Robin Hood by Howard Pyle, Benvenuti, Jessie Beck School Reno, 1962

The Piece

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, written by Howard Pyle, illustrated by Benvenuti, published by Golden Press, New York, as one of the Golden Illustrated Classics. Cream paper over boards with a full color medieval scene laid into the front: a knight in plate armor with a red lion shield crossing swords with a man in Lincoln green while a lady in a gold-sprigged white gown walks away up the hall, and a column of red and gold floral ornament running down the right side. The spine is coral with white lettering.

The copyright page gives it exactly: Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 62-9848, copyright 1962 by Golden Press, illustrations used by arrangement with Fratelli Fabbri of Italy, designed and produced by Artists and Writers Press, printed in the United States by Western Printing and Lithographing, published simultaneously in Canada by the Musson Book Company of Toronto.

The art is the reason this edition exists. Benvenuti worked it as though it were a late medieval book of hours. The endpapers are scrolling ivy and flowers in olive, red and blue around heraldic shields, one checky red and black on a turquoise lozenge, another barry of gold and black. The title page carries a gold ground miniature of Robin and Little John in green, bow across the chest, arrows showing over the shoulder. Inside, illuminated initials with gilt shafts and birds perched in the marginal vines, and full page plates: two ladies riding a caparisoned white palfrey through the greenwood at page 122, the trappings in orange, green and blue.

The series list at the front names the other three: Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne, Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table by Emma Gelders Sterne and Barbara Lindsay.

And then there is what the library did to it. DISCARDED is stamped in black twice, once across the front cover under the title and once on the half title. The front pastedown carries the stamp JESSIE BECK SCHOOL LIBRARY. The spine has two typed labels reading Pyle and F Pyle, an accession number at the head, and the yellow mylar jacket protector is still taped down.

History & Provenance

Jessie Beck Elementary School is in Reno, at Sharon Way and Plumb Lane, and the woman it is named for is not the one most people in this town assume.

Jessie Parker Beck was born in Reno on 23 February 1879. Her father, Henry Hudson Beck, was a miller, a newspaper writer, a Washoe County commissioner and a member of the first territorial legislature. She graduated from Reno High School in 1895 and from the Nevada State Normal School in 1897, taught at Lovelock from 1897 to 1900, then came back to Reno to teach at Riverside School and, from 1904, at Southside School. She taught first grade for twenty nine years in the same room and retired in June 1941 after forty three years in the classroom. The Washoe County School Trustees named the school for her in 1956. It opened on 10 September 1958 with two hundred and seventy one students and twelve teachers. She died in Reno on 8 January 1961.

Which means this book, printed in 1962, went onto the shelf of a school named for a first grade teacher the year after she died, and stayed there long enough to be stamped out of the collection.

The other Jessie Beck, the one people think of, was Jessie Renfro Beck. She went to work at Harolds Club in 1938 after Pappy Smith watched her total a diner bill in her head, became the first woman craps dealer in Nevada, bought the Riverside Hotel for three and a fifteen hundredths million dollars in 1971 and ran it as Jessie Beck's Riverside until she retired in 1986. Two different women, both named Jessie Beck, both Reno. The school belongs to the teacher.

Howard Pyle was born at Wilmington, Delaware on 5 March 1853 and died at Florence on 9 November 1911. Robin Hood, published in 1883, is where he began writing and illustrating his own stories, and the pen and ink drawings he made for it are among the most recognized in American illustration. He opened the Howard Pyle School of Illustration Art in Wilmington in 1900 and taught N. C. Wyeth, among others. Which is the quiet joke of this edition: Golden Press took the book Pyle illustrated himself and handed the pictures to somebody else.

That somebody was Gianni Benvenuti, born at Pisa on 26 June 1926 and died at Philadelphia on 15 September 2005. He started as a cartoonist for Mondadori, adapting The Last of the Mohicans for the comic Topolino, and by the 1950s was illustrating children's books full time, more than fifty of them, translated across Europe and America. Golden Press used him repeatedly through the sixties and seventies.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This one is for a Reno buyer and it should be sold that way. A book stamped out of the library of a school on Plumb Lane, named for a woman who taught first grade in this town for forty three years, discarded at some point after 1962 and still carrying its labels. That is local history you can hold, and it costs less than a framed print.

The pictures are genuinely good and they do not look like anything else on a shelf of mid century children's books. Benvenuti is painting gold grounds, ivy borders and heraldic shields in a year when most American illustrators were doing flat midcentury shapes, and the plates have held their color completely. Open at the palfrey on page 122 and it reads as an illuminated leaf.

Shelve it in a child's room, in a study with other Nevada material, or lay it open on a stand where the plates face out. The covers are tired and the library did what libraries do, but everything that makes it worth owning is intact.