Starting off the first week of the new year with an early Thurber Thursday…so it’s Thurber Tuesday…
After approximately fifty years of collecting Thurber, you might think the Spill library would be in the vicinity of complete, Thurber-wise (not that there really is such a thing as complete). But one major title has always been missing. Thinking about why it wasn’t added long ago, I can only come up with the lame excuse that it’s not a book by Thurber, but a book illustrated by him. Still, there are others already in the library just like that (In A Word, and How to Raise A Dog In The City come to mind).
Men Can Take It, a 1939 book (published by Random House) written by Elizabeth Hawes with a Thurber cover and “14 full-page illustrations by James Thurber” just never came my way, until yesterday. An inexpensive later edition (with a dust jacket*) turned up. When I say “inexpensive” I mean approximately the price of four gallons of gasoline.
So, finally, Men Can Take It is in hand, and I was able to see the “14 full-page illustrations” for the first time ever. Unfortunately I can’t show them (out of copyright concerns) and, unusually so, can’t even find a page online I can link to showing any of them. For now, the one drawing seen on the cover will have to do here.
*I’m showing a dust jacket found online. My copy came protected by plastic — it wouldn’t photograph well — all we’d see is gloss.
— For more on Thurber, go here.
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Ken Krimstein On Gil Roth’s Virtual Memories Podcast
Mr. Krimstein, author of the acclaimed When I Grow Up, chats with Gil Roth on this latest episode of Mr. Roth’s terrif Virtual Memories Show podcast. Listen here.
Ken Krimstein began contributing to The New Yorker in 2000. Visit his website here.
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Yesterday’s Daily Shouts Cartoonist
Another in a series of advice pieces from Liana Finck, who began contributing to The New Yorker in 2013. Visit her website here.