There are but seven illustrations in Frank Case’s 1938 Tales Of A Wayward Inn — the “Wayward Inn” being The Algonquin Hotel (Mr. Case owned the place back in the Round Table days). Below is one of the seven: James Thurber’s take on the Algonquin’s lounge. According to Harrison Kinney’s Thurber bio, Thurber only attended one Round Table gathering (along
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Looking through a late 1930s issue of The New Yorker this morning (the February 4, 1939 issue to be exact) my eyes were drawn to an ad for Frank Case’s Tales Of A Wayward Inn (published in 1938). I’d never seen the ad before. The Wayward Inn is The Algonquin. Frank Case was, at that time, the owner and manager.
Read moreThere are a good number of places to read about the beginnings of The New Yorker by people who were there at the beginning. Jane Grant’s Ross, The New Yorker And Me is one (Ms. Grant was married to Harold Ross during the birth of the magazine), and then there’s Corey Ford’s The Time Of Laughter (mentioned here not long
Read moreIt being The New Yorker’s 90th anniversary, how fitting that the cover has been revealed for Thomas Vinciguerra’s Cast of Characters: Wolcott Gibbs, E.B. White, James Thurber, and The Golden Age of The New Yorker. Quite a crew gathered for a book party at the Algonquin Hotel in 1938: seated, left to right, Fritz Foord (who ran Foord’s Sanitarium in
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