Last night, in the company of Liza Donnelly, I spent a few hours touring the Swann Galleries Illustration auction preview in Manhattan — looking over a goodly number of New Yorker original art. Besides seeing the art (Jack Ziegler! Peter Steiner! Mick Stevens! J.B. “Bud” Handelsman! Chast! Tom Toro! Suba! Robert Weber! George Booth!…and more) we were there for the first public showing of an excerpt from Ms. Donnelly’s forthcoming documentary, Women Laughing, and to say a few words about Lee Lorenz, The New Yorker‘s former art and cartoon editor (The Lee Lorenz Collection is part of Swann’s Illustration auction today; Mr. Lorenz was the editor who brought both myself and Ms. Donnelly into the magazine just a few years after he took the editorship reins from James Geraghty).
With A Thurber original drawing in the room, it seemed a full circle occasion: Thurber’s art brought me to The New Yorker; Lee Lorenz brought me into The New Yorker, where I met Ms. Donnelly, who brought me to marriage. It was not lost on me that our very first “date” was thirty-nine years ago to see a Thurber drawing being auctioned (we drew about it for a collection of our work, Cartoon Marriage).
Here’s the Thurber in today’s Swann auction. It originally appeared, as an illustration, in Margaret Ernst’s In A Word:
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And here’s the Thurber “moose” we went to see all those years ago (where is it now?!). It made its print debut in Thurber’s The Owl In The Attic, published in 1931 by Harper & Bros..
