For the past twenty-seven summers, my wife, Liza Donnelly, and I have gone to the same Downeast home, and over those years, have built a small library of books, some New Yorker-centric (but many having nothing to do with the magazine). Copies of all of The New Yorkery books in Maine are also in the Spill‘s library back home
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Boxed Thurber The only two Thurber boxed books in the Spill library are shown below (a modern box is out there, but I’m only focusing on books published during his lifetime. The first set, produced in September of 1959, boxes The Thurber Carnival and Alarms and Diversions. Carnival was originally published in 1945; Alarms and Diversions in 1957. This box
Read moreBack in late 2014, the cartoonist Mike Lynch kindly asked me if I’d like to contribute something to his publication, Raconteur, “a collection of true stories written and illustrated by cartoonists who usually specialize in other formats.” My first (and only) thought was to put down on paper a graphic report of a nutty Thurber-centric non-event in my college life.
Read morePardon this little trip down memory lane. In 1975 I printed this first book of mine on a creaky noisy offset press in the basement of the Print Shop at The University of Connecticut in Storrs (the Print Shop, a little paradise on campus, is no more, torn down and replaced — a la Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”
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