Thurber Thursday: James Thurber’s Blue Plate Specials

                                          James Thurber’s Blue Plate Specials

The other day I received an email about several blue plates featuring drawings by James Thurber. I’d never seen anything like them before.

I guessed they might be homemade due to the choice of drawings. By that I mean that only one of the drawings, “Touche!”* would likely be thought of as “known” — the other two are somewhat obscure (information on these drawings appears further down in this post).

Other Thurber plates (and cups) have been around for a while on Ebay and elsewhere (a few shown below). These blue plates were not them.

After a few days of emails flying around, the source of the Thurber blue plates was discovered to be a discarded commercial venture. A “pottery friend” of the owners of these plates found the following information in the Collector’s Encyclopedia of Stangl Dinnerware:

________________________________________________________________________________

*Re: “Touche!”

From Thurber Thursday, August 31, 2024:

The drawing was originally published in The New Yorker December 3, 1932, and has been included in numerous Thurber collections over the years (it is, of course, in The Thurber Carnival — the must-have, desert island Thurber collection). Beyond being a great drawing, it stands alone, as far as I know, in the Thurber cartoon canon, as the only time Thurber did a drawing that originated with another cartoonist (the great Carl Rose).

Thurber told the tale in his own The Years With Ross, saying that after Harold Ross (The New Yorker‘s founder and first editor) took a look at Rose’s original sketch, he thought it “too bloody and gruesome, and asked Rose to let [Thurber] have a swing at it, because ‘Thurber’s people have no blood. You can put their heads back on and they’re good as new.’”   

Further plate notes:

The published caption for the No use trying to save me! plate was:

“There’s no use trying to save me, my good man.”  It was published in The New Yorker, June 2, 1934.

The published caption for Give the officer a drink! was:

“One of you men in the kitchen give the officer another drink.” It appeared in The New Yorker, December 17, 1932. [The New Yorker database incorrectly lists the drawing as appearing in the issue of April 30, 1932. The Thurber drawing in that issue is “If I’m a fake, Officer, how do you account for this?”]

–My thanks to Sara Thurber Sauers for inspiring this post, and to the fine folks at Thurber House. My thanks as well to the Thurber blue plate owners and their pottery friend who came up with the plates’ origin story.  

If anyone out there has other New Yorker Stangl products they wish to share please contact me.