I did not go looking for Mable Pyne. She found me. Knowing I enjoyed books, my partner’s daughter gifted me with The Little Geography of the United States. As far as I know, there’s no biography of Mable’s life, nor does Wikipedia have a listing.
But I did find a meager note posted by the University of Southern Mississippi. I learned Mable was born on January 15, 1903 in Mount Vernon, New York, a suburb north of the Bronx and about eighteen miles from midtown Manhattan. She died in 1969.
I unearthed more information. When We Were Little, a memoir illustrated by Mable and written by three generations of her family, Mable writes about growing up in a railroad flat not far from Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother was determined that all her three children “learn to do everything.” Her father, a veteran of the Spanish-American War, taught his children how to shoot using the ends of sharpened wooden kitchen matches as bullets. Maple regularly borrowed books from the Children’s Room in the Pratt Institute where she later studied art.
Houghton Mifflin Company published the Little Geography in 1941. Mable wrote and illustrated the book for children using her own wonderful iconography. Her maps reveal the entire economy of the United States, a scattering of cows, corn, cotton, oil rigs, milk and cheese, and minerals across every state, taking you on a cross-country trip through rivers and mountains, deserts and western plains, including canals, volcanoes and islands.
What’s special, however, is the quality of her illustrations, a few inches high, with approximately eight to ten per page. They capture the “isness” of whatever she’s drawing, possibly pen and ink sketches using color for highlights: Forty-niners pushing a donkey loaded with a pickaxe and supplies up a steep incline, or the idea of a bear followed by blurry cubs. Her sketch lines capture the moment. The illustrations are charming, but more than that. Mable is a storyteller as well as an artist.
In describing the agriculture of Virginia, she starts with the headline PEANUTS.
Of course children like them elephants LOVE them, and squirrels beg for them. But COWS think they are fine eating too. So Virginia grows MILLIONS of peanuts.
Although her books appeared long before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1962, one senses that Mable was a strong feminist who featured girls and women in all her illustrations playing an active role at both work and husbandry, climbing mountains and picking apples, engaged in all aspects of life.
There’s also The Story of Religion, a book published in 1954, also by Houghton Mifflin Company. It tackles the daunting task of explaining the world’s religions in fifty-four beautifully illustrated pages—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This is no small task, but Pyne does just that providing information that pays homage to the builders of temples and churches and the artisans who adorned the interiors of religious meeting places. She offers, “Perhaps there is no future life, think some: all that one does on earth is what counts. Others are sure the soul returns to the Creator.”
Through her own silvered mirror, Mable Pyne reflected the better part of our world. During International Women’s History Month, I honor her achievements as a talented educator who promoted understanding and tolerance, something we need more than ever.