Thurber’s Shakespeare
The other day I ran (online) into this wonderful double page spread in the September 1935 issue of Stage Magazine: “James Thurber Presents William Shakespeare.” Bowden’s James Thurber: A Bibliography, is ever-so-slightly off in his accounting of the Stage drawings, saying there are four drawings (there are five). Not clear to me why these were run white on black, as the originals were black on white. You can see a number of the original drawings in Michael Rosen’s A Mile And A Half Of Lines: The Art Of James Thurber.
Some are also included in the 1966 collection, Thurber & Company (there’s a dedicated chapter to Shakespeare). It includes some drawings shown on this Stage spread, and some not. In the Introduction by Helen Thurber, she wrote of finding the Ophelia original sketch (shown bottom right in the spread) in an “old roll-top desk”… “and the other Shakespeare illustrations shown in this book.”
(According to Bowden, the series was reprinted in Horizon magazine in the Winter issue of 1965: “Thurber On Avon”).