Month: April 2026

Hanging the Moon

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: We are mooning around today here at Pictorama and of course Deitch Studio is a good place for it as no one does it better than Kim in my opinion. That old man on the moon – Kim makes him toothy and gives him carbuncles and craters for an extra moon-y surface to his bald head. There was a time when I might have said that the Man on the Moon best defined Kim’s work – along with the time clock with a face standing over him for starters. And I generally ask Kim for a moon face (and snow) in our holiday cards.

A good ‘ole Kim Deitch moon in this eye popping pic of a cartoon mural!

Postcards, photography, cartoons – all in love with the man on the moon and hanging with him. My collection has a few choice photo postcards of people sitting on the moon (I’d have more if they weren’t so expensive!) and of course even just a few posts back there were kittens in a balloon flying toward the moon. A few images from my collection are below. (The post about the photo of Kim and Simon shown below can be found here.)

Pams-Pictorama.com Collection.

(The card above was from a previous postcard sale and was in a January post which can be found here.)

As much as we crave sunlight there is something about being out under the rays of a bright full or roaring orange harvest moon that makes us kick up our heels in a totally different way – not to mention the romantic interludes it inspires. I remember reading a passage in a novel about roaming through backyards and streets in the suburbs late at night under a bright full moon. Having grown up in suburbia it brought such a specific image to my mind that stayed with me. And where I grew up it would have also been the moon on the water too, always reflected on the river in our backyard. Stephen Millhauser writes very compellingly about having a different life by night – I may be thinking of him. (His novella, Enchanted Night is a good place to start with his books.)

Available in paperback in a number of places online.

I fell hard for this postcard immediately. I found it last weekend at the postcard show and the dealer told me it is a part of a series. Although I found another copy of this card in a collection online, I was unable to find others from a series. I will be keeping a sharp eye out however.

An early Deitch Studio holiday card production with moon, stars instead of snow. I like those too.

It would appear that these youngsters are constructing this natty moon fellow, placing his hat, glasses (those are a nice touch!), giving him a pipe, and one doing something with his mustache – applying it? There is a tiny paint can next to him. Obviously a ladder is necessary to do this work. The boys are all wearing overalls in different colors and reach sports red shoes.

The thing about this image is this amazing flying contraption the boys are in. When you look carefully it is a flying boat – something akin to a rowboat with wings, a kite-tail and strange wheels – for use on land? Another look and you realize that there is something coming off the flying machine to the back of the moon – it appears it is actually propping it up in the softly star studded sky. The painting boy, tucked in the seat of this machine, has a tiny ship’s wheel in front of him to steer. How all three would fit is also a further question for our imagination.

Kim and Simon posing for a moon seat photo as tiny tots!

Lastly this machine hangs over the endless sea – like it is taking place somewhere at the ends of the world, which is likely is. Waves appear to gently lap but of course space and scale are left entirely to our imagination. I must say the artist had a wonderful vision and got to run with it on this one.

This card was never mailed although the back has indications that it was pasted into something. The maker’s mark is postcard druik u. Verlag von B. Dondort, G m.b.H. Frankfurt a/m which doesn’t seem to lead to much of anything.

It is seldom that an image makes me as dreamy as this one does. It gives a new visual to the idea of thinking that your loved one has indeed hung the moon for you. A cheerful thought on a rainy Sunday here in New York City and at Deitch Studio.

More Curtis Yorke

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: It is another book day here at Pictorama. I have continued to digest Curtis Yorke novels at a rapid pace, even as I figure out how much I like her and where I think she fits in my pantheon of women writers of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Back in March I posted my first salvo having read a clutch of her books, mostly in the sort of juvenile, young adult genre. (You can read that post here.) Curtis Yorke is of course her nom de plum and her aka is Susan Rowley Richmond Lee – a whole lot of name by any standard. Fair warning that toward the end of this post I write a lot of detail about plots and if you have wandered over from Goodreads, fair warning that there are many spoilers down there!

I will say upfront that one thing I was wrong about was the availability of her physical books. They are available to some extent even in this country, unlike my beloved Rosa Mulholland whose physical books are largely sold only in the UK and cost a small fortune to ship across the ocean these days. However, perhaps more importantly, they are surprisingly available online for free via Google Play Books. It is this deep vein I have been mining and thus have read a lot of the more adult novels recently. An alert to future readers however, these books were put online by copying the actual pages from books and therefore the print (on my phone for example) is quite small and I have had to read them all on my iPad. (Although you can make the page bigger you have to do it for each page which is annoying – there is no function to just increase the size overall.)

