Tuesday Spill: Recent Additions To The Spill Library

                                   Some Recent Additions to The Spill Library

In the past few weeks, a small crop of books came this way, a few of them are shown above. All have The New Yorker in common. Many were gifted to the Spill library, some were purchased. 

Sob Ballads, by Charles H. Knapp, “With A Few Kind Words” By Frank Sullivan and Corey Ford” — published in 1930 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Illustrations (woodcuts) by Donald Streeter.

 Three of these individuals have big-time New Yorker cred. Charles Knapp’s work appeared in the very first issue of the magazine (a short piece titled “She Presents The Flock”). Mr. Knapp went on to contribute to The New Yorker for twenty-two years. Corey Ford‘s work also appeared in that first issue (“Highlights”). We can be forever thankful to Mr. Ford for, among many other contributions, inventing the perfect name (Eustace Tilley) for Rea Irvin’s top hatted fellow on the cover of that first issue. Frank Sullivan arrived at the magazine in issue #6, March 28, 1925, with a piece titled “Ten, Twenty, Thirt.” Mr. Sullivan originated the magazine’s now traditional holiday poem, “Greetings, Friends”  (it was eventually passed on to Roger Angell, and in recent times handled by Ian Frazier). Donald Streeter, the woodcut artist (no New Yorker connection) found great success in a number of fields.  

 

 

Four cartoon collections, two of them custom books from The New Yorker‘s Cartoon Bank: Rosenblum Cellars Book Of Wine Cartoons, and The New Yorker Sugar Foods Corporation Book Of Cartoons. I seriously doubt that the Spill library will ever have every single custom New Yorker cartoon book title published, but I’m going to take a stab at rounding up the ones I come across that don’t break the piggy bank. Have I Got A Cartoon For You! from Moment Magazine, came out in 2019. It’s similar to the Cartoon Bank books in size (and all the contributing cartoonists are New Yorker folks). A Brief History Of Computer Time: 60 Years Of Computer Technology…” is loaded with cartoons (60 of them, to be exact, and almost all are New Yorker cartoonists).

I’m never too far from an E.B. White phase, so was thrilled when this 2020 collection of letters between E.B. White and Edmund Ware Smith came to my attention. I love the story, told in the Preface by Mr. White’s granddaughter, Martha White, of how these letters sat in a bank vault, all but forgotten, for thirty-eight years.  

 

A number of Thurber books came home with me from Columbus this past weekend. Two, from Thurber House’s “for sale” used book shelf, were upgrades: Thurber’s own Many Moons, and How To Raise A Dog In The City by James Kinney and Ann Honeycutt. How To Raise A Dog  will be all the more treasured because it brings to near completion the Spill‘s dust jacketed Thurber collection (only The Great Quillow remains without a “wrapper”). 

Wish I Could Be There: Notes From A Phobic Life, by Allen Shawn, just arrived yesterday. The author’s father was William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker for thirty-five years. In my fashion of jumping into a book instead of reading cover-to-cover, I immediately read the chapter “Father”: an incredible must-read additional puzzle piece now added to the do-it-yourself William Shawn biography. 

 

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, edited and with text by Mason Currey, is a great read. I love books loaded with short pieces you can quickly get in and out of. Here’re just some New Yorker contributors whose daily rituals are included in the book: Donald Barthelme, John Updike, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ann Beattie, Joyce Carol Oates, Nicholson Baker, and Truman Capote. 

 

–– My thanks to Mike Rhode and John Cuneo for their contributions to the Spill library. 

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