James Thurber Illustrates Poetry

by Stephen J. Gertz

The four original illustrations by celebrated American humorist, cartoonist, author, and journalist, James Thurber (1894-1961) to accompany Charles Kingsley's poem The Sands o' Dee, as published in The New Yorker magazine March 25, 1939, have come to auction. Offered by Swann Galleries in its 20th Century Illustration sale January 23, 2014, they are estimated to fall under the hammer at $4,000-$6,000.

Executed in ink on paper, the artwork and poem appeared as part of The New Yorker's popular Thurber feature, Famous Poems Illustrated. Each drawing appeared above one of the four six-line stanzas:

 O Mary, go and call the cattle home,
          And call the cattle home,
          And call the cattle home,
      Across the sands of Dee."
    The western wind was wild and dank with foam
      And all alone went she.

 The western tide crept up along the sand,
          And o'er and o'er the sand,
          And round and round the sand,
      As far as eye could see.
    The rolling mist came down and hid the land;
      And never home came she.

Oh! is it weed, or fish, or floating hair,--
          A tress of golden hair,
          A drownèd maiden's hair,
      Above the nets at sea?
    Was never salmon yet that shone so fair
      Among the stakes on Dee.

They rowed her in across the rolling foam,

          The cruel crawling foam,
          The cruel hungry foam,
      To her grave beside the sea.
    But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home
      Across the sands of Dee.

Each original illustration is 279 x 216 mm (11x8 1/2 or smaller). Thurber's signature appears at lower left on the final drawing. Three of the illustrations possess faint preliminary drawings on their versos.

Thurber illustrated nine poems for The New Yorker, the others being  Excelsior (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow); Lochinvar (Sir Walter Scott); Locksley Hall (Lord Alfred Tennyson); Oh When I Was ... (A. E. Housman); Curfew Must Not Ring To-Night (Rose Hartwick Thorpe); Barbara Frietchie (John Greenleaf Whittier); The Glove and the Lions (Leigh Hunt); and Ben Bolt (Thomas Dunn English). They were collected in Thurber's 1940 anthology, Fables For Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated.

Established in 1997, the annual Thurber Prize honors outstanding examples of American humor.

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With an affectionate tip o' the hat to Thurber keeper of the flame, fanatic and collector, Jay Hoster, who knows more about the man and his books than anyone alive.

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Images courtesy of Swann Galleries, with our thanks.

Sands o' Dee reprinted via WikiSource under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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Maxfield Parrish Didn't Like Book Collecting

by Stephen J. Gertz

"I have steered clear of book collecting always, seeing the ravaging results on some of my friends, and I wouldn't know a first edition from subsequent ones..."

So wrote the great book, etc., illustrator, Maxfield Parrish, in his distinctive script on both sides of a 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 card, to collector and printer Edward L. Stone (1864-1938) on December 15, 1930, from Windsor, Vermont (later home to J.D. Salinger). Stone was instrumental in the Library of Congress acquiring the copy of the Gutenberg Bible on vellum from the Benedictine Monastery of St. Paul, Carinthia, Austria. Parrish, responding to a letter from Stone, commented on the bible, and then book collecting in general. Parrish collected manuscripts but avoided books:

I have a friend & neighbor who is having a room built for his great collection. He takes out a book as though it were a new baby, his eyes glisten and voices are hushed as in a museum. Were it the MSS I would understand, but it is just one of many printed at the time, albeit a fine job and hard to get and expensive to own. I wouldn't want to get that way. I almost got four with George Washington's signature in them, but luckily was willed a fine Saray Highboy instead, though it ought to be in a museum instead of up here in the New Hampshire hills.

We have no idea what four books signed by George Washington Parrish refers to but I suspect that readers may be salivating, as I am, at the thought of possessing them. I have no idea what the market is for a Saray highboy but the signed Washington books must surely exceed it in value.

Stone, an avid book collector, replied to Parrish, an avid hobby machinist, on January 16, 1931, mentioning the Gutenberg Bible exhibit at the LOC,  printer and book designer, Bruce Rogers (1870-1957), and printer Billy Budge,  an "old-timer," according to the Typographical Journal in 1902, working in Chicago. He also defends the collection of books:

On permanent exhibition in a magnificent mahogany case in the Library of Congress, I imagine it will be of continued interest to a ledge percentage of the people who visit the Library‚ as I feel sure you would enjoy not only this particular copy of the Bible, but the seventeen hundred Fifteenth Century books, which will remain on exhibition for some months.