By way of reminder, we have virtually no autobiography on her except that she was born in 1854 in Scotland and died in 1930. She was educated in Glasgow, married and lived in Kensington and published some fifty books. I can only imagine that she was quite popular in her day and would think at some point her identity was known, the prejudice against women writers waning by the 1920’s, and that someone must have written a magazine article or two about her. If true that work remains to be done.

However, I do feel compelled to say that in some ways she compares unfavorably for example Rosa Mulholland who is a contemporary and sort of an Irish kissing cousin to her Scottish roots. While RM wears her Irish identity on her sleeve, Yorke never refers in particular to Scotland and much of her work takes place in London or the surrounding areas. I say she compares unfavorably because Rosa Mulholland avidly conceived and concocted her intricate plots, executing them and sewing up her many planted points as she went on over hundreds of pages. (Some of my posts and odes to Rosa Mulholland can be found here and here.) I would have to say she is also a lesser light and even a harder comparison to make to someone like Frances Hodgeson Burnett and her adult novels. (Happy hours spent reading those which I was recently reminded of – some posts can be read here and here just for starters.)

Saw this late one available online. Might need to grab it up!

I feel though that Yorke may have been the sort of writer who, with perhaps a broad over-arching outline, just sat down each day and wrote with the narrative going wherever it did. (Kim says this is how Dickens wrote as well, some do I guess.) Fortunes found and lost and found again – romances found and torn asunder. I assume these were probably originally published in pieces although the chapters don’t necessarily fall into the sort of cliff hangers that come of that.

In one of her longer single volume novels Once! (published 1892) she has at the heart of the story (major spoiler here, just a warning here again) an overarching moral message about the male protagonist who has made a bad marriage with a women who (in addition to being a lousy mother), becomes drug addicted; is in love with another man and has, it turns out, only married him for his money – which of course in the way of things he will lose before regaining at the end. Meanwhile, he has taken in his young cousin who has lost her father and has no income. The cousin has a crush on him but when, over time he falls in love with her, she is nothing short of horrified – even once the wife is out of the picture and he reveals it to her. While I think we can all agree none of this is exactly model behavior, Yorke really crushes him for this. (And of course none of that is about being cousins – it is acknowledged that this is done all the time – although it might have been the issue for you or I.) It was a rare time when I just felt somehow out of sync with the sort of accepted behavior of the period. It lacked nuance for me somehow.

Many of these are published and available as reprints although as stated, there is a wealth of them available for free online.

More recently I finished a three-volume opus titled, A Romance of Modern London. (Also published 1892 or perhaps volume one was?) These books chase through a myriad of now you see it, now you don’t wealth and general fortune for the characters. It starts very compellingly with two orphaned children, a boy and a girl, who through starvation, illness and somewhat extraordinary misfortune somehow manage to stay together after the death of their mother – father was long gone. She is then snatched up by some long lost grandparents (ah! they weren’t really brother and sister) who have fallen into a fortune but are by all accounts a bit, shall we say, rough and ready. The boy continues to suffer terrible poverty and adversity until he finds fame and fortune as an author – just as the grandparents lose their money.

Strangely in this case the boy and the girl (now grown and in love with each other but not suspecting that their newfound affection is returned) rarely actually lose touch with each other – he marries her good friend (makes her miserable as he doesn’t love her) while men keep asking her to marry them and she will not, even if it means she is cast out on the street as of course an underlying theme is always the dependance of women on men to house and support them – be they fathers or husbands. You are mostly out of luck if you don’t have one of those. I liked this book but some of the tributaries seemed a bit arbitrary, especially toward the end. On a final note about the end – weirdly, although happily married at the end and in the final pages she introduces their sadness that they have not had a child of their own. Was she thinking of a volume four that was never written?

