Book Review: The Gift Is Small the Love Is Great

Title: The Gift Is Small the Love Is Great

Author: Frederick S. Weiser

Date: 1994

Publisher: York

ISBN: none

Length: 120 pages

Illustrations: full-color photos on almost every page

Quote: “This limited edition...is privately published...for the enjoyment of our clients, friends, and employees...the 23^rd in a series of Keepsake books.”

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in Pennsylvania, across the various German religious communities that formed various towns, simple colored-ink drawings called Fraktur were used to decorate books and documents, sheet music, and sometimes furniture (a particularly pleasing drawing would be pasted onto the wood for everyone to look at, though drawings that have survived were pasted to the insides of wooden chests). These drawings were one-off, private souvenirs of occasions, often given to a new church member at baptism or to a student at the end of a course. The most elaborate might use two shades of light and dark green, blue, or red; simpler Fraktur were done in black or sepia, with shading effects produced by drawing more or fewer lines. Most of the drawings were the kind of simple, stylized, often symmetrical motifs students learn to make in drawing classes; leaves, roses, tulips, finch, and Valentine “heart” shapes predominate.

Fraktur were usually done on unbleached white paper, occasionally framed by wood or cardboard. Warm red, warm yellow, moss green, and the shade of brown produced by mixing those colors, are the most common colors used. Blue is less often found, partly because the bird, leaf, and flower motifs favored were not blue in real life, but a few specimens show blue ink that has not completely oxidized to black or green.

This short book consists mostly of photos of especially well preserved and colorful Fraktur.

While some Fraktur adorned the backs or separate sections of written documents or stood on their own as pictures, many incorporated calligraphy. The writing was usually in German, often in dialects that differ from the regulation German foreigners may have studied. Occasionally documents decorated with Fraktur were simple documentations of names and dates. Often they incorporated verses, Scriptures, or beautiful thoughts. A few were meant to be funny; one pair of pictures depict an argument between two chickens shown squawking at each other from mounds of compost.

As visual art Fraktur showed a close relationship with embroidered pictures from the same period. Simplicity and symmetry are selling points. Although the specimens reprinted in this book are masterpieces, in fact Fraktur were, like the embroideries, often done by children, and new pieces could be done by children today. Who knows what Magic Marker drawings done today, stored inside a drawer, will look like in two hundred years?

Where the original calligraphy was legible to Weiser’s practiced eye, in most cases he typed and translated it. In a few cases, like a thirteen-verse poem based on Hosea 11 (each verse enclosed in a heart above a tulip), he settled for a summary. Christian-phobics beware: Although the focus of this collection is on pretty pictures, many wordless and some with calligraphies that merely give names and dates, when a long text is included it was usually Christian. Weiser, a minister, didn't mind.

This book will probably appeal to anyone interested in any visual art, from simple drawing/coloring to computer graphics. A wooden frame included in one photo, described as “much later,” shows that although Fraktur was not especially congenial with “art in the round,” it is possible for carvings, sculptures, knitting, etc., to take inspiration from Fraktur.

The Gift Is Small was a limited-edition book meant to be a collector's item, so it surprises me that, perhaps because it's small and soft-covered, the heavy glossy paper and glorious color haven't gained value faster than they have. Amazon lists secondhand copies selling for probably no more than Weiser's friends were asked to pay for production costs when the book was new. If you like early American folk art, this amount of it is a bargain at $20 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 if you pay online. About a half-dozen more books of comparable size will fit into a $5 package. Regrettably, Weiser has no remaining use for the $2.50 he'd get if this were a Fair Trade Book, but you're encouraged to add Fair Trade Books to the package.