File:SB-05-005-source-1.png

Summary

Description

The Editor and the Giraffe. A giraffe reaches through a window and takes a sheet of paper in its mouth. A startled editor, holding scissors, stands beside a desk and overturned chair; a second scene at lower left shows him diving head-first into a mug. The window, giraffe, figures, scissors, furniture, small wall portrait, printed title, complete fable and moral, frame and hatching match the scrapbook illustration.

Printed cutting catalogued by Cooper Hewitt as 1878, illustrated by Frederick Stuart Church. The same complete composition appears in G. Washington Æsop's Fables (New York: The World, 35 Park Row, 1878), printed p.40. The book title is dated 1878 and its copyright notice 1877. The catalogue status is Research in Progress; this date does not establish the first publication. The engraver is not securely identified here.

Compared directly with H. P. Blavatsky's Scrapbooks, volume 5, page 5, item 2. The handwritten date, address, signatures, notes, transcription and scrapbook image remain unchanged as a separate witness. This matching composition does not identify the physical copy used for the scrapbook cutting.

Source

Natural-colour photograph supplied by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, accession 1938-57-1070-184, exact media CHSDM-57269_02-000001. Credit line: Bequest of Erskine Hewitt. Medium in the official record: Printed in black ink on paper. This view shows the printed cutting mounted in an album; it is not a preparatory drawing. The same object's media01 shows The Prudent Tiger and is not used for this file.

• Museum object record.
• Persistent object identifier.
• Persistent identifier of this exact media view.
• Complete high-resolution museum photograph used for this crop.
• Matching Fables, 1878, printed p.40.

Thank you to Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum for preserving this material and freely providing its photographs and Open Access metadata.

File and processing

PNG, 1332 × 2192 pixels, RGB. Complete original museum JPEG: 4476 × 5422 pixels, 13280030 bytes, SHA-256 168d6b7e40dafbcf27aad2b6c064253f124c1ca6e1ebfb02bdff74d027f43334. This is the complete high-resolution JPEG, matching the advertised media dimensions. Its full dimensions do not describe the resolution of the smaller pasted illustration.

Illustration crop (1875, 1350)–(3255, 3590). One bicubic alignment correction of 0.132156 degrees clockwise, measured from the long printed bottom picture-frame rule. Final trim (24, 24)–(1356, 2216); right and bottom bounds are exclusive. No added canvas is included. The complete inner printed frame, figures, title, fable and moral are retained; the outer mounting-paper outline is excluded. Original paper colour, marks, show-through and scan artefacts remain. No enlargement, colour or tonal correction, sharpening, retouching or reconstruction was applied. PNG compression is lossless; the source itself is JPEG. The complete source is linked above.

Rights

The saved official Smithsonian Open Access record, captured on 29 October 2026, specifies CC0 for this exact media view and its metadata. The underlying nineteenth-century printed illustration is public-domain historical material. The attribution, accession and credit line are retained above.