Aesop’s Fables: the Stationery

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today is an item which fills me with a sort of jaw-dropping amazement. It is a single sheet of unused letterhead from the Aesop’s Fables Film company – so fragile that I worry that even framing it would hasten its demise and so riotously decorated it left little room for any actual correspondence. The idea of a single blank sheet fascinates me – it would be less mysterious if a letter had been saved, even a mundane one. Some smart person with foresight came across this sheet early on, appreciated the singular nature of this stationery, squirreled it away and somehow it was rescued – ultimately passing most recently into my hands.

I purchased this on eBay. Despite my fascination it was initially listed for such a princely sum that even I could not summon justification for purchasing it. Nonetheless, to even have seen it and known that it existed pleased me no end to start. Much to my surprise, the seller continued to re-list and lower the price until suddenly I thought – it’s mine! And here we are at last.

For Pictorama readers who might be new to the world of Aesop’s Fable cartoons I will provide a crash course. Launched on May 13, 1921, Paul Terry produced a series of popular animated short cartoons which was populated by a riotous cast of cats, mice, dogs and other animals in never-ending loops, usually with an outraged Farmer Alfalfa in the midst of it all, and each ending with a comic moral such as the one on this stationary, It’s a great mistake to drop the real thing for a fake! or the one cited on Wikipedia, Go around with a chip on your shoulder and someone will knock your block off. Paul Terry’s cartoons were evidently what a young Walt Disney aspired to when he started making cartoons.

With weekly cartoons being produced in the silent days, 449 titles are listed for the years between 1921 and 1929 when the move to sound and production slows a bit; 270 cartoons were produced in the final years from 1929 until 1933. However, Paul Terry leaves Aesop Fables in 1929 as well, to start the company which bore his name, Terry Tunes. The Aesop Fables cartoons continue to be produced by Van Beuren Studios until 1936. (As I write this Kim shares that Paul Terry took the Farmer Alfalfa character with him to Terry Tunes. He also tells me that Paul Terry eventually sold the company and became resident at a Westchester country club near where a young Kim Deitch was growing up – and that he even made a prank call to Terry once.)

Paul Terry swiped from the internet, not in Pams-Pictorama.com collection

I adore these cartoons with their anonymous black cats chasing comic mice and in turn being pursued equally by cartoon dogs – with the occasional other chicken, cow or other farm animal thrown in. Long-standing Pictorama readers know that in conjunction with these cartoons, a line of stuffed toys were produced. These have always represented a gold standard for toy collecting to me and I am proud and pleased to own several. (Posts about that aspect of my collection can be found here, here and here, just for starters. A sample of the cartoons can be found at A Jealous Fisherman.) The production history of these toys is a bit obscured and I find pulling at this string of animation-cum-toy history endlessly fascinating.

Which doll is this? Pams-Pictorama.com collection

As for the stationary itself, starting with the address it should be noted that the Palace Theatre still exists. A glorious vaudeville turned movie theater in its day, evidently the original facade lurks behind the billboards of today’s Times Square in some sort of mediated agreement between the landmark’s commission and developers. The original, or at least restored, splendor remains inside the theater as some online photos indicate as below. It is nice to think it was not gutted of its charms. Presumably the offices referred to on the stationary were above the theater and noted as the Annex.

Palace theater interior – photo not from Pams-Pictorama.com collection

The Fable of The Dog and The Bone runs down one side, complete with illustration as shown below. (Signed by Paul Terry but Kim casts doubt that PT actually executed suggesting that, like Disney he may have routinely signed the drawings executed by his staff for this purpose.) The tale wraps with a moral, like the cartoons. I cannot help but wonder if there were other fables (and morals) on different versions of the stationery – how splendid would that be? Running along the bottom is a riotous parade of Aesop animals and the quote, Aesop’s Fables are to a show what pepper and salt are to a chop. It is a two color job meaning they spared no expense back when it would have added cost. As I started this post by speculating – not much room was left for actual correspondence. I have to assume that they had a second sheet produced that allowed for a typed sheet with somewhat more generous margins.

I am sure many mundanities were executed on these jolly sheets. Yet I do love the spirit of a company that would find expression right down to the stationary – and who wouldn’t find even a past-due notice more charming if executed and arriving on this paper?

Detail from Aesop Fable stationary, Pams-Pictorama.com collection

Time for More Men in Hats with Cats

Posted by Pam's Pictorama

Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: Today’s photo postcard was purchased several weeks ago and put aside, found and remembered today as I was having a quick paw through my piles of photos currently waiting to be deposited into storage containers or, more rarely, in line to be framed up. This postcard is in remarkably pristine condition for such an old card, never mailed, written on, nor put in an album.

