Latest Additions to The Spill Library:
Through the kindness of two friends of the Spill, two book deliveries arrived at my door this week.
Here’s the first:
What you see above, from the top down:
The very first New Yorker Album …a heart-stopper whenever I see a dust-jacketed copy. This one has (amazingly, considering its age: 97 years) retained the strength of its original coloring (see below):
Below that debut Album, is the 1979 Peter Arno collection (the Introduction is by Charles Saxon). This is a much better copy than the one I’ve had for so many years. If you’re shopping for an excellent Arno anthology, this is a very good choice (the other is Ladies and Gentlemen, published when Arno was still with us).
I won’t go through all the books in the pile. Each is a gem, and highly recommended should you spot one in a library sale or used book store. The dust-jacketed copy of The 25th Anniversary Album (there are two shown, the other is sans dust-jacket) is, like the Arno collection, a step up, condition-wise, from the ones already in the Spill library. Of all the Albums out there in used book store land, the 25th seems to be the most popular. But it’s rare to find one with an intact dust-jacket. I regard that as a compliment — i.e., a lot of people apparently couldn’t put the book down. It’s as good a piece of early New Yorker cartoon history as you’ll ever find.
The book just below the Arno collection is The Fourth New Yorker Album (published in 1931). On a humorous (?) note: years ago, pre-internet, when I was trying to gather every New Yorker Album, The Fourth Album turned out to be the great white whale. One day, Edward Sorel (who knew of my quest) let me know he’d found one in a used bookstore in Manhattan. He seemed as happy as I was when he handed me the book. Since that wonderful day, I’ve run into several other Fourth copies. Still smarting from the frustration of the initial search, I never fail to pick them up (I think there are four or five now in the library, but only one is dust-jacketed. That very very hard to find dust jacket — art by Rea Irvin — came my way courtesy of Chris Wheeler).
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The other additions, from another good friend of the Spill, are from modern times (relatively speaking). These two belong to an unknown number of New Yorker collections produced through the magazine’s Cartoon Bank. Some years back I had the wild notion of trying to collect all of these books, but since there is no source telling us how many titles were produced, I wouldn’t know if I actually had them all. The museum collection is from 2006 (that’s a Mike Twohy drawing on the cover), and the wine book is from 2011 (a cartoon by Leo Cullum is on the cover).
Below: the last time I gathered the titles together for a photo shoot (the photo includes “official” titles published under the auspices of the magazine itself).
