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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Latest Addition To The Spill Archive: “A Thurber Carnival” Program Last Spring, while visiting the Thurber House, I ran into the poster shown below for A Thurber Carnival. It immediately brought to mind Burton Bernstein‘s passage about Thurber returning to Columbus for the play’s premier: “On January 7, 1960, A Thurber Carnival opened at the Hartman Theater in Columbus, Ohio…Of
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I was looking very carefully through a later edition of Thurber’s must-have collection, The Seal In The Bedroom, when I realized my eyes kept focusing on the wall art that appears in so many of his single panel drawings. If there’s one element of Thurber’s art that I’ve consciously used in my own work over the years, it is the
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The big Thurber news this week is, of course, The New Yorker‘s republication of Thurber’s February 29, 1936 cover (as well as the use of various Thurber animals as Spot drawings throughout the September 4th issue. Below to the left is an original 1936 cover, and the the right, the 2023 cover. Next week I’ll compare the two. Sharp-eyed readers
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