I have forgotten whether I sent you one of the little booklets which Billy Budge printed for me - "All Hope Abandon - Ye Who Enter Here." If not, I will be glad to send you a copy. Maybe this might ease your pain about not being a book collector. But in my sixty six years I have found nothing to take its place - nothing comparable, but, of course, there are many things I have not tried and know nothing about, but I know of people who have interests of all sorts and collectors who are crazy about everything from stamps to colonial antique furniture, paintings, etchings, and everything imaginable. I think it's a fine thing for anyone to get thoroughly interested in a given thing and know all about it that they can possibly find out. You know someone has said: 'There is more o know about an electron than the mind of any one man can contain.' So whether it be in four-leaf clovers or whatnot, there is great enjoyment, just as there must be in your hobby of machines, mechanics or in models of ships, as was Bruce Rogers.

It is easy for me to understand the thrill that you would get from collecting manuscripts, but such a hobby would be a little too much for me, although I have a few manuscript Books of Hours, the works of some of the old writers and scribes, and they all give me a great thrill. Only the other day I found in a little volume of Ovid the signature of 'Robert Browning, Venice 1878." And although I am not collecting autographs or inscriptions, they certainly do add to the pleasure and particularly if they are accompanied by a sentiment or have some special association. Just as there is a bit of pleasure in having a book printed in Leyden, 1616, by William Brewster before he sailed on the Mayflower, although the subject is not intriguing - Cartwright's 'Commentaries of Solomon.' One of my manuscript books dates back to 1330, quite old for me to own…
 
Last June I was in John Byland's library where they have twelve hundred manuscript books, and to look at a showcase full of them ne could easily imagine viewing a jewelry case with the wonderful illuminated goldwork, wonderful floral designs and other decorations…
 
I have only one George Washingon signature, one of Patrick Henry and William Blake. I suspect I have many others that I have not mentally catalogued."

Edward Lee Stone, author of a Book-Lover's Bouquet (1931) and The Great Gutenberg Bible (1930) was born in Liberty, Virginia (now known as Bedford, VA). After working for John P. Bell's printing company, Stone was promoted and eventually took over the business. He became a wealthy and prominent citizen of Roanoake, VA through his business, the Stone Printing and Manufacturing Company. His wealth went a long way in helping the LOC buying the Gutenberg from Benedictine Monastery of St. Paul.

The Parrish letter and Stone's three-page typed response are being offered by PBA Galleries in their Historic Autographs and Manuscripts With Archival Material sale, July 25, 2013. It is estimated to sell for $700-$1000.
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Image courtesy of PBA Galleries, with our thanks.
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Dust Jacket Designer Philip Grushkin From Comps To Final

by Stephen J. Gertz

Philip Grushkin working in his Englewood, NJ home studio, c.1950s.

A major archive of renowned dust jacket designer, Philip Grushkin, "whose work made him the standard-bearer throughout the publishing industry," (NY Times obit) is coming to market courtesy of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller. Booktryst got a sneak preview of its catalog, yet another key reference and collectible work as we've come to expect from the NYC-based super dealer.

Philip Grushkin was born in Brooklyn, NYC, in 1921, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He became interested in book dust jacket design as a teen and began collecting them, those of George Salter (1897-1967), the preeminent American dust jacket designer 1935-1965, his primary interest. He attended Cooper Union college as an art student, studying calligraphy and lettering with Salter, who became his mentor. He graduated in 1941.

After the war, he began to free-lance as a jacket designer, working for virtually all of the major New York publishers of the time: Alfred A. Knopf; Random House; Harper and Brothers; Harcourt, Brace and Company; Macmillan; and Doubleday; as well as smaller houses such as Farrar Strauss, John Day, and Crown. He became one of the go-to designers at Knopf because the great book and typeface designer W.A. Dwiggins declined to do dust jackets. Grushkin became part of a select group of dust jacket designers that included Salter, Charles Skaggs, and, on occasion, E. McKnight Kauffer, Herbert Bayer, Paul Rand, and Alvin Lustig.