Finally in His Heart to Win (I love that title – so fitting to the time and type of story! 1894) we have a pretty delightful story of a man who marries a young, sheltered girl, raised by her aunts, because he feels sorry for her. They are frank with each other in that it is sort of a marriage of convenience (he is older, widowed, has children) although Molly falls in love with him rather quickly, although keeps this to herself – as does he when he (albeit more slowly) falls in love with her – as if actually loving each other was somehow breaking their bargain. They chase around this – fortunes lost and found too I believe – until ultimately they figure that thing out and live happily thereafter.

I do wish I knew more about the reception for her writing and the life of the author in general. However, as above it remains utterly undocumented as far as I can tell, or at least via a surface sort of research online. For now I am working my way through the wealth of novels (and some short stories) available online before I start scooping up the physical books. For those of you who are following this, there is likely more to come here on Pictorama.

Beauty

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Yesterday’s postcard show did not disappoint, and Kim and I wiled away an hour or two perusing the wares. This is a single day show and therefore a bit smaller and folks say they don’t bring as much stock but we made out just fine. We will wait for Friday and Saturday, June 5 and 6 for that. Meanwhile I present one of my purchases which caught my eye, however it is more fun now that I have transcribed the message on the back. The message is for a new kitty, named Beauty, that has clearly joined the family.

It would appear that these cats are ice skating – and this Mom (?) cat is putting a skate on the young cat (boy? it has a blue bow) although there is only one, which she has just placed on his foot. (Where is the other skate?) The chair is somewhat mysteriously placed out on the ice, another cat skating with what appears to be a cane in the background. In the foreground there is a black kitty, who looks like my Blackie with just some white on his neck, also standing with a cane. (Do cats need canes to stand like humans? Is this something we should know if we want them to become bipeds?)

Youngster looks like the one I am calling Mom and has a matching tabby stripe to his fur. The skater in the background also appears to have stripes but is at a distance and somewhat indistinct. The weird sea green ice (which makes them appear to be actually standing and seated on water) goes to an only slightly lighter background. Dad pokes out of the frame and Mom perches right on it.

Back of card – very embossed indeed! Makes it a bit hard to read at first.

This card is embossed, creating a very three-dimensional effect, and around the edge is some snow decoration, also embossed. The postcard was made in Germany, however no artist is identified with it. Youngster is eager to get skating I’d say.

We stopped for lunch at a place called Bagel Pub.

I didn’t understand the message at first as it took some decoding. Despite the neat script the back of the card is pitted with the embossing making it hard to read. Anyway, it reads as follows, October 2d 1910. Well, my one eared Beauty how are you? Snoozing in your mother’s big chair I presume. Be good to little Georgie and never scratch him. Hope you will live many years. Auntie B. It was mailed to, Beauty Dunham, 782 Commercial S, East Weymouth, Mass. and just in case below that, To Georgie Dunham. It’s nice that she dated it because the postmark does not show the year, although October 3 and 6 AM show, as does New Jersey, but only Brio…? shows on the postmark for location which I cannot figure out. And gosh, what happened to one of Beauty’s ears?

Spotted this interesting building – the old bit in front seems to have actual gas lamps. The ancient building on the other side is interesting too. This is 13th Street, I think between 7th and 6th, southside of the street.

Meanwhile, Kim had his maiden voyage on the subway, his first long trip out since surgery. I think a change of scenery swept away any cabin fever he had, although admittedly he has been deep into his work so I am not sure how much he was suffering from his time at home as a result. However, all is onward and upward here at Deitch Studio.

Way Up!

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: Today is Metropolitan Postcard Club Show Day! Yay for new postcards for Pictorama! We herald that event with a postcard from the last show, purchased for it’s kitten collage-ness.

Photos of kittens floating in balloons is a sort of sub-genre of early 20th century photography and this is a late example – almost a tribute to those. This card was mailed from Kingston, New York on July 27, 1944. (As an aside, I had cousins who lived near Kingston, New York and was probably visiting them thirty years later.) So it is later than most of my collection but is reminiscent of those earlier cards. (You can check out some of those posts here and here.)

In the Kills refers to the upstate area full of small water bodies (kille is Dutch for waterway) and those areas such as Fishkill, Peekskill and Catakill (the last being where those cousins resided) named thusly.

Pams-Pictorama.com collection.