The photographer had a good eye for setting these gentlemen up perfectly in front of this interesting house with bay windows and porch. (I have a soft spot for a good porch and I am ready to curl up on this one with a book for the afternoon. In fact I am slightly in love with this house in general and would love to explore its nooks and crannies further.) The upper story of the has these octagon shingles that I find especially cheerful too. I admit to being uncertain about the purpose of the post they are posed near – for horses perhaps? I never understood how horses were patient enough to stay casually looped to a post. I always feel that, like dogs, they probably should be leashed more tightly but, at least from watching westerns, evidently not.

However, most notably, the men have chosen to display this interesting early bike and to scoop up their kitty to include as prized possessions. Unfortunately, the cat has moved with feline impatience and is just a blur. I like the shot of the bike very much. (Watching American Pickers has given me an interest in the aesthetics of early bikes I admit.) Unintentionally, these fellows have given us a visual tour of chapeaux of the day – two variations on bowlers, fedoras and a newsboy cap. I think it is fair to say that the hats are largely worn at a jaunty angle by all. Four are clad in suits of various design and fit showing the sartorial options of the day – from baggy to quite tight – our biker sporting a more casual turtleneck sweater instead.

A subset of photos of hat-sporting men photographed with cats makes up a small portion of my collection. (Some posts about those can be found here, here and here.) I am a sucker for them. From soldiers, to guys sitting on a bench or a lone gentleman scooping up his kit for a snapshot, I am pleased that man clearly does not live by canine alone.

Changing Taste

Posted by Pam's Pictorama

Pam’s Pictorama Post: Fair warning that today’s post is a little bit of nothing that has been nagging at my brain lately, but for those of you who are willing to indulge me a bit, I am considering a an odd morphing of taste that has occurred over the last eight months or so. Now, don’t get me wrong, some of my preferences ebb and flow on a regular basis and a fondness for monochrome black clothing can easily give way to a mad desire for wild prints for example. However, I think of some patterns and desires to be as much a part of me as my brown eyes and it never occurred to me that they would change. I am thinking in particular of my consumption of coffee and tea.

The first significant shift in my coffee drinking predilection started quite awhile ago when I started drinking it cold in the morning. It started with not wanting to waste coffee after making it I would refrigerate it and heat it up. (I am a percolating coffee maker which I know puts me in the minority these days – I meet people in their twenties who don’t even know that percolating coffee pots on stoves exist. Kim is an instant coffee drinker and that preference remains truly mysterious to me.)

While I always drank coffee cold in hot weather, I also started drinking it cold before working out in the morning – and I loved this! Nothing like a fully caffeine charged workout with coffee consumed quickly on the way out the door into the pre-dawn morning. When traveling on business I would buy a cup of coffee and stick it in the fridge for my pre-workout the next day. (That was when hotels had refrigerators – when did they disappear? Am I the only person who had use for them?)

Eventually I began drinking my coffee cold every morning. (To be accurate, I will report that I also have a hot cup I picked up on my way to work every day as well.) As strange as this was, something much odder happened. Our food delivery company, Fresh Direct, sent us a container of cold brew. Since it was there I stuck it in the fridge and added it to my coffee one morning. As someone who values coffee first and foremost as a caffeine delivery system, there is no surprise at all that I quickly became addicted to the high octane combination brew.

What does surprise me however was when about five months ago I noticed a vanilla infused cold brew and decided to try it. Please understand, I have actually actively disliked vanilla coffee for years. It is safe to say there was a time when I would have considered it an abomination of sorts. And yet, I had an undeniable yen and yes, I now add vanilla cold brew to my cold coffee each morning. I sit here drinking it as I write this morning. I keep wondering if it is a desire that will eventually just pass.

The other predilection which surprised me is an interest in tea which until recently I only consumed when sick – typically then with honey. However, I was on my way to see my folks in New Jersey one chilly morning and I saw a man with a covered paper cup of tea and it suddenly I was seized with the idea that a hot cup of tea with brown sugar would be just the thing. As it happened, I didn’t have time to indulge this desire and it was a few weeks later when I found myself home with a cold that I made some tea and dumped some brown sugar in. Now almost every afternoon these days find me indulging in this beverage which in my mind is still associated with childhood and I now find unbelievably comforting.

These two seismic shifts in routine have me stumped.

