Bannerman, Helen

Little Black Sambo. [“Animated” movable picture book, illustrated by Juian Wehr.]

New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., [1943]. First edition with the Julian Wehr illustrations. The Story of Little Black Sambo was first published in 1899 as part of the Dumpy Books for Children from the publisher Grant Richards. With seven full-page color illustrations by Wehr, each with movable, tab-activated elements. This copy has all seven movables (in contrast to later editions with fewer). A fine copy, scarce in this condition. Spiral-bound pages in original color-illustrated pictorial boards. 6 x 8 in. [24] pp. Item #17636

Helen Bannerman (1862 – 1946) wrote The Story of Little Black Sambo in 1898 to entertain her daughters while traveling in India, where the family lived for thirty years while Bannerman’s husband worked in the Indian Medical Service. The original Sambo story portrayed its protagonist as a South Indian boy, and Bannerman’s follow-up books (including Little Black Mingo) also reference the landscape of the Indian subcontinent (Jeyathurai). Controversy surrounding the depiction of Sambo grew in the 1930s as American editions of the book proliferated: “In various editions of the book, Sambo is depicted as having very dark skin that is juxtaposed against the whites of his eyes and teeth, a broad nose, and a wide smile. While set in India and about an Indian protagonist, the illustrations matched what African Americans such as Langston Hughes recognized immediately to be the ‘pickaninny’” racist caricature (Jeyathurai). Some critics saw Sambo as a relatively positive depiction of a dark-skinned protagonist, however, and the character has appeared in modern editions like The Story of Little Babaji (1996) and The Boy and the Tigers (2004). Julian Wehr (1898 – 1970) patented his own style of “animated” children’s books in the early 1940s. While previous designs utilized a tab at the bottom edge of the page that could only be pulled up and down, Wehr’s designs were more flexible, sometimes featuring multiple tabs that could be moved both back-and-forth and up-and-down. Wehr created over forty animated books, including versions of classic children’s stories like Alice in Wonderland and Cinderella (both 1945). Wehr, who was also a sculptor, was trained at the Art Students League in New York City, where he studied under John French Sloan (1871 – 1951).

Jeyathurai, Dashini. “The complicated racial politics of Little Black Sambo.” Tides Magazine, April 4, 2012 (accessed on the South Asian American Digital Archive).

Price: $500.00