Kistner Supply

I am a big fan of an excellent gift-wrap job.  The box, the tissue, the ribbon and the card, the whole shebang.  Because we created a new product I wanted to make sure that when people received the book the whole package felt complete.  New parents need gifts that are perfect, just like their new babes.

When it came to the pen I was very picky.  As you learned in my last post, penmanship is important to me, so I headed back to Paper Source and every other arts and crafts and office store to try pens, pens and more pens.  The Jimnie gel pen from Zebra was just right.  A medium 0.7mm tip is not too thick, not too thin and it has a smooth line.  I used it to fill out my kids books and love them.  After shopping for prepackaged photocorners, I couldn’t find any that fit the bill, so I decided we would package our own from 3L Scrapbooking Adhesives photocorners because of their outstanding quality.  There is also a card inserted into the package with a note of congratulations and some information about the book. The grouping is held together by a piece of cotton tying tape which is traditionally used by book restorers to tie together books.

After the wonderful illustrations and poems from Mother Stork’s Baby Book, the last thing I fell in love with was personal.  I had never seen my great-grandmother’s handwriting before and I was smitten at once.  At the time it was probably nothing fancy, but now it is such a dying art I always appreciate a pretty cursive. It is hard to imagine her as a young mother in New York in the early 1900s, sitting and writing with ink and a dip pen.  Finding time to fill out a baby book isn’t easy, but how much longer did it take without our modern implements?  The unevenness of the flow is charming and seeing a page filled with her writing is quite pleasing to my eyes.

I am a big fan of lovely cursive penmanship.  My mom always writes in a small and tidy cursive (and she does short-hand, which is nuts) which is what I was taught in school.  I remember getting older and then your handwriting was your identity.  I still remember wishing that could write like Francis Rennolds and Jenny Fry, they had a perfect bubble-style script, which was all the rage in 7th grade in the early 1980s.  My attempts at super-cool cursive never really worked out, but I have always noticed handwriting, it is quite telling.  At some point my grandma learned about what your handwriting means about your personality and she told me that I was creative.  I must have been in my early teens, but I thought that was a beacon of hope for my future.

Imagine my amazement when the invitation to my first Bat Mitzvah arrived in 7th grade.  I was blown away!  A purple envelope with purple writing. Here it is:

Inscription for My Little Son’s Silver Plate by Eugene Field

When thou dost eat from off this plate,
I charge thee be thou temperate;
Unto thine elders at the board
Do thou sweet reverence accord;
And, though to dignity inclined,
Unto the serving-folk be kind;
Be ever mindful of the poor,
Nor turn them hungry from the door;
And unto God, for health and food
And all that in thy life is good,
Give thou thy heart in gratitude.

Mother Stork’s Baby Book is filled with 10 wonderful poems that accompany the beautiful illustrations of Albertine Randall Wheelan.  The best children’s poets of the late 1800s are included: Eugene Field, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll,  Robert Herrick, Francis Turner Palgrave and Dinah M. Craik.  Eugene Field penned 5 of the 10 in the book which I love because he was a mid-western guy who settled in Chicago.

The first time I read through the book I was amazed that so many of them can be applied to life today, even though they are over 100-years-old.  They are about the universal themes of mothers and babies and make-believe, what could be better?!

Each of the poems is listed here along with some of the illustrations.  Wheelan’s transcriptions alongside her beautiful illustrations truly enhance the poems in a way that adds to their already fanciful style, making the whole book that much more enchanting.

The first thing that I noticed about Mother Stork’s Baby Book was the illustrations.  They are the breathtakingly beautiful work of Albertine Randall Wheelan.  I had never heard of her, but I am not up to date on the 19th century illustration scene and what I found out amazed me.  She was one of the earliest professional female cartoonists, ever, and produced illustrations for Harper’s Bazaar and many other magazines in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  Being a feminist, I thought that was pretty cool.  She was born in 1863, so by the time Mother Stork’s Baby Book was published in 1904 she was 41 years old, married and with two school age sons.  The family lived in San Francisco where she had studied art at the San Francisco School of Design.

The 50 illustrations in this book are lovely.  Each page is a unique work-of-art and I fell in love, hard. The illustrations depict a simpler time but are also filled with mischief and humor. There are many vintage scenes that are as sweet as can be, but not cutesy.  I can’t imagine how long it took Albertine Randall Wheelan to illustrate the whole book.

I took the job of redesigning this book very seriously and I think I did it justice.  There were many things that needed to be addressed to update Mother Stork’s Baby Book, 100th Anniversary Edition to 21st century standards.

In 2003, shortly after my maternal grandmother passed away, I was helping my mother sort through a gigantic bin of stuff from my grandparent’s house.  Many people would think it was trash, but in our family we can’t throw anything away until it has been thoroughly examined for sentimental value.  That can be a curse (it usually is), but occasionally it pays off.  There were all sorts of goodies in that bin: gas mileage records from my grandparents’ car in the 1960s, stationery from the Milwaukee Road railroad where my grandfather worked, a list of 20s and 30s song lyrics that my grandfather had memorized years ago…

Then, I found the book!

My grandmother’s baby book, filled out after her birth in 1917 by my great-grandmother Mildred Grimm Kistner, aka Granny “Kistner”.  No one in our family had ever seen it before. I wish I could have gone through it for the first time with my grandmother, she would have been amused by how much I loved it.  I remember opening it and gasping over how beautiful the book was.  Every page had something amazing to look at and read.  I had never seen anything like it: the illustrations, the poetry, the thick paper, my great-grandmother’s cursive hand and the irreplaceable record of my grandmother’s first years.

I pored over the book and couldn’t stop thinking about it for days, wondering if there were other baby books on the market like this very special one.  I decided it was worth investigating and scoured Chicago and its suburbs searching through book stores and baby boutiques, coming up empty handed each time. Next, I bought magazines like American Baby, Parents, Pregnancy and Baby, Cookie (remember Cookie!), Junior Pregnancy and Baby from the UK and others, looking for something, anything that came close to the treasure I had discovered. There was nothing else like it.

I knew I had to do something to share this amazing book!  I showed it to my extended family and told them I wanted to see if it would be possible to reproduce the book.  They loved the idea, and so it began.