The Queen of England, Camilla, stopped by the New York Public Library on Wednesday to pay a special visit to a small, carefully preserved stuffed animal that the library\u2019s president and chief executive, Anthony Marx, called \u201cthe world\u2019s most famous teddy bear.\u201d<\/p>\n
That would be Winnie-the-Pooh, a toy bought from Harrods department store in the 1920s and given by A.A. Milne, the author of the \u201cWinnie-the-Pooh\u201d books, to his son, Christopher Robin Milne. Along with the other stuffed animals that inspired the books \u2014 Kanga, Piglet, Eeyore and Tigger \u2014 Pooh resides in pride of place in a climate-controlled case in the Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library\u2019s Treasures.<\/p>\n
Alas, Kanga\u2019s baby, Roo, got lost somewhere in an English apple orchard in the 1930s. But Camilla, who arrived in the United States on Monday for a state visit<\/a> with her husband, King Charles III, came to the library bearing the next best thing: a bespoke replica of Roo produced by Merrythought, Britain\u2019s oldest surviving teddy bear manufacturer.<\/p>\n The visit was the first by a British royal to the New York Public Library since its founding, in 1895, and the queen took the opportunity to promote her literary charity, the Queen\u2019s Reading Room<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m hoping my voice isn\u2019t going to conk out before the end of this speech,\u201d Camilla said during a reception at the library\u2019s flagship location, the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Guests included library and literary luminaries \u2014 Sarah Jessica Parker, Jenna Bush Hager and Amor Towles among them \u2014 and a sprinkling of British expatriates living in New York, including the former Vogue magazine editor in chief Anna Wintour. \u201cAs you can imagine, I have been talking quite a lot over the past few days,\u201d Camilla said.<\/p>\n Camilla kept Roo in her purse while carrying him into the library, according to Marx. She then presented the doll to the library on a cushion emblazoned with the Union Jack.<\/p>\n It was quite sporting of Camilla not only to bring a present, but also to resist any impulse to take Pooh and his friends home with her. Such a request has been made before. In 1998, a member of the British Parliament named Gwyneth Dunwoody visited the toys in their previous location in the library \u2014 the children\u2019s room of the Donnell Library Center, which was located on West 53rd Street \u2014 and was not pleased with what she saw.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThey look very unhappy indeed,\u201d Dunwoody said at the time. \u201cI am not surprised, considering they have been incarcerated in a glass case in a foreign country for all these years.\u201d<\/p>\n In making her plea, Dunwoody invoked the poster child of problematic national treasure acquisitions, the ancient sculptures seized from the Parthenon in the early 19th century that have been on display at the British Museum for more than 200 years.<\/p>\n \u201cJust like the Greeks want their Elgin Marbles back,\u201d she said, \u201cso we want our Winnie-the-Pooh back, along with all his splendid friends.\u201d<\/p>\n The response from New York back then: No way, Jos\u00e9. Vowing to do \u201canything we can do to keep them here,\u201d then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said he would pay a personal visit to the library to check on Pooh & Co. \u201cHe just wants to reassure the bear that he is safe on American soil,\u201d his spokeswoman, Colleen S. Roche, said at the time.<\/p>\n All this raises the question: Why did Pooh, a Very English Bear, end up spending his retirement with his friends in a glass case \u2014 a studio apartment for five \u2014 in Midtown Manhattan? Milne, his creator, was a Very English Author; the bear\u2019s home was the fictional, but also Very English, Hundred Acre Wood. (It was inspired by Five Hundred Acre Wood, a portion of Ashdown Forest, near Milne\u2019s country home in East Sussex.) If the bear could talk, surely it would be with an English accent.<\/p>\n The answer requires a circuitous wander deep into the thicket of the past. It all began more than 100 years ago<\/a>, when Milne purchased that stuffed teddy bear at Harrods as a present for his 1-year-old son.<\/p>\n Christopher Robin named him Edward Bear, but then changed the name, basing it on two other animals: Winnipeg (\u201cWinnie,\u201d for short), a Canadian bear<\/a> who ended up in the London Zoo during World War I; and Pooh, a swan who appears in Milne\u2019s book \u201cWhen We Were Very Young.\u201d<\/p>\n Other stuffed animals \u2014 a kangaroo and her joey, a donkey, a tiger and a small upright pig \u2014 soon joined the Milne menagerie. Along with Christopher Robin, they became characters in Milne\u2019s whimsical, internationally best-selling books, and eventually part of the Disney cartoon universe. The books, which offer pre-Trumpian examples of using Sporadic Capitalization to Emphasize Certain Things<\/a>, chronicle adventures like Piglet\u2019s encounter with an elephantine Heffalump, Roo and Tigger\u2019s efforts to get down from a tree and Pooh\u2019s attempts to correctly count his honey jars.<\/p>\n For decades, the original animals remained in the possession of Christopher Robin Milne, who grew up to become a bookstore owner, although he felt conflicted about how the books had affected his life. (\u201cMy name was famous all over the world but it made me miserable to be pointed out as the son of my father,\u201d he once said<\/a>.) On a visit with Milne fils in 1947, Elliott Macrae<\/a>, the president of E.P. Dutton, the books\u2019 American publisher, spotted Pooh and his gang languishing in the corner of Milne\u2019s living room \u2014 everyone present and accounted for, except for the lost Roo.<\/p>\n Milne offered the toys to Macrae, who spirited them away on a tour of the United States. Dutton later bought the dolls from the A.A. Milne estate, and they were put on display<\/a> in a glass case in the publisher\u2019s lobby on Park Avenue. Occasionally, they were briefly liberated for visits to schools, literary festivals and the like.<\/p>\n Dutton itself was sold in 1985. Two years later, the publishing house\u2019s former owner, John Dyson, who was then the chairman of the New York State Power Authority, helped to arrange their donation<\/a> to the New York Public Library.<\/p>\n The squabble over the bear\u2019s rightful home during the Giuliani administration died down, but about 12 years ago, \u201cthe question of whether Pooh should go for a visit to the United Kingdom came up,\u201d Marx, the library president, said in an interview. In the end, it was determined that the trip would prove too damaging to the health of the old bear.<\/p>\n A bit careworn, even mangy-looking in their old age \u2014 in some cases bits of fur had rubbed off \u2014 Pooh and the others were given a professional makeover by a textile conservator several years ago. The idea was to restore the dolls to the way they looked when they were young, as a cosmetic surgeon would a person getting a face lift. Repairs included \u201cneck alignment, clavicle repair and bottom fluffing,\u201d The Guardian newspaper reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were careful not to have any work done that would change their appearance in any way,\u201d Michael Inman, the Susan Jaffe Tane curator of rare books at the library, said.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are so serious about the preservation of this animal that when he went for his conservation and was briefly outside of the glass box, I asked if, as president of the library, I could touch him,\u201d Marx said, of the Pooh toy. \u201cI was politely told no.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Queen of England, Camilla, stopped by the New York Public Library on Wednesday to pay a special…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":762916,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[9],"tags":[313482,36029,1157,313377,171,141618,68957,313481,89275,5228,312272,25249,67,132,68,313480],"class_list":["post-762915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-a-a","tag-books-and-literature","tag-camilla","tag-christopher-robin","tag-entertainment","tag-great-britain","tag-midtown-area-manhattan","tag-milne","tag-new-york-public-library","tag-ny","tag-queen-consort-of-the-united-kingdom","tag-toys","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-winnie-the-pooh-fictional-character"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116491813844222841","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=762915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/762916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=762915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=762915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=762915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}