The Invisible Library

The Village Voice:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Everything Is Funnier With Monkeys. If J. Fred Muggs, Lancelot Link, or zoo-house fecal tossing have taught us anything, it is that every human endeavor is enriched by the addition of a screaming, leg-humping, ass-biting primate. Even, say, sex education. I beg your pardon? you might ask. Clearly you’re not acquainted with the strangest children’s book of the 19th century– Sammy Tubbs, the Boy Doctor, and Sponsie, the Troublesome Monkey (1874). Written by health crusader and mail-order magnate Dr. Edward Bliss Foote (1829-1906), it’s the five-volume Manhattan saga of the 12-year-old son of freed slaves. It does indeed also feature a sidekick monkey named Sponsie–and yes, as promised, he is troublesome.

[edit]

It’s a Victorian sex-ed manual. For children. Starring a monkey.

“Encountering Sammy Tubbs was a eureka moment, like a shot of a very powerful, very pleasurable drug,” Michael Sappol, curator at the National Library of Medicine, tells the Voice. Sappol’s metaphor is apt: The Sammy Tubbs series mixes nearly every progressive and fringe element of 19th-century physiology and politics into a sort of patent-medicine speedball. There are lectures against tight-fitting clothes, against tobacco and alcohol, and for phrenology and animal magnetism; there are thrilling showdowns between bigotry and the rights of women and minorities. And there are, courtesy of illustrator H.L. Stephens, hundreds of drawings of everything from shrub-like capillary diagrams to flying monkeys and animated kitchen appliances. Rather more down to earth–if not downright earthy–illustrations include those of genitalia. One set of these occurs on page 180 1/2– the publishing netherworld equivalent of Floor 7 1/2 in Being John Malkovich�so that mortified parents could razor out the drawings without Junior noticing a break in pagination. But even razored copies still contained a drawing of a vagina with a tiny musical note tooting out of it–a sly touch by Stephens removed from later printings.

Sappol first encountered Tubbs in the early days of researching his recent book, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth Century America (Princeton University Press, 2002), newly published in paperback and featuring a chapter devoted to Tubbs.

I’d love to get a hold of a repro copy of this book. So far, I haven’t been able to track one down though. But I’ll find it. Oh, yes. I will find it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 24th, 2004 at 6:57 pm and is filed under Belonging To The Emperor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.