Blacky Daw and Dorothy Saunders

genderdesk

Dec 5

I was just noting that the Marjorie Miller article was trending and went back to look at Slap Happy Larry's blog again with all the noir art and I saw this nice Crow picture. It kind of reminded me of our old crow friend. I wonder if he misses us.

The illustration is from Blacky Daw by Adelaide Palmer and illustrated by Dorothy Saunders, 1930.

So who is this Dorothy Saunders and does she have any more nice crows for us?

It will surprise no one to find out she is a total red link.

But it is on Commons. In fact, the whole thing has been copied from the Library of Congress to Commons in PDF form, where someone has plastered some templates on it asking for information about both Dorothy Saunders and the author Adelaide Palmer. I guess someone thought that would be better than looking it up.

But here at Genderdesk, we think it is more fun to look it up. So shall we?

Okay, we are off to a good start. We now have the text of the first edition on both Commons and the Internet Archive. Google books lists it, but there is not even a preview, probably because it has been picked up and republished by Amazon in 2021 as "selected by scholars as being culturally important". But they do tell us it was first published in 1930 and is classified as juvenile fiction.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blacky_Daw,the_story_of_a_pet_crow,_(IA_blackydawthestor00palm).pdf Complete text.
https://archive.org/details/blackydawthestor00palm First edition
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL6752738M/Blacky_Daw read online
https://www.loc.gov/item/31001283/ full text and illustrations
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Blacky_Daw_the_Story_of_a_Pet_Crow/Zp22zgEACAAJ?hl=en No text, no preview.

There was also a book review from Journal of Education, Volume 112 Issue 16, November 1930, pp. 406, along with reviews of four other books on the same page. https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/jexa/112/16 Paywall.

Also illustrated by Dorothy Saunders:

THE COURTESY BOOK Drawings by Dorothy Saunders, Dunlea, Nancy, Published by Beckley-Cardy Company, Chicago USA, 1927

Disambiguation

Adelaide Coburne Palmer (artist)(1851 - Orford, New Hampshire -- 1928) "was a member of the Copley Society in 1893 in Boston, Massachusetts and studied with John J. Enneking. As a commercial artist, she created the logo for Fruit of the Loom." https://www.askart.com/artist/Adelaide_Coburne_Palmer/25694/Adelaide_Coburne_Palmer.aspx
Dorothy Saunders (Dorothy Sylvia Saunders, athlete) (1915 – 2013) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Saunders

Well, that petered out quickly. No VIAF, no dates of birth, no bios. It's almost as if these were pseudonyms. Well, we have done everything we could do for one night. Tomorrow is another day. So let's dump this on the intertubes and see what the daylight brings. If worst comes to worst, I may have to read the thing.