In 1947 he joined the the fledgling Book Jacket Designers Guild established by Sol Immermann (1907–1983), who, with H. Lawrence Hoffman, produced the jackets for the first one hundred titles published by The Popular Library. The BJDG established a code for dust jacket design, rejecting the poster style in vogue for pulp novels in favor of a descriptive, non-blaring style. Its manifesto, embraced by Grushkin, rejected:

• "The stunt jacket that screams for your attention, and then dares you to guess what the book is about."

• "The jacket that is born of the assumption that if the book has a heroine, or if the author is a woman, or the author's mother a female, the jacket must say SEX."

• "Burlap backgrounds, the airbrush doilies and similar clichés as well as the all too many good illustrations that were stretched, squeezed, tortured and mutilated to fit a jacket format with just enough room left for an unrelated title."

1953.

Grushkin's hallmark, like Salter's, was his creative use of calligraphy and lettering in concert with a lightly drawn illustration. His early work tends to mimic Salter's but in the late 194os his own personal style began to emerge, with an emphasis on lettering and calligraphy often to the exclusion of illustration altogether. Perhaps his most recognizable and typical dust jacket from that period is that for Simone De Bouvier's The Second Sex (1953).

If you are unfamiliar with Grushkin his deceptively simple yet visually aggressive pictorial style is distinctive; once you see a Grushkin book jacket you will begin to see them all over the place on books published during the late 1940s - early 1960s.

"Grushkin forged his own brand of modernism, one that owed nothing to the work of Lustig, Rand, or Herbert Bayer, inventing a unique mixture of bold typographic hand lettering, dynamic background patterns, vibrant colors, and abstract symbolism. By the end of the 1950s, Grushkin’s style was distilled to the point where it resembled Paul Bacon’s 'Big Book Look,' with hand lettering - instead of calligraphy - taking center stage, augmented only by a tonally variegated background" (Paul Shaw, Philip Grushkin: a Designer's Archive, catalog to the collection).

Below, a few examples of Grushkin's work in development, from first comp to final jacket.

The Other Side of the Record (1947):

First comp.

Second comp.

Third comp.

Fourth comp.

Fifth comp.

Final.

The Train From Pittsburgh (1948):

First comp.

Second comp.

Third comp.

Fourth comp.

Fourth comp, side notes.

The fourth comp of Train..., unusually, has notations, not just by Grushkin, but also by "J" at Knopf (likely production manager Sidney Jacobs). Grushkin’s notes refer to the colors he plans to use - blue, red, and yellow - with a reminder that the jacket will be offset printed. The notation by “J” approves the design but suggests substituting the calligraphic lettering of Julian Farren's name to a clean, serif'ed typeface.

Fifth and final.

Mechanical - Shards of Glass.

Mechanical - Lettering.

Helix (1947):

Partial comp.

In what was, apparently, the first (and partial) comp for David Loughlin's novel, Helix (1947), Grushkin employs a blue background, a single swirling spiral, and title lettering running upward on a diagonal from left to right.

First complete comp.

In the above, the first complete comp for the Helix DJ, Grushkin loses the blue background and substitutes red, has the title lettering on a downward diagonal from left to right, acutely triangulates the author and title, features a series of smudgy, overlapping spirals, and adds a tiny ship moving along a black plane.

Second complete comp.

Grushkin's second complete comp for Helix refined his design in the first comp, downplaying the swirling spirals,  deleting the ship's black path, and adding black "gears," elements that made it to the final published dust jacket.

Final.

Grushkin's final design for Helix cleans up, clarifies, and polishes the second comp.

Limbo mechanical.

Final.

The lettering mechanical for an early comp of Grushkin's DJ for Bernard Wolfe's classic science-fiction novel, Limbo (1952) bears a different subtitle than the final. "A Voyage of Discovery and Adventure in the Fantastic World of 1990" must have seemed a tantalizing teaser in 1952. The teaser to the final certainly hammers it home: "A diabolic tale - mad, merry and monstrous - of men and women caught in the vortex of history yet to happen! Check out that mad, merry, and monstrous year, 1990, more frightening that Wolfe could ever have imagined:

• Manuel Noriega surrendered to U.S. forces after acting as dictator of Panama for five years.