These cats are a further play on words with the broader Catskill area. The postcard play on words was popular and I have future posts devoted to more of these as of course cat cards are like nip to me. We have two fluffy kits in a basket with a “balloon” that looks like maybe it is a fishnet stocking or real fish netting around a ball, which is probably then held by a string of fishline we cannot see. An ever so slightly cross-eyed moon face looks on – the yellow is a nice contrast in this otherwise almost dark and stormy card. I gather these kits are making their journey at night.

Pams-Pictorama.com collection – very similar!

The back of this card is printed in an unusually legible hand. It says, Dear Very Dear Elinor Hello; Sweetness. How be you, and the partner – O.K. I hope – the same here – in this grand restful place – I am getting along famously – take a walk most every day – and am receiving excellent care – in the intervals – lots of love from your old man – brother. AL. It is addressed to, Mrs. R.H. Robinson, 155 Clymer Street, Brooklyn, 11, New York.

The ingenuity of cards like this interest me. I am always looking at them and thinking about which two of the seven I could convince to sit in a basket (none) and tie a little ball to it, etc. I am sure it was a day’s work that was harder than it may look. Meanwhile, this one has these collage elements of the moon and background layered in. It is though, remarkably similar to the earlier one I show here.

Back of card.

Meanwhile, Kim and I are off to the West Village soon to see what irresistible cat cards are in store for me today. Wish me happy collecting! It is bright and sunny here in New York and having a spring swing back toward warm today. Kim is braving downtown for the first time since his back surgery – getting a bit of cabin fever I think doing nothing these days really but working on hard his next book. We’ll get him some air and a change of scenery. More to come!

Easter Egg

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: This year it is a foggy, rainy Easter morning here in New York City. Hardly the harbinger of spring that you want it to be, however I am celebrating with this somewhat whacky card. I bought many months ago at the postcard sale and I bought it for the sheer, delightful, oddness of it.

Just noting that I have an odd fondness for these chocolate Easter eggs from childhood and still grab one or two annually.

The card is heavily embossed with thick looking gold highlights. A careful look tells that it appears to take place in a dark forest, if you peer behind the large egg house the trees almost bend around it. Easter Greetings is engraved with gold highlights, nestled among the trees. Meanwhile, a pretty little decorative, curtained window on the second floor of this egg house reveals a rooster portrayed in dignified profile. Below him is a sweet little green door complete with a mail slot and a red portico (you want to get into the house in the rain comfortably, after all), and even a little pull chain for a doorbell. There are a few front steps to complete the image.

Below, running wildly are two little chicks – I say little although somehow they are much larger than the rooster – who I grant you is at a bit of a distance up in his window, but still! They are in a race with each other on a grassy turf; the light one has a worm the one with brown feathers wants to share. Is there a cryptic and symbolic meaning in this? The artist was very conscious of shadow, bottom of the egg, under the chicks, under even the tiny window ledge, giving the card a three dimensional appeal.

The border of the card is a colorful riot of flowers, leaves and (pink!) eggs on a gold background. The eggs are dispersed in odd groupings of single, three and two, again not sure if there is some symbolism I am missing.

Back of card.

Like many lately, I find that this card was addressed on the back but never stamped and postmarked so therefore not mailed and no date for us. I show the back above, the sloping child’s hand going off the card and barely crams in the address. It appears to read, Miss Eleanor Bigwood, 928 Helamont Avenue, Schenectady, NY. Upside down on the other half, in the same hand but very hard to read is, Myra and Victor – presumably the senders. I will assume that this precious missive was ultimately put directly in Miss Bigwood’s hands.

With today’s weather we can only cheer ourselves with the old adage, April showers bring May flowers. And it is true! The pansies, tulips, magnolias and cherry trees are in bloom after a long winter’s nap. New York City is shaking off its long-held mantle of winter at last this year and it is all we can do from burying our heads in the flower filled tree wells lining the blocks here.

Meanwhile, we had a gorgeous spring day yesterday. Kim and I endeavored to undertake his first long walk since his surgery, about a mile round trip to Orwashers bakery and back. This weekly walk to get a nice loaf of bread for the week has become somewhat of a ritual and during the hospital stay and the MoCCA convention last weekend, it has been interrupted. However, the walk was much longer than anything he has done since the surgery, although still using a walker now and for the coming month. He did it like a champ though which makes us feel he is well on the way on the, albeit long, road of recovery from his back surgery.

