Thurber Thursday: A Button And A Book

A Button

Sometimes the simplest things are the best things. Take for instance the Thurber dog eraser in the photo shown here. It came from the Thurber House gift shop I don’t know how many years ago. I’ve never used it as an eraser, and now, even if I wanted to (and I never will), it’s too late, as it’s become as hard as a rock over the years.

A few weeks ago the button shown below was included in a swag bag handed to me while attending the Thurber Prize Award ceremony. It’s as simple as can be, and just the right size (about the same as a quarter). I think it’s great. 

Other items in the bag included Thurber stickers, and a copy of James Thurber: Collected Fables, edited by the terrific Michael Rosen.

Published in 2019 (to celebrate the 125th year of Thurber’s birth) it contains Thurber fables previously published in Thurber’s lifetime, as well as never-before collected Thurber fables, with ten illustrated by contemporary artists, including, among others, Victoria Roberts, Seymour Chwast, and R.O. Blechman. 

Before heading over to Thurber House on a rainy morning in a hotel room at Columbus’s Great Southern Hotel (where Thurber’s mother lived for a time), I pulled a chair up to a big window looking out over the city, and re-read a number of these fables. What fun. 

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Thurber’s A-Z entry:

James Thurber Born, Columbus, Ohio, December 8, 1894. Died 1961, New York City. New Yorker work: 1927 -1961, with several pieces run posthumously. According to the New Yorker’s legendary editor, William Shawn, “In the early days, a small company of writers, artists, and editors — E.B. White, James Thurber, Peter Arno, and Katharine White among them — did more to make the magazine what it is than can be measured.”

Key cartoon collection: The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments (Harper & Bros., 1932). Key anthology (writings & drawings): The Thurber Carnival (Harper & Row, 1945). There have been a number of Thurber biographies. Burton Bernstein’s Thurber (Dodd, Mead, 1975) and Harrison Kinney’s James Thurber: His Life and Times (Henry Holt & Co., 1995) are essential. Website