• Notorious Gambino crime family leader John "the Dapper Don" Gotti was arrested and charged with racketeering, murder, and various and sundry illegal activities.

• Marion Barry, the flamboyant mayor of Washington D.C., was arrested for possession of crack cocaine in an F.B.I. sting set up in a D.C. hotel room.

• British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher resigned. 

• The first McDonald's restaurant opened in Moscow, becoming for many a symbol of the nation's new progressive free market ideology.

• The World Wide Web was created, along with the first ever web page and web browser.

• Time Inc and Warner Communications, two of the largest media companies in the world merged to create giant Time Warner.

That's some vortex. We're lucky to have made it through 1990 alive.

The Grushkin archive consists of his book jackets (with related comps, roughs and mechanicals); binders of his cover designs for Mercury Publications; letterhead and logo designs; related ephemera; and a collection of book jackets by George Salter: over 2,000 total items in all, 150 of which are highlighted in the catalog, with the largest and most important portion being the dust jackets by Grushkin.

"'His life was literally books,' said his son, Paul, noting that some 10,000 volumes lined the walls of the Grushkins' home.

"Yet, he was an invisible presence, his work evident only to a book's author, the publisher's editorial and design staff, the printer and the bindery" (Times obit).

"My Dad was also a book designer. He handled in his lifetime close to 1500 books, for many publishers, but most for Harry N. Abrams, the worldwide leader in artbooks. He told me a book design is successful when it's invisible, meaning the reader never has to labor to overcome the designer. In a good book design, the grid and typographic elements illuminate the author's concept along with the book's contents. Nothing jars that reader from experiencing the book - nothing in the design is so boastful that it's the designer who's calling out, before anything else, 'look at MY cleverness'" (Paul Grushkin). 

Book lovers, special collections librarians, and aficionados and collectors of dust jackets will be fortunate to score a copy of the Grushkin Archive catalog, luckier still to acquire the archive itself. While it's not unusual to track a writer's progress through their archive, it isn't often that we have an opportunity to see a dust jacket designer in the midst of their process from conception to completion.

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All images reproduced with the express permission of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, with our thanks.
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Book Illustrator Ben Shahn Does Posters

by Stephen J. Gertz

WE WANT PEACE / REGISTER - VOTE. (1946).

"His codified signature neatly scribbled under any of his images conjures up a peerless world of visual and emotional realism" (Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, 1988).

Born in Lithuania in 1898, artist Ben Shahn immigrated to New York with his family in 1906. He apprenticed with a commercial lithographer in 1911 while still a high-school student, and earned his living in the trade until the early 1930s, when he began to receive recognition as a fine artist.

In 1934, after exhibitions of his series of paintings about the Dreyfus and Sacco-Vanzetti affairs, he was commissioned to produce a mural by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The following year, Rexford Tugwell, a prominent member of Roosevelt's "brain trust," invited Shahn to join the Resettlement Administration. He worked as an artist in the agency's Special Skills Division and was an unofficial, part-time member of Roy Stryker's photographic section.

His first significant contact with graphic design, however, came in 1942 when he was hired to work in the Office of War Information. Shahn later told biographer Selden Rodman that his chief duty was "to explain in posters to the people who need it what is being done for them and to the others what they are paying for."

This image above  was "used by the CIO in a voter registration drive. [And] it represents, perhaps, the best of Shahn's poster work. One cannot soon erase the memory of the hollow-eyed young face begging for peace. Nowhere is Shahn's genius for drawing more evident than in the thrust of the pleading hand...Using the image of this child in the context of an election campaign seems to say that in a democracy the first step toward healing the ravages of war is to exercise one's right to vote" (Kenneth W. Prescott, The Complete Graphic Works of Ben Shahn, p. 132).

Based upon his painting Hunger, Shahn recalled, in 1964, that he told Roy Stryker that a certain photograph of soil erosion would not have a strong impact on viewers. "Look Roy," Shahn said, "you're not going to move anybody with this eroded soil - but the effect this eroded soil has on a kid who looks starved, this is going to move people."

