The Cheerful Cricket

The delightful chromolithographs above - mostly chapter title pages - were taken from 'The Cheerful Cricket and Others' by Jeannette Marks with illustrations by Edith Brown, 1907, at the Library of Congress. They've been spot cleaned a little and I boosted the colour slightly.

The book is also available at the Internet Archive:

"The Cheerful Cricket and Others is a collection of stories about how different insects and animals learn meaningful life lessons. There are little songs at the end of each story that children and adults can play and sing together."

I'm not sure I can decide if any of the few 'Jeannette Marks' online - possibly a suffragette, proud lesbian, poet, dramatist and/or english professor - are in fact the author of this book. Probably not.

Edith Brown, on the other hand, was a founding member of a group of young women known as the Saturday Evening Girls, who began meeting at the Boston Library in the late 19th century and later established Paul Revere Pottery.

"[The group was] part of a social and cultural endeavor that began in the Boston Public Library in the 1890s. They were the result of the convergence of three major movements influencing Boston at the time: the growth of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the evolving role of women and Women's Movement, and the Settlement House Movement."

See: one, two, three. (None of this has anything to do with the Cricket book at all of course.)