Enroute to the recent convention, I stopped off at the Hunterdon County Library in northwestern New Jersey. That may not mean much to you, but Kurt Wiese, illustrator of the Freddy books, spent most of his adult life in Frenchtown in Hunterdon County. I had previously been contacted via the Freddy Website by someone who had known Wiese when he was younger and, in response to my requests, had sent along some local newspaper clippings about Wiese. These clippings mentioned, among other things, that Wiese had donated some of his artwork to the local library. My contact informed me that, so far as he knew, the library still had this artwork.
A phone call to the reference desk confirmed this and set up an appointment. I arrived the Friday afternoon of the convention and was surprised to see the extent of the collection: nearly 150 original Wiese illustrations, of which around 50 were from the Freddy the Pig books. They supplied me with a stack of the smaller originals (on the order of 8"x10") as well as a larger stack containing photocopies of the entire set. I was disappointed that the originals didn't include any of the Freddy illustrations and pointed this out, whereupon they brought up some of the Freddy originals. These were significantly larger (14"x17" or so and sometimes larger), and they only let me look at them three at a time.
The originals were done in black ink with some occasional white-out. The collection appeared to include an almost complete set from Bean Home News, as well as illustrations from Freginald, Clockwork Twin, Wiggins for President, Freddy's Cousin Weedly, Ignormus, and Spaceship. Along with the photocopies of the illustrations was a list of them, indicating the source of each illustration. This was occasionally inaccurate and sometimes incomplete. I asked if I could annotate this list, and the librarian told me I could. I added identifications for some of them, but still couldn't identify others.
Then I had an idea: I'd make photocopies of the still-unidentified ones and take them along to the convention, where all of our erudite experts gathered in one place would have the opportunity to examine them and come to a definitive conclusion.
Those of you at the convention on Sunday morning will know that that's exactly what I did, and we were very successful at identifying the sources of the remaining illustrations. Thanks go to Sarah Koslosky and Michael Cart in particular for their masterful identification efforts. I have since written the Hunterdon County Library with the sources we identified and, while I haven't yet heard back from them, I'm sure they're very grateful.
Speaking of which, I'd like to express my thanks to reference librarian Leslie Moore and his associates for taking the time to prepare the collection for me and for their support while I was there.
If you happen to be in the vicinity, I encourage you to stop by the library to see what a Wiese original looks like. The library is located just outside of Flemington, New Jersey, about half-an-hour's drive north of Trenton. The phone number of the reference desk is 908.788.1434, and the library has a nice Web site at http://www.hunterdon.lib.nj.us.