Thurber Thursday: Wall Art

There are plenty of stories of Thurber drawing on the walls of The New Yorker‘s offices, but sadly, only a few of those drawings survived. Directly below you see some of them in their original location at 25 West 43rd Street (photo taken by Liza Donnelly years and years ago on the day she and I stopped in to see them) — this was shortly before they began their journey around Manhattan following The New Yorker as it moved to new locations (the drawings are currently behind glass at 1 World Trade Center…see below).

Here’s another Thurber wall drawing, sitting behind glass at 1 WTC:

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…A follow-up to last week’s Thurber Thursday about Thurber’s introduction to a 1960s paperback edition of Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. When the paperback arrived the other day, I immediately sat down to read Thurber’s “The Wizard of Chittenango” (I learned that Chittenango, a village near Syracuse, is the birthplace of Mr. Baum).

The piece is straightforward reporting by Thurber, with a hint here and there of his humor. I learned more about Baum than than I’d known before (which admittedly wasn’t much).

In the one thing leads to another department: I also learned that this introduction varies slightly from the original piece, as published in The December 12, 1934 New Republic. That means, of course, that that New Republic issue is now on my want list.

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James Thurber’s A-Z Entry:

James Thurber Born, Columbus, Ohio, December 8, 1894. Died 1961, New York City. New Yorker work: 1927 -1961, with several pieces run posthumously. According to the New Yorker’s legendary editor, William Shawn, “In the early days, a small company of writers, artists, and editors — E.B. White, James Thurber, Peter Arno, and Katharine White among them — did more to make the magazine what it is than can be measured.”

Key cartoon collection: The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments (Harper & Bros., 1932). Key anthology (writings & drawings): The Thurber Carnival (Harper & Row, 1945). There have been a number of Thurber biographies. Burton Bernstein’s Thurber (Dodd, Mead, 1975) and Harrison Kinney’s James Thurber: His Life and Times (Henry Holt & Co., 1995) are essential. Website