Showcasing more Amazing Artifacts…  

1893 “Chatterbox” was a unique textbook

This issue is special for me, Ken Weyand, a Clay County Museum board member and writer of these “artifact” pieces. This time I’m featuring an artifact from my family. Readers may recognize it from one of my “Vintage Discoveries” columns featured earlier in this paper.

One of my dad’s treasured possessions when he and his seven siblings were orphaned in 1900 and “farmed out” to various relatives, was a unique hardback children’s book, given to him by his oldest sister, Florence.  “Chatterbox,” with more than 400 pages, was published annually in the U.S. by Dana Estes and Charles E. Lauriat in Boston and edited by Erskine Clarke. The museum’s book was published in 1893, the year my dad was born.

Originating in England, the book includes advertising, which kept the cost lower for young readers, and adds interest for today’s history-lovers.  One ad promotes;

“Crosby’s Vitalized Phosphates, a brain food – invaluable to the nursing mother, weakly women, pale underdeveloped girls, and the aged.”  Our copy is in poor condition, its hard cover barely connected to the crumbling spine, but its color printing remains vivid, even though the subject matter reveals how attitudes have changed since the 1800s, including the depiction of black people as savages in a long article entitled “Among the Caffres.”

The book is one of hundreds of artifacts that make our museum special.

Come and see them soon.

“A Happy Family,” one of several illustrations in the book