WARNING! INFLATION MEANS DEPRESSION. (1946).

This poster, another for the CIO, "of a farmer, whose seeming integrity and strength greatly impressed Shahn" (Prescott p. 132),  is based on a photograph Shahn took during the 1930s while traveling through Arkansas as a member of the Resettlement Administration and Stryker's photography unit.  It is a haunting image of a troubled working man, memories of the Great Depression fresh and alarming,  yet with an optimistic message to allay his fears : "Register - Vote."

BREAK REACTION'S GRIP / REGISTER VOTE. (c. 1946).

In the years after World War II, Shahn took on a new threat, anti-Labor, Establishment radicals. "The one arm, dressed in coat sleeve and shirt cuff, with hand clasping a colorful map of the United States, represents the country's supposedly small, but powerful, reactionary forces. The poster suggests that however strong, their power could be broken by the greater strength of the progressive forces, as represented by the larger, sleeveless arm" (Prescott, p. 131).

OUR FRIEND. (1944.)

Shahn's political orientation was patent, his views powerful. "This poster was used in the hotly contested 1944 campaign in support of Franklin D. Roosevelt's fourth term. Shahn presented Roosevelt as a warmly sympathetic man whose visage looms father-like above the crowd" (Prescott p. 128). The image, in retrospect, is a bit disconcerting, the obvious influence of Social Realism suggesting the cult of personality exploited by Stalin in Soviet propaganda. You can, in fact, substitute Stalin's image for Roosevelt's and wind up with a typical 1930s Soviet poster celebrating Papa Joe.

Be that as it may, his work here (and, ultimately, most of his work) was infused with a strong concern regarding the forces that undermine the common man, each a visual editorial protesting social injustice. Shahn was always a champion of the less fortunate.

Shahn's uncle was a bookbinder; he allayed Shahn's childhood hunger for books by bringing him volumes from his shop. After World War II he was chosen by Look magazine as one of the "World's Ten Best Artists." He abandoned painting for good and adopted graphic work for better. The book dust jackets he created (amongst other celebrated graphic designs) during the 1950s and 1960s remain classics.

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Images courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries, with our thanks.
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A Lurid Story of Book Dope And Lives Twisted By Mad Desire! A Booktryst Golden Oldie

by Stephen J. Gertz

Hard-boiled dames caught in the grip of a habit beyond their control; corrupt dolls seeking cheap thrills between the sheets of a book; innocents ensnared into the rare book racket, underage girls seduced by slick blurbs, and grown men brought to their knees by bibliographical points that slay dreams in a depraved world.

It's rare book noir, the dark underbelly of collecting. Human wreckage litters the streets of Booktown, the vice-ridden gotham that kicks its victims into the gutter margin, slaves to their twisted desire and lost in a sick world where condition is everything, obsession is the norm, and compulsion the law.
 

That first book seen in a window display, an Internet image, held in the hands - soon, you're furtively ducking into dens of iniquity with bookshelves and rarities behind a bamboo curtain; you've got the shakes and you need something, bad, right now. The rent is due, the kids need food, mama needs a new pair of shoes but let 'em all go to hell, you're a quarto low, you need your shot of heaven, a mainline hit straight to the pleasure centers to bathe in a flood of dopamine unleashed by a new acquisition and sink into careless ecstasy.

It's a brutal, hard-hitting story that rips the tawdry curtain away from this covert world to expose the reckless passion that drives its denizens to the depths of impecunious human existence and insanity.

It's a tale told through posters designed and exclusively distributed by Heldfond Gallery Ltd in San Francisco, based upon vintage pulp fiction book covers. Proprietor Eric Heldfond has been  peddling them for a few years now, leaning against a lamppost on a dark street corner to tempt unwary passersby. I've succumbed to his evil pitch, bought a few, have given them as gifts, and suspect you may wish to do same for friends of dubious character, i.e. book lovin' broads, momzers, and biblio-debauchees - in short, fellow travelers in the shadowland of the sordid habit we call reading. Make yourself at home in the flophouse of the hopelessly hooked: Your local rare book shop.

