorro And The Secret Plan.

Horse-related Little Golden Books
Snowy, The Little White Horse (1962, Suzanne Reynolds, a Big Golden Book)
The New Pony (LGB #410, 1961, Blanche Chenery Perrin, il. Dagmar Wilson)
A Pony For Tony (#354, William P. Gottlieb, photos)
Little Benny Wanted A Pony (1950, #97, written by Oliver O'Conner Barrett, il. Richard Scarry
Baby Farm Animals (1958, il. Garth Williams)
Indian Indian (#149, 1952, Charlotte Zolotow)


From television and film
Walt Disney's Tonka (1959, Elizabeth Beecher, il. Hamilton Greene, with photos from TV series)
The Lone Ranger And The Talking Pony
Mister Ed, The Talking Horse (1962, Barbara Shook Hazen, il. Mel Crawford)
Fury Takes The Jump (1958, Seymour Reit)
Roy Rogers And The Indian Sign (1956)
Annie Oakley, Sharpshooter (Charles Verral, il. E. Joseph Dreany)
Annie Oakley And The Rustlers (Ann McGovern, il. Mel Crawford)
Gene Autry (#230)
Zorro And The Secret Plan (1958, Charles Spain Verral, Hamilton Greene)
National Velvet (1961, Kathryn White, il. Mel Crawford)
Walt Disney Presents The Story Of Black Beauty (1973)

Donkey
Little Gray Donkey (#129, 1954, Alice Lunt, il. Tibor Gergely)
The Christmas Donkey (T. William Taylor, il. Andrea Brooks)
Manni The Donkey (1942, based on Felix Salten's A Forest World, author Emily Broun, il. Disney)



Publisher History
Little Golden Books was created in 1942 by a collaboration between publishers Simon & Schuster and Artists And Writers Guild, Inc., an arm of the printer/publisher Western Publishing and Lithographing. In 1958, Western and Pocket Books bought out S&S, and launched the subsidiary Golden Press. In 1978 Western, now called Western Publishing and a 20-year operator of a game division, was acquired by Mattel, Inc. In 1984, the failing but largely debt-free company was sold again, this time to a collection of senior executives led by a real estate mogul. In 1986, the company went public. Western thrived until 1993, when it became a decline blamed on financial mismanagement and a policy of creating a backlog of titles. Around 1994, they sold their school book club business to Troll (featured in the previous review) and in 1996 former Simon & Schuster CEO Richard Snyder and media mogul Barry Diller bought a controlling interest in the company and renamed it Golden Books Family Entertainment, Inc. Despite extensive and aggressive restructuring and pursuit of new markets, the company began to struggle in 1998. Random House bought the book publishing business in 2001, while Classic Media bought the licensing and merchandising right and TV/movie/video business.

Golden Press released a history of its most famous product in 2007, Golden Legacy by Leonard S. Marcus. There also appears to be an Australian connection in Golden Press - Sydney. It seems that several titles belonged exclusively to the Australian division, including Walt Disney Presents The Story Of Black Beauty.

Links
Random House - Little Golden Books
Funding Universe - company history through 1999
CNN - Poky Little $84 M Deal
Collecting Little Golden Books website

Illustrator - Milton Menasco

The Black Stallion series by Walter Farley has had any number of illustrators over the years, but one of my favorites was Milton Menasco. His muscular, physical horses were in direct contrast to the more stylized illustrations by Harold Eldridge and Keith Ward, and the colors in his cover paintings were intensely beautiful.


Milton Menasco
1890-1974

He started out in his native Los Angeles doing movie posters in the silent film era, worked in films themselves as art and set director, then in 1925 moved to New York City and advertising. After spending WWII painting battle scenes for Life magazine, he moved to Kentucky and specialized in horse portraits. He did commissions for some of racing's most famous people of some of racing's most famous horses; the people include Penny Chenery, John Whitney and Arthur B. Hancock, Jr., while the horses include Secretariat, La Troienne, and Nashua. He also did illustrations for a book about the Hancock family in Thoroughbred racing, From Here To The Bugle.



Books Illustrated - Walter Farley
The Black Stallion's Filly
The Black Stallion And Satan
Son Of The Black Stallion
The Blood Bay Colt


Books Illustrated - Other
Judging the Horse for Racing, Riding and Recreation by John F. Wall and Frank Jennings
From Here To The Bugle by Frank G. Jennings and Charles J. Calitri



Links
Website
His film credits at IMDB
His former home in Versailles, Kentucky

Links - examples of his art
Examples of his paintings at AskArt.com
Portrait of the racehorse Assault at Racingandriding.meganjellis.com
Pennsylvania Railroad poster, available at Allposters.com
Image of Son Of The Black Stallion at Biblio.com

Illustrators

I was crushed when I began reading the Black Stallion series as a child. The reason? No pictures. They were my first step away from the world of interior illustrations, and while the writing was wonderful and I loved the books, I missed the artwork. Perhaps you can see why.


Afraid To Ride, C.W. Anderson


Scorpion, Will James


Old Bones by Mildred Mastin Pace, illustrator Wesley Dennis


The Complete Morgan Horse (nonfiction), Jeanne Mellin


A Horse To Remember by Genevieve Torrey Eames, illustrations by Paul Brown


Rain Cloud The Wild Mustang by Margaret Kraenzel, illustrations by Pers Crowell


Ride The Wild Storm by Marjorie Reynolds, illustrations by Lorence Bjorklund


Of course, some editions of Walter Farley's books did have illustrations - above is Keith Ward's work from The Black Stallion.