Happening Upon Millmoss
The most recent addition to the Spill library is this very heavy bound volume of New Yorkers, from June through October of 1934. Although the cover is showing its age, the magazines themselves are in great shape.
One of the pleasures of sitting down with a new old bunch of now ancient New Yorkers is coming upon the unexpected: whether it’s a great “spot” drawing, or a Profile, or, of course, a cartoon.
It took looking through the first five issues in this volume before I turned to pages 10 & 11 of the July 14th ’34 issue. Although my eye should’ve gone to the large Alain drawing on page 10, it was the smaller Thurber drawing at the bottom of page 11 that immediately got my attention and set off fireworks.
There, in its natural habitat, sat Thurber’s “What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?” — a drawing I’ve written about numerous times because… it changed my life.
Although I’ve looked at the drawing numerous times (an understatement) in The Thurber Carnival, I cannot recall that I had ever seen it as it first appeared in The New Yorker. If I did see it in the magazine, it would’ve likely been back in college while zooming through the bound volumes in the UConn library stacks.
And so here it was, set in a humble space near the gutter of the magazine. By the time I first saw it in The Thurber Carnival, when I was a teenager, it was about 37 or 38 years old. Now 88 years old, Millmoss has proven itself to be…ageless.
