Here’s a fun oddity: the stamp/envelope moistener that once sat in The New Yorker‘s Art Department at the magazine’s 25 West 43rd Street address. The moistener, sold by Chicago’s Wilson Jones Company, seems have been manufactured in the 1940s. It was in use at The New Yorker until 1991, when the magazine moved south across 43rd Street to modern digs
Read moreTag: Harold Ross
The Forever Fun Work By Nurit Karlin, Dana Fradon, and Gahan Wilson
2019 was an unusually rough year in the loss column for New Yorker cartoonists. We lost Nurit Karlin in April, Dana Fradon in October, and then Gahan Wilson in November. Although we miss them, and mourn them, we have thousands of their cartoons at hand in anthologies, collections, and online. A wonderful thing happened this morning when I began looking
Read moreJames Thurber, Cartoon Critic; William Steig Drawings At Auction; Meet The Artist (1943): Gluyas Williams
James Thurber, Cartoon Critic On a recent search through Thurber biographies in the Spill library I happened upon a Thurber letter I’d forgotten about. Written to Harold Ross, and dated October 20, 1941, it appears in the mother ship of all Thurber biographies, Harrison Kinney’s twelve hundred and thirty-eight page Thurber: His Life And Times (Henry Holt, 1995). Thurber, unhappy
Read more“The Table In Mr. Ross’s Office Where We Used To Sit To Work On Pictures”; Book Of Interest: Alay-Oop By William Gropper; A Case For Pencils On Maddie Dai’s Tools Of The Trade; Daily Shouts & Daily Cartoon Cartoonists; Meet The Artist (1943): Dorothy McKay
“The Table Where We Used To Sit To Work On Pictures” A photo I’ve seen before on the web, but never with the note attached you see above. The letter, signed “Jim” was written by the then art editor James Geraghty.* The “Gardner” it’s addressed to was likely Gardner Rea, one of the magazine’s artists. There’s another possibility: the “Gardner”
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