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Friday, May 13, 2022

Hartwell/Pyle - The Little Tadpole - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

This month is so busy I decided to do three inter-related stories early and schedule their publishing for the next three weeks.  One of my programs is as the One-Room School Teacher.  Along the way I show some of the books used as enrichment in those classrooms.  E.C. Hartwell or Ernest Clark Hartwell produced the Story Hour Readings, from fourth year through eighth.  He also wrote a teaching manual for the series and one other book, The Teaching of HistoryBeyond that, since he was primarily the editor and not the author, the only information I could find on him was he was born in 1883 and died in 1964 long after the popularity of One-Room Schools.  

Because this year's cooperative Summer Reading Program's theme is water-related, I decided to choose stories that might be useful.  Starting with the Fourth Year I found a non-oceanic story, but appropriate to this springtime when frogs are singing.  It also helped that the story's written by Katherine Pyle.  She's less well-known than her brother, Howard Pyle, who has appeared here in five postings before.  Her art and writing, however, deserve to be better known and she certainly was acclaimed in her lifetime.

She's a perfect introduction to this Story Hour Readings trilogy and fits the purpose of "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."   It opens with a simple illustration not as complex as some of her artwork, but conveys the whimsy she often revealed.  It may even have been by one of the miscellany of illustrators used in the series as it's unsigned.




May the story stick with you when you hear everything from the Spring Peepers all the way to a deep bass bullfrog.  They all started out as Tadpoles!

That simple story was an introduction to the next two weeks when stories of sharks and swordfish bring high adventure to the older students.

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This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories.  



At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my regular posting of a research project here.  (Don't worry, this isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future storytelling to an audience.)  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other postings as often as I can manage it.
Other Public Domain story resources I recommend-
  • There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I have long recommended it and continue to do so.  He has loaded Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm
  • You may have noticed I'm no longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking specific types of stories.  There's another site, FairyTalez claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales, folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.

    Between those two sites, there is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait, there's more!"
The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:            
         - David K. Brown - http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html
         - Richard Martin - http://www.tellatale.eu/tales_page.html
         - Spirit of Trees - http://spiritoftrees.org/featured-folktales
         - Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, described below, but the late Jackie Baldwin's wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ .  It's not easy, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for October 22 2016  and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you.
       - World of Tales - http://www.worldoftales.com/ 
           - Zalka Csenge Virag - http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com doesn't give the actual stories, but her recommendations, working her way through each country on a continent, give excellent ideas for finding new books and stories to love and tell.
     
You're going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find some of these old links.  Tim's site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a full-time job.  In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she could no longer maintain it.  Possibly searches maintained it.  Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library (something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine.  It took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally in December of 2006 it appears!
    Somebody as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.  I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that becomes the only way to find them.
You can see why I recommend these to you. Have fun discovering even more stories!

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