For those of you who are totting up how much caffeine I am consuming, you are right to raise an eyebrow. My cut off time each day is 3:00 if I don’t want to risk insomnia. Less surprising to me, I will admit that I am also unnaturally interested in the newly unveiled Vanilla Orange Coke Zero (sounds heavenly to me) at the moment and planned to snatch some up as soon as it arrives in my neck of the woods. In addition, I report that there is a bottle of Jack Daniels received as a parting gift at an event recently (along with a John Grisham novel which I am now reading) sitting in a bag by the television. I haven’t had Jack Daniels since college, but I am eyeing it and there may be a future preference post in those beverage choices as well.

Toy Love

Posted by Pam's Pictorama

Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: I purchased this photo awhile back and it was put to one side in the heat of birthday purchases and other indulgences of recent weeks and months. I pull it out now and realize how much I like this photo. It is a somewhat perfect example of its genre. (That would be the children posing with a Felix doll category – in case you are new to the Felix photo genres of my collection – it is a whole swath of it.) It is a slightly odd size, 6″x 8″, and despite being mounted on thick cardboard there is evidence it was also pasted into an album at one time. Because of that, I think, it is curling a bit.

This is obviously a studio photo and therefore Felix is undoubtedly a prop, borrowed for the picture, rather than her own beloved toy. However, as she looks out at us with a bit of a smile for whoever is on the other side of the camera, for his part Felix appears to be looking up at her with an impression of real fondness. As I look at it the somewhat odd thought occurs to me that even in my most anthropomorphizing moments I can no longer see love in the eyes of my toys. I do have a flickering memory of looking deeply into the eyes of my dog Squeaky with adoration and finding it returned however. With strangely long eye lashes and glass eyes which roll open and closed, I remember being deep in communication with him when I was a tot and he accompanied me everywhere. (Those of you who are regular Pictorama readers know that I still have Squeaky. A very old, battered and beloved stuffed toy indeed. I have shared photos and other thoughts about the special place he has in my childhood in posts that can be found here and here.) I am quite sure I knew his affection for me equaled mine for him.

I wonder what the adult equivalent of toy love is. The closest I can come is the somewhat mystical relationship I have had with my cats which has continued more or less unchanged since childhood, although sadly I don’t have long hours to commit to communion with them I did as then. Of course cats, in this case a long line of them, are alive so it is different. (Kim offers that he has lost a feeling of tapping into deep cat wisdom he had enjoyed with kits as a child. He too still communicates with them however – I see him and Cookie and Blackie go about their daily routine and the three of them are clearly of a mind.)

As an adult and as much as I love my toys and they bring me a certain joy, I no longer communicate with them in the secret language of being a child. I ponder if this is true of some of my toy collecting colleagues. I think especially those folks who collect toys because they didn’t have them as children may have a different relationship to them, although this isn’t a question I have put to any of them. (I am grateful to report that my childhood was in no way deprived of toys.) I regret that loss a tiny bit as I consider it and I think I wouldn’t mind slipping back into that world – and perhaps there is a little gleam of approval in Squeaky’s eyes now that I take another look.

Train tracking

Posted by Pam's Pictorama

Pam’s Pictorama Post: I wrote yesterday of my reluctance to leave home (hearth, Kim and kitties) to commence travel in general. Now, as I write, I sit on an Amtrak en route to Boston, parked in New Haven. It brings to mind a trip several years ago, also on business, when a derailment somewhere in the Northeast had delayed a trip, I had commenced at 5:30 in the morning, by hours and hours in effect killing a day of business entirely and reminding me of why I always pack too much reading and food.

That day we inched our way up the east coast and I spent more than an hour on the train in this particular spot, looking at this same view. It was fall instead of spring. I think if you work in the Northeast and do any business travel this corridor (and perhaps this story) is familiar, although perhaps others have more tales of airports. Other than one occasion when it was late April and my flight in Boston was prevented from taking off in New York due to a snow storm in New York, most of the stories of travel are Amtrak ones.

I can almost remember being young and naïve enough to think that travel by train in this country might remotely resemble what I had seen depicted in early films. (Think noir, compartments, dining cars with service and china.) It most certainly does not and I had this drummed into my head on my very first trip to Washington DC from my New Jersey home, back when I was in high school. There was a problem, I want to say something fell across the tracks which is sort of fatal to train travel, and our trip home became a thing of family legend, involving total abandonment by Amtrak at a station off the beaten path (think woods) somewhere in the general area between Philadelphia and the New Jersey border, as night was falling, requiring several non-train methods of transportation and many, many hours beyond the requisite four or so before we arrived home.

Still, one can’t fly everywhere and I have put in my time on America’s trains. Coming home from college in New London, Connecticut – standing a long part of the way on a crowded train from New London to New York at Thanksgiving, before changing to a NJ Transit train there. (Today when the New London stop is announced in about forty minutes I will twitch with memory of getting on and off there. As above – entering New London and the video of leaving below – it looks pretty much as it always has.)

