Latest Addition To The Spill Library…A UK Edition Of “The Seal In The Bedroom”
Was pleased a few weeks ago to finally find an affordable copy of the UK 1951 edition of James Thurber’s first collection of drawings, originally published here by Harper & Brothers in 1932 (Hamish Hamilton published this 1951 edition). As far as I can tell — using Edwin T. Bowden’s indispensable James Thurber: A Bibliography as my source — this was the first edition published in the UK — not sure why it took nearly twenty years!
This well read copy certainly has a history: it was published in England in 1951, purchased (by me) seventy-four years later from a bookseller in France, then traveled across the Atlantic, finally setlling in here in New York.
I really like the simplicity of the cover — the ever-so-slightly off-white tan color, and the thin paper dust jacket. Most of all, I love that Thurber’s drawing is front and center without a single design element elbowing its way into the spotlight. The only thing missing is the caption: “All right, have it your way — you heard a seal bark!”
Thurber wrote of the drawing: “I was surprised as I was delighted when its appearance in the magazine in January, 1932, brought me a truly ecstatic telegram from Bob Benchley, than whom there was nobody whose praise a cartoonist or humorist would rather have had. I gave him the original of the drawing, and named my first book of pictures The Seal In The Bedroom because of what he had said.” *
Here’s the back cover with an assortment of blurbs from UK newspapers.
Below, on the left is the first US edition (it still gets my vote as best Seal cover); the 1950 US edition is on the right.
*From Thurber’s The Years With Ross (Atlantic, Little, Brown 1959). p.53-4.
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James Thurber’s A-Z Spill 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