Never before has the finger of light shone so glaringly on the wasteland of the book collector to pitilessly strip bare this seamy hotbed of unbridled text! 

 "Read any good books lately?" she purred. 

The dame had me right where she wanted me. 

I felt her scan my lines and before I knew it she tore 

off my jacket, and began to paraphrase my favorite part.

She bookmarked me, and how. I didn't complain.

I was a book junkie and there was no escape from this sinister paradise.

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The posters are 8.5 X 11 inches, printed on 68lb. (252 g/mf) / 10.4 mil. heavyweight Premium High Gloss photo media.92 ISO, and priced at $25 each. Custom sizes up to 13 x 19 inches are available. Visit Heldfond's Bibliopulp gallery here.

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Originally appeared on Jume 14, 2010.

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Draw Me a Story: Collecting Children's Book Illustrations

by Alastair Johnston  

Draw Me a Story: A Century of Children’s Book Illustration San Francisco Public Library, Skylight Gallery, through December 2nd 2012.

Like most kids I had a loving mother who read me to sleep with bedtime stories. But not Beatrix Potter, which she didn't have time for.

My brothers and I would drift off to The Mill on the Floss or Adam Bede because that was what my mother was reading, and what quicker way to put your kids out than a paragraph or two of George Eliot? She was not opposed to children's books — we had plenty, from Thomas the Tank Engine to Treasure Island, and quickly got into reading for ourselves. (Slight digression: What happened to the Fat Controller and Joe the Monkey Porter from the Thomas books? Are they too politically incorrect for audiences 66 years later?)

"Hush-a-Bye, Baby" from The April Baby's Book of Tunes by Kate Greenaway, 1900. Watercolor on paper.

Malcolm Whyte, director of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, collects children's books, more specifically their illustrations. This autumn, San Francisco Public Library is showing selections from 41 artists in his collection that neatly document the story of children's books for over a century. The show has been touring, and was previously seen at the Frick in New York.

There is no Beatrix Potter! But we do see more important artists in the history of British printing and illustration: Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway. Greenaway's father was an engraver so she understood how to prepare art for process engraving.

The big names of the twentieth century, W. W. Denslow (The Wizard of Oz), Jules Feiffer (The Phantom Tollbooth), Chris Van Allsburg (The Polar Express), and Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are) are represented with original work.

Beyond them, I only recognized one or two names — Edward Ardizzone and Palmer Cox — but there are many books to wonder at. Jack Kent fits naturally into Whyte's collection because he started out as a comic strip artist, drawing "King Aroo" from 1950 to 1965. But when his strip was cancelled, Kent moved to children's book illustration, producing over 40 titles, including Mr Elephant's Birthday Party (1969), Clotilda (1969), The Fat Cat (1970), and The Blah (1970).

Sarah Noble Ives (1864–1944), "At the Seaside" from ABC of Objects, 1930s. Watercolor on paper.

Lansing "Lang" Campbell is another comic strip artist who turned his hand to book illustration. He created "Uncle Wiggly," who ran in the Newark News from 1910. His children's books still have the feel of the layout of comic strips, and Peter and Puddle Duckdash, from The Dinky Ducklings, 1928, exemplifies this. His flattened perspective and line quality are similar to the animated cartoons of the time.

Lang Campbell, cover, key-line sketch and final spread from The Dinky Ducklings (New York: Algonquin Publishing Co., 1928)

Corinne Malvern (1901–56)'s work is well-known from her covers for the Little Golden Books which established a definite "Fifties Look."

Four book covers by Corinne Malvern: Doctor Dan, the Bandage Man (1950); Nurse Nancy (1952) extra-illustrated with Band-Aids on the title-page; Susie's New Stove (1950); and McCall's Giant Golden Make-it Book (1961)

Malvern achieved much in her 55 years. She came from a Vaudeville family and began her career, aged 6, in the American premier of Madama Butterfly by Puccini. At 14 she made her first film, The Luring Lights. After being injured in a railroad accident during a tour she went to boarding school and then studied at the Art Students League of New York. From 1938 on she and her sister published 32 children's books with McLoughlin Brothers. In the forties she was Art Editor for the Ladies Home Journal.

