ABSTRACT
The vignettes in the four corners of the frame for the title pages of books in Juta’s Juvenile Library fix the parameters of many stories for young children for the first half of the twentieth century. They have their roots outside Africa, in European settlement, fairytale and myth or the stories brought to the country by enslaved people from the East. Even the hearth with its fire before which the children are seated, though not improbable for this country, is not typical — as the sunburst motif and recurrent references in the stories to sun, clear skies, heat and drought remind the reader.
