Tom Tit Tot; and A Sketch of the Whole Complicated Subject of Universal History

Tom Tit Tot, a collaborative project by the poet Susan Howe and her daughter, the artist R. H. Quaytman, comprises sixty-seven poems written by Howe and artwork by Quaytman, who also designed the book. Howe’s poems are based on fragments of text extracted from readings in American, British, and Irish folklore; poetry; philosophy; art criticism; and history. The title, Tom Tit Tot, refers to the English folktale about a mysterious and menacing character also known as Rumpelstiltskin. In the book, Quaytman makes reference to the work of Emma Hart Willard (1787–1870), an American author, educator, and activist for both civil and women’s rights. In addition to evoking the geographical atlases Willard devised to accompany her writings on history, Quaytman based her image for the frontispiece on two of Willard’s visualizations of geography and history, Picture of Nations and Temple of Time. The book contains three other works by Quaytman: a black-and-white detail of an unraveled baby’s sock based on a photoengraving found in Thérèse de Dillmont’s 1866 Encyclopedia of Needlework, an impression of a thumbprint on a sheet of black paper, and an abstracted detail from her design for the book’s frontispiece. On the spine, Quaytman stamped gold lines that recall the edges of the plywood panels found in some of her paintings.