Wandering around Ebay, I came across an unknown (to me) Thurber piece, “I Can’t Make Anything Work” in a magazine, For Men (June 1939). According to Edwin Bowden’s Thurber Bibliography, this was its only appearance (i.e., not collected). Oddly(?), a piece titled, “I Break Everything I Touch” was published in 1941 in another magazine, The Man. That piece is included
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An oddity! Thurber’s drawing on the cover of Sports Illustrated (November 7, 1960) seems to have eluded Edwin Bowden’s essential James Thurber: A Bibliography. It also does not merit a mention in any of my other go-to Thurber books (the biographies and letters books). The one place it is mentioned, and appears, is the fab A Mile and A Half Of Lines:
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Last week I showed three James Thurber spot drawings that appeared in several early 1950s New Yorkers I came across in bound volumes. You might wonder why I’m talking about Thurber spot drawings when his spots appeared many many times in previous decades. The reason is that by the 1950s Thurber was no longer drawing work for publication. His TIME
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Thurber’s Shakespeare The other day I ran (online) into this wonderful double page spread in the September 1935 issue of Stage Magazine: “James Thurber Presents William Shakespeare.” Bowden’s James Thurber: A Bibliography, is ever-so-slightly off in his accounting of the Stage drawings, saying there are four drawings (there are five). Not clear to me why these were run white
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