This Search Has a Happy Ending

It’s no secret that a childhood experience can lead an adult down a path of fancy dreams and plain hard work. But the connection between inspiration and achievement is not always clear--even to the person who has the dream and fulfills it.

Take Mus White, the Danish American author of “From the Mundane to the Magical: Photographically Illustrated Children’s Books, 1854-1945 and Beyond,” the first major bibliography of its kind. Published by Dawson’s Book Shop in Los Angeles and scheduled for release in early April, it contains 1,421 book citations, 57 photographs, an introductory historical overview by White and a whimsical preface by contemporary photographer Duane Michals.

Exploring the relationship between photography and juvenile literature--and embracing Pictorialist, Surrealist and Modernist photography styles--the landmark bibliography is likely to become an important resource for scholars and collectors. Among notable entries are an illustrated volume of rhymes by Hans Christian Andersen, published in 1866; “Master St. Elmo: The Autobiography of a Celebrated Dog,” a 1904 collection of photographs of a dressed-up dog that predates William Wegman’s work by seven decades; and “The Jaunts of Junior,” an Art Nouveau tour de force of photomontages by Arthur B. Phelan, published in 1911.

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Nine years in the making, the bibliography is a labor of passion and perseverance that evolved from White’s lifelong habit of collecting children’s books and many years of work with her husband, photography collector and private dealer Stephen White. But until a couple of months ago, it hadn’t occurred to her that a book she had loved during her childhood in Denmark foreshadowed her literary debut.

“I collected illustrated children’s books when I was a child in Copenhagen, just because I liked them,” she said during an interview at her home in Brentwood. “That isn’t so unusual--everyone likes children’s books--but I bought older ones. My favorite was about a girl from Greenland who was named Little Fingers, and I read it every day.”

White didn’t forget the book, but she had never mentioned it to her husband. “About two months ago, out of the blue, I told Stephen about that book,” she said. “He stopped and stared at me. Then he asked me if it was illustrated. I said it was--with photographs--but I didn’t know who wrote it and I didn’t even know the title. I had been back to Denmark several times, and I had thought of looking for it, but I never did, partly because I collect books published up to 1945, and I thought it was a later book. But Stephen said, ‘You are crazy not to go and find that book. That’s your reason for being.’ ”

She contacted a friend in Denmark, who found a copy of the book, “Lillefingers Store Eventyr” (Little Fingers’ Great Adventure), with grainy, black-and-white photographs by John Knox-Seth. Much to her surprise, White discovered that it was published in 1934. “Mine must have been a later, jubilee edition, because I remember a picture on the frontispiece of the queen of Denmark, who must have been about 10 or 12 years old at the time, which makes it in the ‘50s,” she said. “Also, I remember the pictures being glossy, so that edition was probably printed on different paper.”

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White hasn’t located a copy from the edition she remembers, but she is delighted to have renewed her acquaintance with Little Fingers. “It’s a story about harsh conditions and surviving them, but it’s also a very nurturing story,” she said of the slim book with a bright green cover. “Not many people remember children’s books illustrated with photographs. When I mention the subject, people look at me blankly. But here I am, and here’s the book. It did exist.”

White met her American husband, then an aspiring writer, while he was studying in Copenhagen and she was still in high school. She left Denmark for the U.S. after her graduation in 1965, and they were married soon afterward.

“I had boxes of books, but I left them with friends who had young children,” she said. “I don’t know why; I guess I was eager to come here and start a new life. But I started collecting children’s books again, almost right away. After a while, I had quite a nice collection of children’s books--illustrated, but not with photographs. That idea came to me later on, in 1976, after we had opened a gallery.” Launched in 1975, the Stephen White Gallery, a major local showcase for photography, continued for 15 years in various locations in West Hollywood.

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White eventually realized that she couldn’t compete with established collectors of children’s books. “I couldn’t duplicate what they had done, and I knew that to be a real collector you have to do something unique or special. So I thought, why don’t I specialize in collecting children’s books that are illustrated with photographs? It’s a natural. It hit me like a bolt of lightning,” she said.

But she lacked the necessary time and money to concentrate on the project until 1990, when Stephen sold his collection of about 15,000 photographs and related items to the Photographic Center of the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum in Tokyo. He never revealed the price, but the multimillion-dollar deal ended the Whites’ financial struggles, and they closed their gallery.

“After we sold the collection, I didn’t know what to do with myself,” Mus White said. “I had lost my job. I had been working really hard for many years, and then I was sitting in this big house. I wasn’t complaining, but it felt overwhelming.” Building her collection and compiling the bibliography was “an ideal situation,” she said. “It saved me from myself.”

When she began the project in earnest, in 1990, she already had about 1,000 photographically illustrated children’s books. Now she owns more than 2,000 examples. “I began to look for books that I knew were out there and I had to have. But it was a strange process,” she said. “I think when you start looking for something seriously, it comes to you. That happened to me over and over again.”

Her favorite example is the Hans Christian Andersen book, illustrated with photographs of children in whimsical settings by Harald Paetz. “I think it’s the gem of my collection,” she said. “I was in Denmark in the fall of 1989, and a friend there told me he had seen it in a bookstore. I knew of the book, but of course I never thought I could own it because it’s so rare. This friend said he might buy it because the photographs were so sweet, but he was thinking of cutting it up [to sell the illustrations separately].

“I said, ‘You are out of your mind.’ This was on a Saturday after the store was closed, and I was leaving Sunday morning. I said, ‘Go find the book dealer. I don’t care how or what you do, but get him into the store and buy the book. Whatever you pay for it, I’ll give you double.’ As I was going to the plane, my friend came running and handed me the book. I sat with it in my lap all the way back, and I was ecstatic.” The transaction cost her about $400, which seemed like a lot of money at the time, she said, but it was probably a bargain, even then.

White has compiled a broad, international collection--including books from Russia, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Hong Kong--but she chose 1945 as the cutoff date for the bibliography. “It seemed to be the natural limit because books changed a lot after the war and there were so many of them,” she said. But she became fascinated with well-known modern and contemporary photographers who have illustrated children’s books--including Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke White and Cindy Sherman--so she added a separate list of their books, up to 1995.

Writing a bibliography is an extremely tedious process, White said. “It’s not fun because you have to enter all the books precisely and count the pictures. In the beginning I had a goal of 10 books a day. When I saw the piles getting smaller, I felt much better. It wasn’t like doing the dishes, which come back. At least the books were done. There was a great satisfaction in that.”

It helps to have a “compulsive nature,” she said. “Most people couldn’t do it; they would go crazy. One thing I discovered about myself was that I could do it. I even got a sort of perverse pleasure out of it. But when I finally got to writing the introduction, it was really fun because I had choices. I could write about any book I liked. That was the creative part.”

Now that her academic project is complete, she is thinking of writing more accessible picture books on the same topic. Exhibitions from her collection are another possibility, including a show at the New York Public Library that is currently under discussion.

Undertaking such an old-fashioned project in the Computer Age makes one feel a bit like a dinosaur, White said. But she enjoys having a substantial project of her own after years of laboring alongside her husband. “Even people who are seriously involved with photography are showing an interest in the bibliography, which is ironic,” she said. “When I first started, they thought I was just collecting my piddly little books.”