The artwork for Peggy's Pokey and Other Stories about Pets (1940) shows her technique: she would start with a pencil drawing then add layers of watercolor and fill in with gouache where she wanted a more opaque finish.

Lawson Wood's cover image of the Snork is charming. The Noo-Zoo Tales (London: Warne & Co., ca. 1922) shows the Snork, a giant bird in spats, who joins the circus and realizes he fits into society all right. There's a strength of line in Wood that recalls Winsor McKay of Little Nemo fame. In 1934 Wood was made a Fellow of the Royal Zoological Society; he also maintained a retirement home for elderly animals.

L. Leslie Brooke (1862–1940), another Warne artist, would pull faces in the mirror to get the right expressions for the animals in his story books. His original drawing for "Lion and Bear" from Johnny Crow's Garden, 1903, shows a lion in a bow tie and a bear in a dinner jacket, made to measure by monkey tailors. He continued the tradition of British cartoonists who illustrated Punch with humanoid animals depicting the world's nations (Britain was the lion and Russia the bear), though nationalism doesn't enter into his children's stories.

The exhibit, on display through December 2nd, is a rewarding tour of a delightful aspect of book history.
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A Very Edgy Alice In A Very Weird Wonderland

By Stephen J. Gertz

Alice doesn't live here anymore. 

At least, not in Wonderland as imagined by John Tenniel in his original illustrations for Lewis Carroll's classics about the curious domain found on the far end of the rabbit hole and through the looking glass.

Glimmers of bondage, sexual hegemony, and voyeurism with fetish as relish are condiments that season a two-volume, in French and English edition of Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass illustrated by Dutch-born artist, Pat Andrea. Published in France in 2006, it is now available through Ken Sanders Rare Books by special arrangement with the publisher.

With his fully-realized reinterpretation of Lewis Carroll's two Wonderland volumes, Andrea turns the story on its head to present a protean Alice with an attitude absent from traditional Alice illustration.

It's precocious Alice in 21st century Wonderland, a virgin touched and never the same. Think Britney Spears from Disney to fishnets and Baby One More Time. Oops, she did it again, confounding our expectations and opening our eyes as she journeys through a transmogrified Wonderland, a realm of the sensuous. It's 3 AM at Hef's place, the Playboy mansion in Los Angeles, as imagined by David Hockney on LSD.

The work of painter Pat Andrea, born in 1942 in Den Haag, Netherlands and now living in Paris and Buenos Aires, has achieved international success. With over eighty international exhibitions of his work, including at The Hague and the Centre Pompidou, and four retrospectives on his forty-year career, he presently teaches in France. He has been justifiably hailed as a modern master of magical realism. 

As written by Lewis Carroll, the Alice books present dreamlike and nightmarish fantasy, lack of logic, and bizarre characters. As illustrated by Pat Andrea, the books present a dreamlike and nightmarish fantasy, lack of logic, and bizarre characters that would have scared the bejesus out of Carroll but that Freud would have recognized.

Imagined by Andrea, this is one little girl that Anglican deacon Charles Lutwidge Dodgson would have never photographed in his Oxford studio. She might have innocently come on to him and thrown him into a terminal tizzy blubbering "jabberwocky, jabberwocky, jabberwocky, jabberwocky" until gently led away by the men in white coats for sedation and recovery in a Victorian sanitarium.

Heavens! We weren't in Kansas to begin with and we're surely not in Kansas anymore, certainly not now. This is Wonderland as Times Square before New York's Mayor Bloomberg sanitized it for our protection and turned it into Disney World.

Is that a hot dog on your head, Tweedle-Dum,
or are you just glad to see us?

This edition is a stunning addition to the Alice canon, a fresh and provocative vision.

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CARROLL, Lewis.  Les Aventures d'Alice au pays des Merveilles et De l'autre cote du mirroir et de ce qu'Alice y trouva [Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There].  Paris: Diane de Selliers, 2006.  

First edition thus.  Oblong quarto [27 cm by 32 cm].  Two hardcover volumes in slipcase with prospectus.  Dual language edition (French and English) translated into French by Henri Parisot. Illustrations by Pat Andrea.

You may order here.

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All images courtesy of Ken Sanders Rare Books, with our thanks and with a nod and a wink to Melissa Sanders.

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