Young adulthood found me with a boyfriend in upstate New York which resulted in many Amtrak hours logged – delays, electrical failures and the like becoming part of the routine. Hard to believe, but there were things about that relationship that were worse than the train time and after Andrew I said adieu to my weekend warrior status on the train. However, I can’t be on one, chugging toward Boston or DC, or perhaps the lesser route to Albany, or even up to Toronto, without flickering memories of trips past, successful and otherwise.

In college I had found my way to Europe and those trains, in Britain, Scotland, France and Italy, carried a whiff of the old world rail charm old films had teased me with. They also carried a level of efficiency the heights of which Amtrak would never, at least in my experience, reach. Dependable, generally clean, the rail system is the primary travel artery for most of Europe and Asia in a coherent way that I fear ours is not.

In my thirties a friend found a cheap tour to Russia – flying into Moscow and then the train down to St. Petersburg. It was February, but reasonable warm for a Russian winter. Our tour group consisted of about six people in addition to my friend, her mother and myself. Suzanne’s mother, Jean, had been my painting teacher and was in her early eighties when we made the trip.

Jean and I shared an ancient compartment on the train overnight. It was exactly as I would have expected and hoped such a train would be – down to watching snow out the window overnight as we dashed through the countryside, wolves baying – really! We had been warned by our guide to lock our doors however, and to refuse to open them to anyone overnight which we did – I have no memory of anyone attempting to enter however.

Meanwhile, the Russians seemed to have great respect for older people and took a genuine interest in Jean wherever we went. They would always take the time to help her from the bus or over a step and to say a few words to her in one language or another. Sadly Jean is gone now, although she lived well into her nineties. She was a good traveler and made international trips, albeit gradually easier ones, for another several years after that trip to Russia.

My trips are no longer romantic or liaisons, and are mostly driven by conferences and these days concerts. Much of the travel time is now devoted to work. Despite that and the issues above, I generally find my time on a long train ride calming. Watching the world go by and eventually hopping off at my destination, mildly changed, hopefully for the better, by the process of getting there.

Travel

Posted by Pam's Pictorama

Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: This little kid clutching (his?) toys is my jumping off point for a brief post before grabbing my roller bag and hitting Amtrak for a business trip this morning. This photo was part of the birthday loot from the great Antique Toy Shop (I like to promote my friends and a link can be found here!) in Chelsea. This little fellow in his winter togs has his toys so he’s ready to go wherever.

As a child who had to travel with a certain retinue of toys, I can remember that decision making process even now. There were, to some degree, toys which had to go with as I remember. Squeaky the dog was probably the primary one and there was a koala bear (and a successor one) that also did some road time. There were toys of the moment and toys to entertain (Colorforms anyone?) but those two toys were the mainstays of maintaining happiness abroad. Of course travel when I was small was rarely more than a trip to my grandmother’s house. The Butlers were not a traveling family for the most part. It is, however, all relative and leaving the house was travel when I was a tot.

I am a mix of contradiction about travel. There is an adventurous side of me that gets a gleam in my eye at the thought of a trip to a remote Buddhist enclave hidden in the Himalayas and only accessible via three days hike with our bags strapped to yaks. (I have been to Tibet twice and would love to go another time; Patagonia and Machu Picchu via a trip with the Met Museum, Russia and Europe. The Buddhist kingdom of Mustang has long been on my list.) And yet I am always conflicted about actually leaving home and routine – Kim! Kitties! Morning coffee at the computer with Kim and them. I am both the daughter of my father, who happily traveled world-wide in his job as a cameraman for ABC News, and my mom who has rarely left New Jersey and has only flown, to my knowledge, twice in her life.

I guess as a child I mitigated that travel anxiety to some degree by having my toys with me. As an adult you instead run through the plethora of bits you don’t want to forget – a myriad of charger cables, shoes for the event on Sunday, socks, a plethora of appropriate ID if flying, instructions for the hotel and restaurants. (I once showed up in Boston for a conference with only the name of my hotel, sadly a generic one like Hilton, and no address. The cab driver made a lucky right guess with the first try as there were several in town. Since then I always check that I have that.) It is a pity that there really is no adult substitute for toys.

I travel for business with some frequency, although as Pictorama readers know these days I sometimes also travel with the orchestra. (I have written about my orchestra adventures from Florida to Shanghai and samples can be found here and here.) There is comfort in being of that well oiled machine, and once I am under the purview of the great road manager Ray Murphy I am secure in the knowledge that I will get where I am going on time, will be well fed, and in general all will be good and run with military precision.

