Now In The Public Domain: Is Sex Necessary?
I just came across the four-and-a-half months old news that the original edition of E.B. White & James Thurber’s 1929 edition of Is Sex Necessary? entered the public domain as of this year. Above is the Spill‘s copy, swathed in a plastic protective cover. Seeing this edition on the shelf alongside other fragile early Thurber editions is a comforting sight — but if I need to go to that title, I usually go to a much later edition.
Onr thing I like about this early edition, besides its size and the cover design, is the black & white photo of the Flatiron Building that greets you when you open up the book. The photo doesn’t appear in more modern editions (the most modern edition I have is from 1977).
You can read about the contents of this book elsewhere — I want to hone in on the significance of the book as it concerns Thurber’s art. You can hear Thurber himself talk about how it came to be that his drawings were included in the book (go to the 12:25 mark in this fab interview). A very big round of applause for E.B. White here.*
Without Thurber’s drawings appearing in Is Sex Necessary?, and especially without the book becoming a bestseller, who knows if Harold Ross, The New Yorker‘s founder and first editor, would’ve been inspired to publish Thurber’s drawings in the magazine (they began appearing two months after the book was published). Try imagining a world without “All right, have it your way — you heard a seal bark!” or “What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?” Unimaginable!
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*I came across this tidbit while revisiting what one Thurber biographer, Harrison Kinney, had to say about Is Sex Necessary?. Here he describes Thurber speaking to students out in Columbus, Ohio following the publication of the book:
“In front of the students, he smoked cigarettes, stroked his mustache, looked over his horn-rimmed glasses, and told them that he had bought a lot of drawing paper and India ink when he heard he was to illustrate Is Sex Necessary?, but that White had taken them away from him and had given him an envelope and a sawed-off pencil, remarking, ‘Who do you think you are, an artist?’“
— p.434 in Harrison Kinney’s James Thurber: His Life and Times (Holt, 1995).
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James 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