Collection of Four Bound Volumes of School Notebooks, 1933-1937
Baltimore, MD: 1933. Very Good. Item #25829
Baltimore, MD: 1933-1937. Four quarto volumes (28cm.); uniformly bound in green cloth, pictorial typescript elements mounted to each upper cover; approx. 260ll. per volume totaling nearly 2000 pages of manuscript text; myriad hand-colored illustrations and mounted pictorial elements throughout. Rear hinges of latter two volumes very slightly loose, a few mounted elements separated but present, else a Very Good or better collection.
Remarkable survival of the complete notebooks kept by Baltimore schoolgirl Judith Warner (born ca. 1925) between the ages of nine and twelve as a student at the still-extant private Calvert School. The notebooks, separated by month with a hand-colored drawing, were then bound by year, presumably commissioned by an enthusiastic parent.
Indeed, Judith Warner, whose older brother John was a star student athlete at Yale during these years, was herself a fastidious student as exemplified by the teacher's marks and the report cards that begin each volume. Warner appears to have excelled at all her studies, which included more than two hundred writing exercises ranging in subject from Napoleon and Joan of Arc to India ("a country in Asia. England owns it"), the Ancient Romans, and poached eggs. The earliest writing assignment bound at the beginning of the first volume is titled "How Things Started": "Long, long, long ago there was no world. There was just the sun. It kept whirling, sputtering and throwing off sparks. One of those sparks cooled and became our world."
Additional courses included spelling, arithmetic, grammar, history, and geography ("Africa is often called the Dark Continent"), with forays into art history, astronomy, and etiquette. By the time Warner hit her final year at Calvert she was learning how to write an order for a blue sweater from a New York City department store and how to send out (and decline) a proper invitation. In a writing exercise to develop the art of dialogue, Warner images Mrs. X putting in an order for a dinner party with her cook: "I want to have oyster cocktails, tomato misque [sic] soup, roast beef, potatoes baked around the roast, macaroni, and spinach." The few personal essays reveal very little of Warner's home life, other than the night when she and her nurse got locked out of the house because it was the maid's day off and her parents were out to dinner and the theater. A kindly neighbor took them in.
Perhaps the area most notably absent from her studies is science, with the exception of her essay on the beginning of the world, and a year later, her bafflement at the amoeba: "It can walk and it has no feet. It flotes [sic] along like a speck of jelly. It can breathe and it has no lungs It has no nerves and can feel. It can eat and has no mouth. It absorbs little plants. It is round when either it is dead, or starving, or very comfortable. It can also raise a faimaly [sic]. It is very queer, I think."
We find very little about Warner in the public record apart from a smattering of articles covering her debutante ball in 1942 and her marriage announcement in 1977.
Price: $950.00