However often, like today, I will travel on my own and only meet up with them briefly for a concert. I am, of course, all competency and capableness once started – not to mention that these days I am blessed with an extraordinarily efficient assistant in the form of a human dynamo named Sandra. She has organized me almost in spite of myself for this particular trip which I paid almost no attention to in the fray of other work needing to be tied up. Thank you Sandra!

I will drag my heels about getting out of the house to some degree although not enough to endanger my actual schedule; I am too compulsive for that. The suitcase is half packed on the floor causing some distress among the cats already. Kim is off to the MoCCA comics con shortly and I am left with a nagging desire to be in two places at once. I am always good once I begin. Travel efficiency will kick in and I have people I am looking forward to seeing in Boston, as well as those I will enjoy meeting. A few days in Boston is largely an enjoyable outing.

Traveling with Kim is of course entirely different, although we don’t do it very often. For me in many ways, having Kim with me and going somewhere is sort of like taking my toys with me. I will have to write about that as well. Now if only we could figure out bringing the cats.

Not my bear but one like it via the internet.

Squeaky the dog. He’s clearly worse for all that travel!

Smoking

Posted by Pam's Pictorama

Pam’s Pictorama Post: Born into the mid-1960’s my parents were in many ways a modern and scientific couple. My mother evidently eschewed alcohol during her pregnancies and gave up even what was evidently a lingering, occasional cigarette – so infrequent that I knew nothing of the habit until years later, but I will get to that in a bit.

I came more or less into a world where even among my extended family there was, to my memory, little or no smoking. It wasn’t like it was an issue. Of course tons of people smoked and people came to the house and smoked. To my knowledge nothing was thought about it and never anything said. Although as I think of it, I can only remember us owning one ashtray however – it was a large blue heavy ceramic item with a swirl of color in the middle that I liked for its heft and color. Perhaps that we only had the one ashtray is telling. (I own a single one as well – a cat head with a wide open mouth. Not really surprising I realize. The awkward design is not favored by visiting smokers.)

When I was about twelve my mother, who must have been trying to lose weight in retrospect although I don’t remember her being heavy, took both running and smoking up. I eventually learned that my mother had been a high school track champion (to my knowledge a plaque noting her accomplishments is still at the Long Branch, NJ school she attended) and the running craze of the 1970’s had renewed her interest. What took her back to the occasional cigarette I am not sure. I smelled them but never saw her smoke one. She later said she stopped again because she could taste them when she ran, even after having only a single one and a day later.

Turns out my mother had been a regular smoker in college. She tells tales of tobacco companies coming to the campus at Douglas College where they gave free cigarettes to all the students, essentially getting them hooked which of course made it a good investment. They would have had to be free because my mother, at school entirely on scholarship, often also told stories of how she had her budget calculated down to how much shampoo she and her roommate could use monthly. (In addition, mom was pre-med and eventually was offered a fellowship to do cancer research. Pregnancy prevented her accepting the position – years later she mentioned that all of the researchers she worked with developed and died of cancers.)

On the other hand, my father disliked cigarettes and I gather he had encouraged or even insisted that she stop when they got together. He was not happy when she went back to that occasional cigarette either. While he did not smoke and disliked cigarettes, after I reached a certain age he told me had had tried pot and thought it okay. This tale was tied to a wild story about the friend of a friend, an artist named Ernst Fuchs, who drove a car trunkful of pot up from Mexico. Much to my surprise at a quick internet search, Mr. Fuchs only died in 2015 at 85 – I always thought he was older than my father, but he was about the same age. I hadn’t thought of that story in years. I supply an image of one of his paintings below, one done in a style that I think my father would have liked.

Meanwhile father drove from location to location for ABC News in a car with his crew with many of whom did smoke. I am not sure if it was that or another exposure, but it is somewhat ironic that it was COPD that ultimately killed my father last year.

I believe the pipe shown here belonged to my great-great grandmother, on my mother’s side. It was discovered by my cousin Patti who is unearthing many family treasures as she cleans out her family home which has housed at least three prior generations. (See my recent post about a photo of a turn of the century family wedding party here.) It is my understanding that this Italian ancestor of mine was a tough cookie. She was a breast cancer survivor when the only option was cutting away as much as possible of the cancer as you could and survive. She had surgery and lived a significant time beyond it.

There is something so personal about such an item and you feel that when you hold it. I am impressed by the velvet-lined case it sports and survives in. I gather from looking at it that the mouth piece must have been replaced ongoing. The maker’s tag is unfortunately faded beyond recall.

