When it comes to truth in title, A Picture Book, for Little Children is hard to beat. It’s a book of pictures (45 of them), and thus probably appealed to little children.

Today, this offbeat little charmer with its weird captions also appeals to adults. It’s a good example of the way early publishers built a book by setting a collection of illustrations into a matrix of text. The worn cuts with their often misshapen people certainly weren’t created for this publication. d’Alté Welch identified Robinson Crusoe and Isaiah Thomas’s 1794 edition of Mother Goose’s Melody as sources (A Bibliography of American Children’s Books Printed Prior to 1821, number 993). A. S. W. Rosenbach credited Thomas’s 1795 edition of The Brother’s Gift; or, The Naughty Girl Reformed for another image (Early American Children’s Books, number 466). Here they’ve been patched together into a chapbook with a page size of about 2.5 inches wide and 5.5 inches high.

Whoever captioned the illustrations was probably doing a job he’d done all too often, and doing it in a hurry. But the dry little statements make for a book obliquely humorous. “We cannot see ourselves in this Glass,” reads the caption for a picture of a mirror, and, no, we certainly cannot. “What a curious figure she is!” reads another, and that’s as apt a description as any. Few turkeys have looked as bedraggled as the one in this book; “perhaps she is not very well,” the caption notes. Another appears to comment on the indecipherable illustrations printed from worn blocks: “We cannot see well at night;” and we truly cannot see what is going on in that illustration. The last page seems to contain a lesson on vanity: “The use of clothes is to cover us, and to keep us warm,” states the caption of an illustration of a finely dressed man and woman; “what do these people wear theirs for?” Probably, the writer seems to imply, not to keep warm. Below them, a peacock “make[s] a great show with his fine feathers,” which is appropriate, because “nature has given them”—unlike, perhaps, the couple pictured above it.

The author also managed to include some local flavor: “The Swedes Church” is at least the same shape as the Gloria Dei—also called “Old Swedes’”—Church, built before 1700 in Philadelphia. And the (upside-down) bible manages to slip in an advertisement for the publisher, Kimber and Conrad.

When was this book created? It’s undated, and the recycled illustrations show figures in 18th-century dress. Welch and Rosenbach give a date of about 1812. A copy in the online catalog of the American Antiquarian Society has a guessed date of 1806. Kimber and Conrad had their bookstore at 93 Market Street from 1809 to 1814, when they dissolved their partnership. (See advertisements in Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser [30 May 1809]: 4 col 3 and [27 March 1811]: 1 col 4. “Dissolution of Partnership.” American & Commercial Daily Advertiser [18 Jan 1815]: 1 col 3.) Samuel Merritt apparently established his business as a printer in 1811 and printed books for Kimber and Conrad from 1811 to 1814. (See Early American Imprints.)

My copy is presented here in an illustrated transcription, with links to images of the two-page spreads. For the sake of completeness, I’ve also linked to images of the unprinted front and back covers.