{"id":776,"date":"2017-11-17T11:32:51","date_gmt":"2017-11-17T11:32:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/selcie\/?p=776"},"modified":"2017-11-17T11:32:51","modified_gmt":"2017-11-17T11:32:51","slug":"dear-mrs-shillabeer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/selcie\/2017\/11\/17\/dear-mrs-shillabeer\/","title":{"rendered":"Dear Mrs Shillabeer"},"content":{"rendered":"

While working in the book archives of Edinburgh’s Museum of Childhood, we sometimes find books that hold traces of their authors. This usually takes the form of an authorial inscription, as is the case with\u00a0the charming\u00a0Mr Barnacles and His Boat<\/em> book that appeared in a previous blog post<\/a>. It is also always very exciting when we find traces of illustrators, as was the case recently when we found this 1960 copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s\u00a0A Child’s Garden of Verses:\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Child's<\/p>\n

This edition is illustrated by Mary Shillabeer, who was based in Edinburgh. She was known both for her children’s book illustrations and for her beautiful marionette puppets, which you can see here<\/a> and here<\/a>, for example. Our own Museum of Childhood here in Edinburgh even holds some of her puppets! She also sketched and painted Edinburgh’s Rehearsal Orchestra for many years; you can see some of those paintings here<\/a>. The book we found certainly shows how skilled she was:<\/p>\n

\"Shillabeer<\/p>\n

However, the most interesting thing about this book is that it was owned by Mary Shillabeer herself. Tucked into the front cover is a letter from Martin Dent, the publisher. It is addressed to “Mrs Shillabeer” at her address in Edinburgh:<\/p>\n

\"Letter<\/p>\n

The letter contains the publisher’s opinion about a “question of colour”; he states that he “will happily leave it for you to put it right in whatever way you wish after Christmas”. This is a lovely little glimpse into the life and work of this talented illustrator that we were very happy to find. As the season approaches for us to start wishing each other “a very happy Christmas”, we hope that you find this as interesting as we do!<\/p>\n

\"Shillabeer<\/p>\n

This post written by Danielle<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While working in the book archives of Edinburgh’s Museum of Childhood, we sometimes find books that hold traces of their authors. This usually takes the form of an authorial inscription, as is the case with\u00a0the charming\u00a0Mr Barnacles and His Boat … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":167,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36,23,45,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-illustrated-books","category-scottish-illustrators","category-poetry","category-readers-book-owners","category-scotland"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/selcie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/selcie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/selcie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/selcie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/167"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/selcie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/selcie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":782,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/selcie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions\/782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/selcie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/selcie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk\/selcie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}