- Jack Zipes
Little Mole & Honey Bear: Reviving Historical Children’s Books with Jack Zipes
With this post, we welcome guest contributor Jack Zipes, professor emeritus of the University of Minnesota and founder of the publishing house Little Mole & Honey Bear. Below Zipes relates his personal journey into the world of publishing and shares the neglected and little known works that inspired him to become a “gravedigger.” Additionally, Zipes presented a live-streaming event on 27 January 2022 at the Magers & Quinn Booksellers, now on YouTube, about his new editions of Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest, and Tistou: The Boy with the Green Thumbs of Peace. We invite you to visit the link to learn more about these two classic tales as well as Zipes’s work with Little Mole & Honey Bear.
I am a gravedigger. I do not rob graves. I do not dig graves to bury the dead. I dig up graves to bring the dead back to life. Most gravediggers dig graves to keep people silent forever. I dig graves so that the dead can rejoin us and can have an honest word or two with us. I do not want to silence the dead or ignore them. I want to pay homage to them, especially writers, illustrators, and artists of all kinds.
As gravedigger, I do not have a specialty. I am not narrow. I am not a Fachidiot--what the Germans fondly call academics who are too narrow and know only one field in which they are experts. I am a serious dilettante. I am a child of serendipity.
As a student, I was lucky to spend two years in West Germany in 1961. Before I left New York none of my Jewish family and friends would talk to me anymore. I was given the silent treatment. In Germany, my young friends were given the silent treatment by their parents, who kept silent about the Nazi period. In turn, my friends did not talk about the past because their parents were ashamed and silent. I kept quiet and listened to the silence. Then, in all the silence, I found I had to be a gravedigger in Germany.
Germany was a mystery to me. Still is. When it came to understanding German history, all my friends there were silent at first. They were silent about the Nazi past because their parents and relatives were silent, just as I was silent about the anti-Semitism I experienced in America. But I no longer keep silent about it. Many German philosophers and critics compelled me to open my big fat mouth: Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Hans Mayer, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, what some people call the Frankfurt School.
I was never the same after Germany. I am never the same.
Like one of my heroes, Ernst Bloch, I read everything and write on everything. Comics, children’s books, newspapers, journals, novels, plays, poetry, sports books, dog books. You name it. I am a flea market junky. I am also addicted to old books and antiquarian bookstores. Walter Benjamin, a very overrated German writer, once wrote an essay about collecting books. It was stupid because, even though he was a collector of children’s books, he did not understand what it meant to be a gravedigger. Nor did I really, until recently.
In 2008, the year of my final retirement from the corporate University of Minnesota, my wife issued a declaration. “It’s me or the books!” Either I was to part with all the 10,000 or more books in my private library, or she would leave me. She wanted to downsize. She gave me a week’s notice for me to make a decision. At first I was resistant, but when I started going through the fairy-tale and fantasy books from the early twentieth century in my collection, books by Charles Godfrey Leland, Heywood Broun, Lisa Tetzner, Hermynia zur Mühlen, Berta Lask, etc., etc., I realized what my new mission and profession was -- I was a born-again gravedigger. I decided to found my own small publishing house to waken the dead – talented writers and their unique works that still have relevance today.
I have sorted the books I own, donated many to different libraries, and made peace with my wife, promising to keep only those books I intend to publish. The result is that, since 2019, I have been very active editing and publishing highly relevant and startling books by neglected and gifted authors and illustrators such as
Fairy Tales and Fables from Weimar Days: Collected Utopian Tales. Various radical German writers (2018).
The Giant Ohl and Tiny Tim. Christian Bärmann (2019).
Ernst Bloch, The Pugnacious Philosopher of Hope. Jack Zipes (2019).
Johnny Breadless. A Pacifist Fairy Tale. Paul Vaillant-Couturier (2020).
Keedle the Great and All that You want to Know about Fascism,. Deirdre and William Conselman, Jr. (2020).
Yussuf the Ostrich. Emery Kelen (2020).
Charles Godfrey Leland and his Magical Tales. Jack Zipes (2020).
Tistou, the Boy with the Green Thumbs of Peace. Maurice Druon, Illustr. Joellyn Rock (2021)
The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest. Felix Salten, Illustr. Alenka Sottler (2022)
The Weimar tales were written from 1920 to 1936 by radical German and European authors. Bärmann’s 40 fascinating illustrations and story involves a refugee giant and little farmer who save their town from a pandemic. Bloch was the most significant political philosopher of the twentieth century who took fairy tales seriously. Vaillant-Couturier, a bohemian turned communist, wrote a fantasy novel about a boy who learns all about the terrors of World War I. Charles Godfrey Leland was one of the first American folklorists who sought to understand witches and indigenous customs in America and Europe. Druon is perhaps the first great environmentalist who wrote about the magical thumbs of a little boy who stops a war. Salten prefigured the Holocaust in his existentialist novel about animals in a forest and the cruel way they were treated.
Future projects include British illustrator Rolf Brandt’s collection of stories and pictures of topsy-turvy tales, first published in the 1940s. Brandt (also known as R. A. Brandt or Rolf A. Brandt to distinguish himself from a German with the same name) was a superb surrealist painter as well as a brilliant illustrator. Also worthy of attention is Romer Wilson’s three anthologies of Silver, Green, and Red magic tales, collected in the 1920s and dedicated to children all over the world.
It is time to give these writers and artists the recognition they deserve. They are not dead. They still speak to us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jack Zipes is Professor Emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. In addition to his scholarly work, he is an active storyteller in public schools, founded Neighborhood Bridges at the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis, and has written fairy tales for children and adults. Some of his recent publications include: The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (2012), The Golden Age of Folk and Fairy Tales: From the Brothers Grimm to Andrew Lang (2013), and Slap-Bam, The Art of Governing Men: Édouard Laboulaye’s Political Fairy Tales (2018). In 2019, he founded his own press called Little Mole and Honey Bear and has published The Giant Ohl and Tiny Tim (2019), Johnny Breadless (2020), Yussuf the Ostrich (2020), Keedle the Great and All You Want to Know about Fascism (2020), and Tistou, The Boy with the Green Thumbs of Peace (2021). His very latest wok is a translation and analysis of Felix Salten's The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest (2022).
Website: https://jackzipes.com/