The house that Crane built: Walter Crane, "The house that Jack built", and the artist’s early book production

The Caroline Miller Parker Collection of the Work of Walter Crane at Harvard University is one of the most important holdings of this artist in the world, and certainly the largest in the United States. With its 2,300 original drawings and sketches, 200 letters, 300 printed copies of books and albums, 150 manuscript poems, eighty sketchbooks, and twenty-two so-called “black books” (manuscript story books and albums, with a total of more than 500 pages of original illustration), the Houghton Library’s vast collection holds newly-discovered or long forgotten original materials that authoritatively solve many lingering attribution and chronology riddles in Crane studies. From a thousand possible subjects prompted by sustained study of this collection, I focus in this article on a series of notes and original drawings for Crane’s early toy book The House That Jack Built, examining in particular the problematic identity of its publisher, the chronology of publication, and the intended number of illustrations to accompany it.