Marionettes.

Bookseller Notes

An attractive set of seventeen plates intended for use in an elementary school setting, illustrating not only the steps to construct a marionette from scratch but also how to build a stage with dramatic lighting. The Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State University holds a painting by Margaret L. Milley, dated 1920; the artist appears to have been a Buffalo native, and mother of the watercolourist Margaret M. Martin (1940-2012).The ownership inscription is likely that of the Reverend Leo Griswold Williams (1893-1942), a Universalist minister who taught theatre workshops and summer schools, topics including on the use of puppets, and who contributed a recipe on wood pulp to the 1934 Yearbook of Puppets & Marionettes. Williams was an enthusiast of amateur dramatics and the Little Theatre Movement, and founder of the Reading Community Players - the third oldest volunteer community theatre group in Pennsylvania. He died in odd circumstances, apparently electrocuting himself with a homemade apparatus intended to treat neck pain (Nassau Daily Review-Star, 19 February 1942).As a minister, Williams wrote the popular Universalist Covenant still used today: 'Love is the doctrine of this church. The quest of truth is its sacrament and Service is its prayer.' His outspoken pacifism during the First World War brought him under the suspicion of the FBI, after which he served with the American Friends Service Committee as a conscientious objector. He advocated for penal reform, birth control and interracial understanding - and once shocked his congregation by reading aloud 'sex plays', including Pollock's translation of Brieux's controversial play on syphilis, 'Les Avaris', in lieu of a sermon on three successive Sundays (Variety, March 1920).