Homemade matzoh making a holiday appearance at Orwashers this weekend.

Although Orwasher’s was all sold out of their as advertised, yummy-looking hot cross buns when we got there (oh my!) a small amount of homemade matzohs were still available. Although not our mission for the day (we stuck to our loaf of sourdough and a bonus olive stick), it was a reminder of the dual holidays, Passover and Easter, which signify this season of renewal and regeneration.

Pictorama readers may remember that with a Jewish father and a mother who was raised in a Catholic/Episcopalian household, I grew up recognizing both holidays, admittedly in a secular and food related way. I can remember Easter weekends with matzoh brie (my mom had mastered that) followed by an Easter Sunday family brunch at my maternal grandmother’s of ham and homemade Easter bread. We dyed Easter eggs but also, at least roughly, knew the rituals of a Passover seder. It all means the return of spring to me now – tied to the blooming of the magnolia in my front yard in New Jersey and streets filled with masses of blooming cherry trees.

A day or so in the ER and even a short stay in the hospital will always remind you of your blessings – other people’s problems are indeed frequently worse than your own, and we have seen that recently. For now, I remain grateful to say spring is arriving, Kim’s recovery and walking improving apace, and there are many signs for a significant growth and blooming in the next part of this year.

Postal Kit

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: Today is a return to feline real photo postcard territory with this recent acquisition off of eBay. This nice looking tabby in-charge is puss as stern postmistress. (This brings to mind a behind-the-scenes tour at work this week which for some reason revealed an unusual number of tabbies submitting to various treatments. Tough week for tabbies I say.)

This post office scene caught my attention, in part I think, because I thought it was a clever collage of images. The cat, seated sternly and evidently staring the small child, could be another photo that was neatly trimmed and inserted into the image. I have revised my thinking after close examination and now I believe it is really just a mirror behind the cat revealing a wall papered wall across from him or her on the other side of the room.

Back of the postcard.

Neat and numbered tidy cubbies await their mail and small packages. It reminds me a bit of the post office at my college years ago of similar vintage. Although it was less trusting and there were little doors with combination locks. I always loved those and have seen them for sale and been tempted although Pictorama readers know I don’t really live a life that can accommodate a wall of mailboxes, however endearing.

Smythe Park, Mansfield, PA. Photographed by W.A. Bates.

You can’t see it easily in the photo, but in pencil in the lower left corner someone has written the date, July 21, 1907 and initials, which may be L.E.T. It is nice that our sender did this because the postmark is obscured. The location may read as Kent – Connecticut I speculated at first, but a quick search shows more likely Nelson Lakes near Kent, New York. On the back in a fairly painstaking script is says, I had a nice time at Nelson. This is the P.O. at Nelson. Lyle E. Tubbs. It was mailed to, Miss Grace Corselius, Claremont, VA.

Smythe Park, Mansfield, PA, W.A. Bates.

The card maker is W.A. Bates, Postcard Manufacturer, Mansfield, PA. AI made me laugh when I search this as it informed me that W.A. Bates was known as Bert. And evidently, he was known foremost as a local photographer who got into producing his popular photos as real photo postcards. It also notes that a John Bates who owned a pharmacy, Bates Drugstore, also published these postcards – I can’t imagine exactly where AI may have dug those tidbits up, but it does paint a sort of cheerful picture of him and his life, a brother, father or other family member investing in his business.

Bates Studio, Mansfield, PA. More or less contemporaneous to our postcard.
Written by Bert?

Bert recorded largely local history in this fashion from 1905 until 1938. So mine is a rather early effort on his part. I will note that Kent, NY and Mansfield, PA are about three hours away from each other so if the locale is correct Bates was a bit far afield from his usual local bailiwick, although this was clearly a commercial gig.

Despite evidence of a long career, I have shared two from a small sampling of photo images I could find online, remains of his likely prodigious output. It is interesting that one is of what I assume is his studio. I note that on the back of that card, which is for sale on eBay right now on a card that was not used postally, it looks as if it may have been written by the man himself. I wonder. It is a really sort of lovely building and one can imagine all those interesting porticoes and fun nooks from the inside. The other photo is of a local park I guess he was known to photograph. I hope Bert and John and their families had a lovely life in Mansfield, PA at the dawn of the 20th century. From here it looks like they did.