Honestly, I’ve been in a Peter Arno mood for a very long time. It was just about sixteen years ago that I decided to write the biography of The New Yorker‘s greatest artist. One of the bonuses of digging deep was coming across little known (to me) books or pamphlets that bore Arno’s cover art and/or illustrations.
One of his earliest post-college outside-of-The New Yorker illustration jobs was for H. McCarty Lee’s France on Ten Words A Day, published in 1928 by Simon & Schuster (S&S published Arno’s first book, Whoops Dearie! the year before).
There’s an Arno on the front cover (as shown here) and on the back cover, and ten illustrations throughout the book (how I wish there were more). Below is just one example (caption translation: “Road hog!”):
Arno’s biography, Mad At Something, will be published in the Spring of 2016