Thurber Thursday: Why Not This Thurber Book?

 I tried to ignore writing this post, thinking to myself, What purpose does it serve to discuss why you haven’t bought a particular book?  

The book, published thirty-one years after Thurber’s death in 1961, is Thurber On Crime, edited by Robert Lopresti. 

I’ve managed, in those thirty years, not buy a copy. And why not? It sports a perfectly fine cover. Price is not a consideration (you can pick up a copy on Amazon for $1.35 plus postage). I could suggest that the book’s contents may be keeping me from ordering it — I believe that every piece in the book has appeared elsewhere. But buying duplicates has never stopped me before (thus the dozen or more copies of The Thurber Carnival in the Spill library. 

The real reason is probably fueled by bewilderment, and is found in the foreword by the highly accomplished mystery writer, Donald E. Westlake (Mr. Westlake died in 2008). It is most likely this section, bolded below, that has (unfairly or not) kept Thurber On Crime off the Spill‘s shelves (for now):

I’ve become used to folks in The New Yorker cartooniverse expressing their inability to appreciate Thurber’s drawings (When-oh-when, I ask myself, will they ever see the light?!) but a smackdown appearing in a foreword in a Thurber book truly puzzles me. Surely there might’ve been some pushback from the editor (who decided to include thirty-two Thurber drawings in the book as well as one on the front and back cover). But no. 

I’m not going to go on and on about why I think Thurber is among the greatest New Yorker cartoonists (a case can be made that Peter Arno was the greatest. In fact, I made it myself). If only I’d had a chance to speak with Mr. Westlake before his untimely demise in Mexico. Perhaps I could’ve sat with him and gone through twenty or thirty Thurber drawings, just to, you know, see if he might’ve become a believer. Turns out that that scenario was a real possibility. I noticed in his Wikipedia entry that he lived about ten minutes from here.