Boxed In
I’ve had these two Thurber boxed books on the shelf for awhile. Both were gifts. Further Fables For Our Time was the first to land here, given to us by a 100 year old woman we knew from the area. It’s a single copy of Further Fables in a hard cardboard case. The second box was handed over to me in the parking lot next to what was then the University of Connecticut’s Print Shop (sadly, it no longer stands — it was my second home at UConn). A fellow who brought an exhibit of my wife’s work and mine to the Storrs campus, nonchalantly handed the Thurber Carnival/Alarms & Diversions box to me, just as Liza and I were about to get into our car. The copy of Alarms & Diversions was signed (I’ve written about the significance of this book being gifted to me at UConn). So a sort of double “moment”: a box I’d never seen before and a signed Thurber book.
More recently, while zipping around the internet, I came across a modern Thurber box I’d never seen before, The Best Of Thurber. Published/produced in 1977 by Penguin (in association with Hamish Hamilton, Thurber’s long-time UK publisher) the box contains four titles, in paperback: The Beast In Me and Other Animals, Thurber’s collaboration with E. B. White: Is Sex Necessary, The Thurber Carnival, and Thurber Country.
This box falls into the category of something I want for the archive because of the wonderful packaging (the Spill archive has various editions of each of these books). I love the single drawing on the Best Of’s book covers, and the single drawing on each side of the box. Thurber’s hippo on the cover of The Beast In Me tipped the scales (not that there needed to be much tipping).
The photo above is from another boxed set online — not the set I ordered (that box is shown below). I found a very inexpensive box (under $10.00 before shipping) offered by a bookstore in the UK. The seller was kind enough to send me some scans. The Best of Thurber box is on its way across the Atlantic right this moment. I love the dog on the box, and the box itself, charmingly beat.
