Thurber Thursday: Thurber At Vassar

                                                        Thurber At Vassar

What a nice surprise to learn that Vassar has two Thurber original drawings. The one above now joins (in my memory bank) the handful of other “complicated” Thurber drawings I’m aware of (you can see the others in A Mile And A Half Of Lines: The Art of James Thurber. I might be mistaken, but I’ll say it anyway: this is the most complex series of buildings I’ve ever seen in one of his drawings.

The other Thurber drawing at Vassar, so very simple, is the opposite of the above. .

I spent a lot of time at Vassar back in my Peter Arno research days. First and foremost, because Arno’s first wife, Lois Long, went to, and graduated from, Vassar. The other reason I was there was to take advantage of the Vassar library, with its terrific microfilm archive as well as their stacks of periodicals. I spent a memorable morning thumbing through bound volumes of TIME Magazine, specifically looking for (and finding) an article that featured this great photo below:

But back to Thurber…

That there are possibly other Thurber originals in libraries elsewhere is (to me) an exciting new  prospect. I’ve known about Ohio State’s Thurber holdings for a good long while (it’s the Thurber mothership!), but look forward to learning about other libraries (I visited Yale’s Beinecke library during the Arno research because it holds Thurber’s Years with Ross papers).

 

 

 

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