Quick research shows various attitudes toward women smoking during what I vaguely calculate to be the late Victorian period, heading toward the dawn and start of the new century. (An interesting aside, smoking jackets originated because it was considered rude for men to expose the women in their lives to the smell of tobacco on their clothing and therefore changed into jackets for this purpose. Interesting, yes?)

I know my family was not wealthy so, putting aside the feeling about female smokers of the upper class, I am left with the impression that great-great grandma would have been considered either fast or somewhat hard-bitten. From what I know I lean toward the latter. She would have come to this country as a young, married Italian woman. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for having been fast.

I knew the story about the breast cancer and our ancestor because of my sister’s research of the family proclivity when she developed it. At the time no one mentioned that our great-great grandmother had been a smoker however. Loren was not, like me she never developed a taste for cigarettes. I assume like me she tried a few, but she was an athlete and generally disliked smoking. (I never developed the habit and don’t even really understand how to smoke them since it really is different than a joint.) I doubt she smoked much pot either although we never really discussed it. Loren’s cancer was ultimately labeled as environmental rather than hereditary, although I take little comfort in that – as we shared the same environment for many years of our lives.

For all of this, there is a bit of allure as I look at the pipe in it’s case – looking at the case from the outside, it is almost as if a tiny musical instrument was going to be found within. Another tiny piece of family history today, waiting patiently all these years to be taken out, examined and considered. Even our own limited family history surprisingly tied up and full of contradictions about this particular habit.

Beyond the Pale

Posted by Pam's Pictorama

Pam’s Pictorama Post: Earlier this week a friend and former Met colleague, Melinda Watt, one who I miss since she relocated to Chicago a few years ago, tagged me in an Instagram challenge to post seven book covers over as many days without comment. Since I Instagram frequently and inhabit both an apartment and office surrounded by books I figured what the heck. I started with what I was reading (a Judy Bolton juvenile mystery, but more about those guilty pleasures another time) and then pulled the next book off of the pile next to the bed, The Motor Boys on the Border.

Then I started going off the rails a bit – the no comment piece was sort of nagging at me. As you probably know if you are reading this, I am chatty by nature and as I posted The Heroine or the Horse, Leading Ladies of Republic Films on day 3 I felt a vague annoyance at not telling the story of how I had found it for sale on the street in front of Argosy Books several days earlier while running around for work, and snatched it up for Kim – and that by coincidence we had watched several Republic films over the following weekend. (Clearly vital information.) However, I did enjoy the commentary by folks on the post and snuck my snippet of a story in via the comments.

So the next day I decided I would post Alias the Cat. While I could easily write volumes about the place this book has in my heart and life, I also felt that as book covers go which could speak for themselves it was an excellent choice, and not to mention that it is always a fine idea to promote the family product here at Deitch Studio. I posted it and I thank Instagram compatriots for all their nice comments and continued generous likes.

The much beloved Alias the Cat where I step out as a character!

Earlier yesterday I also posted the sad news that Leslie Sternbergh Alexander died. I didn’t know Leslie and her husband Adam especially well, but over the course of more than a decade of openings and parties we were a part of each other’s world for many years. We first met over the duration of a seven year stint of my dating Kevin, Art Director for Screw magazine and comics fan who pre-dated Kim in my life, but I saw more of Adam and Lesley after Kim and I got together. They were fixtures at a certain kind of gathering and the premature passing of the second of them is mournful for the comics community. Leslie was a gifted artist whose work I felt like I never saw quite enough of, but who seemed to inhabit a life that was really her art. Yesterday Kim shared a story with me I hadn’t heard about how they had denied him my phone number when he heard that Kevin and I broke up. This was a bit of a running joke as no one in the comics community would give up my number until our friend Carol Lay jumped ranks and provided it. I hadn’t realized they were among the withholders.

Axel & Komoda Opening at La Luz de Jesus, Los Angeles, 1989 - 22 of 24-L.jpg

Leslie, on left, and Adam

For this reason, over the last 24 hours my mind has been dwelling on the early and mid-90’s – people and parties and how it all ultimately took my life on a course I couldn’t have foreseen. When I woke up this morning and I had a look at Instagram and thought about books again, Beyond the Pale came to mind. So in complete defiance of the no comment rule of the Instagram challenge, I bring you the tale today.

Back in about 1990 I was wandering around in a bookstore I used to frequent on Madison Avenue in the 70’s, Books and Co., which was a delightful way to spend an afternoon. (This bookstore, memorialized in various films as the prototypical bookstore, is still missed today by those who knew it. I was a tad intimidated by it and rarely went upstairs as a result. However its disappearance left a hole that I occasionally poke at – like a missing tooth.) As I was perpetually broke at the time, my purchases were spare but the enjoyment of the selection process was a pleasure to be savored. One day I found several copies of Beyond the Pale remaindered and I purchased one for $2. What to say about a $2 that changes the course of your entire life?

