I love this 1899 school notebook--kept by a Helen Dayton of Watertown, CT, when she was 8 years old or so--for many many reasons; really, every page (121 of them!) delivers delights large or small. Most exciting are several pages devoted entirely to colored pencil drawings, in which triangles and boxes and moons and kites and apples and blocks and houses and ladders commingle, sometimes with nothing more than the handwritten label distinguishing one from another, a ball and a circle for example, which to me is quite a beautiful distillation of how semiotics works. Also a fabulous pair of cutout paper dolls with drawn faces (and their ghosts on the opposite page), a couple of cut and folded paper constructions, and then all sorts of lists of spelling words, calculations, stories, phrases and much more all mixed and layered together in a pretty wonderful way. Full of life on every jam packed page, with a mix of graphite, ink and colored pencil throughout.
8 3/8" x 6 3/4", 121 pages, every one of them filled. Very very good condition; no tears or foxing or loose pages or other issues at all. I've photographed my favorite pages plus a representative sampling of others.
