Tuesday Spill: Remembering George Booth…Mort Gerberg; Another Bookshelf

Mort Gerberg Remembers George Booth

The Spill is grateful to Mort Gerberg for the allowing the following remembrance of George Booth to be posted here.  Mr. Booth passed away earlier this month at the age of 96. 

Sarah Booth took this photo of her father, George, and me in 2017, and she thinks it’s one that most completely captures George’s essence: joyful, giving, genuine— a rare, totally-good human being. We’re in a Japanese restaurant here, after attending some cartoonists’ event and, as we usually did when we got together, George and I were horsing around, improvising, making each other laugh. George loved doing that. It was
easy for him—his natural, default setting. George made the whole world laugh – by the way he talked, or wrote, and surely, the way he drew.
He was one of the greatest cartoonists, ever. We who knew him personally were incredibly fortunate to have him in our lives, and the whole world is so lucky to have the blessings of his memory and his work, which will remain alive and funny, and lift us, as long as there is consciousness.

–text by Mort Gerberg; photo by Sarah Booth

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Another Bookshelf

Over the years I’ve shown various New Yorker centric books here at Spill headquarters, and maybe even a few of the non-New Yorker centric books shown below, but I don’t believe I ever showed the Spill shelf given over to some of the art and artists who were inspirational to this cartoonist pre-discovering James Thurber’s work. In the Thanksgiving spirit here’re a number of books with work by and about artists and cartoon characters I’ll be forever grateful to.