Latest Addition To The Spill Library…
Let’s see, how many variations are there of Thurber’s 1937 collection, Let Your Mind Alone! Too many for me to count at the moment. I will show a few of them though — the earlier editions, including one that’s making its way, via the mail, to Spill headquarters. One edition shown here that is not in the Spill library — not on its way to the library — is the 1937 UK first edition. I’ll eventually hunt one down…I hope.
Above: on the left is the US 1st edition (published by Harper & Brothers) in 1937. On the the right is the UK 1st (published by Hamish Hamilton), also published in 1937.
Above: the Armed Services edition, published in 1944.
Above, two more UK editions from Hamish Hamilton: left, published in 1948; right: published in 1954
The brownish 1948 copy is the latest addition to the Spill library. The first time I saw this edition I was taken by the paper bag quality of the cover design and its industrial typeface — so very different than what had come before, and after. Different can sometimes be a graphic disaster, but in this case different is fascinating (to me, at least).
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James Thurber’s A-Z Entry:
James Thurber Born, Columbus, Ohio, December 8, 1894. Died 1961, New York City. New Yorker work: 1927 -1961, with several pieces run posthumously. According to the New Yorker’s legendary editor, William Shawn, “In the early days, a small company of writers, artists, and editors — E.B. White, James Thurber, Peter Arno, and Katharine White among them — did more to make the magazine what it is than can be measured.”
Key cartoon collection: The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments (Harper & Bros., 1932). Key anthology (writings & drawings): The Thurber Carnival (Harper & Row, 1945). There have been a number of Thurber biographies. Burton Bernstein’s Thurber (Dodd, Mead, 1975) and Harrison Kinney’s James Thurber: His Life and Times (Henry Holt & Co., 1995) are essential. Website