Barbara Jones is one of my favourite illustrators and this book has a bit of all her best subject matter – objects, animals, furniture and quirky things. But I got this for its design historical credentials first and illustrations second. It was published for the Scottish Committee of the Council of Industrial Design in 1947, in much the same format as those lovely contemporaneous Puffin Picture books.
1947 was the same year the SCOID committee organised the exhibition Enterprise Scotland at the Royal Scottish Museum. A sort of northern version of the Britain Can Make It exhibition held in the V&A the previous year. This book must have been part of the same design bandwagon that was crossing the nation in the name of good taste.
This or That is aimed, ostensibly, at teaching children about good design. You do wonder a bit at the fairly sophisticated level of text and theory in these mid-century children’s books. Form and function rhetoric wrapped up in a story about David and Shelia, ribbons around waste bins and nature versus the city. The latter point is made with two double page illustrated spreads of the bucolic countryside compared to a rat and bulldog infested city. There is even an ‘interactive’ page where you (the reader) pick items for a room and compare your taste to David and Shelia’s.
This or That a bit of a mess, editorially speaking. And feels like it was rushed off the press by a committee who probably needed to produce something. But visually speaking, Barbara Jones pulls it off. One supposes David (in his kilt) and Shelia are the two young’uns on the cover. Arguing (as children do) the aesthetic value of plywood versus mock-regency chairs.
So that’s where Ikea get their advertising ideas from then!
If only I could think they had such a treasure on their Billy bookshelves..
I am very envious of that one – we’ve never found a copy that wasn’t at a mortgage-the-cats kind of price.
And so I have never seen that it is a paen to the bucolic countryside too – unlike all the Puffin Books on similar subjects which have lovely pictures of beautifully-planned modern towns as the pinnacle of civiilisation. Perhaps that’s the Scottish point of view for you.
I can’t remember where I got it, but needless to say it’ll have been cheap, like me. And yes, its more about taking it easy on the modernism than adopting it fully.
Very prudent. After all, the fashion could change at any moment, but your Victorian stag picture, well that’s always in style.
In other matters, has anyone ever written anything proper about the mock-Regency strain in 50s design?
Not seen anything on mock-Regency myself.