I hopefully will forever be surprised by foreign edition Thurber covers. Google translated the below Czechoslovakian title to “The Philosopher and the Oyster” — one of the fables in Thurber’s 1956 Further Fables For Our Time. The cover drawing is definitely not an oyster, it’s supposed to be a toad…I suppose a toad could be philosophical.
This book…
is this book.
The drawing accompanies the fable, “The Truth About Toads”
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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
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Bonus suggestion!
If you love Thurber’s drawings, may I suggest this truly fab book, A Mile and a Half Of Lines: The Art of James Thurber. It was published in 2019, edited by Michael Rosen, with contributions, as you see right there on the cover, by Seymour Chwast, Liza Donnelly, Rosemary Thurber, and yours truly.