Books & Co. as I remember it. This image snatched off the internet.

My then boyfriend Kevin had introduced me to the world of underground comics. I can’t say I was an especially astute student. Mostly I either found the art interesting or, less often the writing, but virtually never both. There were exceptions – Art Spiegelman’s Maus for one, a few other things. Suffice it to say however, I wasn’t getting it. However, as a devoted girlfriend I continued to try as Kevin was utterly devoted to them and found them endlessly fascinating.

Beyond the Pale, an early anthology of Kim’s work published by Fantagraphics, was different and I saw that immediately. I loved the art and how there always seemed to be something new in it each panel every time I looked – the stories took me happily down a rabbit hole of one kind or another, sometimes unsure where reality left off and fantasy started. The drawings were a visual aesthetic that rang a bell deep in my brain and the stories told of a fascinating world just outside of view, one I realized I had always wanted to visit. I took it home and devoured it. Reincarnated potatoes! Clowns, Big Billy Goat, chess playing marvels – tales of the asylum where Kim once worked, and of course early cartoons! This was where I wanted to live!

Fold-out page from Beyond the Pale

Republished in Beyond the Pale

I finally understood the appeal of this graphic form marrying the visual and the written – I got it. I went back and bought the remaining copies (two as I remember) and gave one away and kept the other until it too was eventually given away. I began raiding Kevin’s collections for snippets of Kim Deitch work. It was never quite as gratifying as the deep dive of an entire book, but Kim is prolific, Kevin’s library was pretty complete, and my ferreting paid off over time.

I was an official Deitch fan by the time I met Kim in person at an exhibit Art Spiegelman was having at a gallery on 57th Street a few years later. It was an evening with the comics crowd in full regalia. However I only remember meeting Kim and his brother Simon, and finally putting a face and person with the comics I liked so much. They were living in Westchester at the time and as a result were not all that frequently present at these Manhattan openings and parties. I liked talking to him though (he was as interesting in person although somewhat laconic – I was afraid of Simon) and in a compulsive way which is part of my nature, I began to look for him at each gathering, considering it a bit of an event if I saw him and spoke to him. The full progression from fan-girl to girlfriend and then later wife will require additional posts – it was a progression that took a number of years and a few turns before that happened. I now happily inhabit an entirely Deitchian world and there is no place I would rather be.

So today I take a moment consider this particular volume and how that $2 investment took me down a path that I could not have possibly foreseen at the time – which is after all the way life is wonderful. Meanwhile, with this very long post, I have certainly subverted the Instagram challenge with its cover only pretensions.

My copy of Beyond the Pale, with the original $2 price on the inside cover.

Economical Felix

Posted by Pam's Pictorama

Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: If you are by chance a newbie to Pictorama, you may not know that photos of people posing with Felix (stuffed ones larger than an average child, people clutching the toy form of him) make up the depth of my ever-growing collection. Even I do not entirely understand my endless fascination with these photos, but I absolutely have yet to see one I wasn’t anxious to add to my collection.

This aforementioned collection adorns the walls here at Deitch Studio – photo postcards climbing up the wall near the kitchen, across from where I sit and write at this moment, more by the front door and tintypes and assorted others near the bathroom where they get the least light of all. Kim is including some in the drawings for his next book – the one that he’s working on now that will come out after Reincarnation Stories later this year. Even I amaze at the tiny renderings of these photos in fine Deitchien style. They were giving him the devil’s own time this week, but I think they look great! I am always pleased and excited to have a nod to Pictorama in the wider Deitch Studio endeavors. (Incidentally, the pre-order on Amazon for Reincarnation Stories can be found here – always good to plug the family product.)

My collecting of these photos has long outstripped our ability to display them in our tiny apartment, but it has not impacted my desire to continue to acquire them – frankly not in the least. In fact, one of the great pleasures of this blog endeavor is to be able to look through the posts and be reminded of the photos tucked away – reminded of photos I have not seen in awhile. It was my original intention to use this blog to organize these photos – as well as the the other cat photos I have collected, including people posing with giant stuffed black cats, sometime astride them – such as seen here. I can’t really say this blog has organized anything, however I would still like to see that happen – it would be so much fun to be able to leaf through a fat book of my collection. I suppose every collector feels that way though. (Sigh.)

Today’s photo, a recent acquisition, represents a bit of a sub-genre. Somewhere in Britain, enterprising photographers who couldn’t be bothered to acquire a large, stuffed rendition of Felix appear to have made their own wooden cut-outs of him for posing, propped up with something that looks like a third leg or a second tail in each. Today’s addition appears to be the very same (or remarkably similar) Felix as another I featured in December of 2016 in a series of these so-called Flat Felix photos. (The post can be found here. The other two posts about these are found here and here.) However, the backdrop is decidedly different as you can see. The seller of the card of the two men identified it as located in Blackpool, England.

There was evidently a proliferation of these fellows. I throw in a third, flat Felix, for additional comparison below. If I had to draw a conclusion from these photos, I would say people were a tad less enthused than those posing with a fully stuffed Felix, but four is really hardly a fair sampling and I own so many of the others. Still, one of the joys of collecting is the ability to compare photos side-by-side. The child in today’s photo does look a bit tentative however, the backdrop painting of a fantasy park is a jollier one than in the other photos. Like virtually all of these photos, this one survives in good condition because it was never mailed, there are no notations on the back either however.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

So my virtual museum of images continues. I hope you continue to enjoy this rather specific photo journey with Pictorama.

Maud Powell

Posted by Pam's Pictorama

Pam’s Pictorama Post: Last week I wrote from my mom’s home in New Jersey as I occasionally do. Shortly after pressing the publish button on that post I decided to take on the task of going through some things that were unearthed and put aside for my examination during their move a little more than a year ago.

Numerous emotionally packed things spewed forth in that exploration, many small sentimental items of my father’s – his penknife, passports and driver’s license among them. I am pleased to have them and over time I may eventually write about those, but there was also a box of my sister’s jewelry, mostly small things she wore when she was younger, and in most ways least really of all is a tiny item I am writing about today.

This button intrigued me in part because my sister Loren was not a collector of buttons. To the extent there was a designated button collector and wearer in my family it would have been me. I was the keeper of the political buttons my father gathered on the endless Presidential campaigns he trailed from start to finish as a news cameraman; I had a collection of early smiley buttons. Remember those? (I was a collector of things as I hatched out of the womb evidently. All these early collections have vanished incidentally. I didn’t really learn how to latch onto things until I was older.) Even in college I was still pinning interesting buttons to the old army jacket I wore, and on the labels of the thrifted men’s jackets I favored in 1986. (A friend’s Instagram post of her in college sporting one she bought when we were together in Red Bank, NJ reminded me of that.)

So I was surprised to find this early button saved with Loren’s things, except that it is of a woman violinist and she played and loved the violin. Few things take me back to my childhood faster than certain violin solos which my sister would have practiced endlessly, usually picking up her violin to practice starting around 10:00 pm, after finishing her homework, and playing well into the night. We all learned to go to drift off to her playing since Loren herself never needed more than a few hours of sleep. For years after she died I found I couldn’t listen to violin music without crying.

As it turns out, Maud Powell is not a footnote figure in the history of American classical music. She was a top drawer, famous musician, internationally ranked, and according to Wikipedia the first American violinist of either sex to claim that distinction. Powell was also the first instrumentalist recording star of the Victor Talking Machine Company.

Born in a suburb of Chicago in 1867 she was a child prodigy discovered at the age of 9. When she was 13 her parent’s sold the family home to fund her studies and career which took her to Europe, and where she first debuted before returning to the United States. Several online sources site her as an advocate for music by black and women composers, including having commissioned a composition by Sierra Leone-English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. She made a point of playing for underserved communities routinely. However, in 1919 she collapsed on stage with a heart attack and died the following year, age 52 while on tour, after a second attack.

A biography of her was published in 1986 and there is a Maud Powell Society which has an online presence. NPR did a short piece on Powell receiving a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2014. She was the first female instrumentalist of any instrument or genre to do so at the time. (A distinction I assume stands today, but I am sketchy on the Grammy awards.) Peru, Illinois sports a statue to her according to a Youtube fan of one of her recordings posted there. The Youtube selection of her music appears slim (you can sample it here) although several albums appear to be available in an online search.

The back of the pin helped to confirm that it was indeed old and not a later reproduction. you cannot easily read it in the photo here, but this pin was made by the Whitehead and Hoag Co…buttons, badges, novelties and signs Newark, NJ. (The company was extant until 1959.) I found it interesting that this company, established in 1892, in 1896 introduced and patented the pin back pin. For those of you who thrill to pin back or NJ manufacturing history and wish to explore it more deeply I refer you to a fellow blogger, Newark’s Attic and the post The Whitehead and Hoag Company.

I will never know how Loren stumbled on this item as she was far less likely to meander through flea markets and antique shops than I was. However, it is easy to understand the appeal and why I would find it, tucked away, saved and waiting for me in a time capsule of her things.