Painting the Town

The identity of the Young Man of Manhattan book jacket artist has always been something of a mystery to me; the signature in the lower right hand corner of the picture is not large or clear enough to be legible. I've seen the artist credited as Emar Williamson by an online antiquarian bookseller; but an internet search on that name doesn't return any meaningful results. Besides, Emar doesn't even sound like a real name. For a person, anyway.



Well, with the help of the good folks at the Society of Illustrators, I think we have found our man: he is none other than Edgar Franklin Wittmack. It's easy enough to see how that name could have been misread as Emar Williamson. I guess.

Wittmack did covers for The Saturday Evening Post and the adventure story pulps, but is best remembered today for the futurstic illustrations he did for magazines such as Popular Science.

This looks like an absolutely TERRIBLE idea!

The Society of Illustrators, located on East 68th Street here in Manhattan, has a wonderful museum space and is well worth a visit if you're in New York.

Greetings From Governors Island!

Today we took our bikes on the ferry over to Governors Island. Besides it being a perfectly gorgeous day for a bike ride, I wanted to get a shot of this view of lower Manhattan.

It's obvious that the artist worked from this vantage point while painting the dust jacket picture for Young Man of Manhattan. 

The view was easily identifiable by the presence of two New York City landmarks: the Whitehall Building (the building on the left, indicated by the pointing finger), and the Standard Oil Building (the right indicated building, partially obstructed). The tall building still under construction to the left of the Whitehall is, of course, One World Trade Center, previously referred to as The Freedom Tower. And the green-topped tower at the far right is the Bank of the Manhattan Company Building, now known as the Trump Building. It was built the year after Young Man of Manhattan was published, which explains its absence in the dust jacket painting.

I believe the gold-topped building just below Toby's right knee is the Woolworth Building, which is now obstructed.

Pulp Fiction V: Show Me The Money!

Misled. No male characters actually appear in the story Night Club. And just what conclusions, exactly, are we expected to draw regarding the wad of bills being tucked down the front of the girl-in-pink's dress? (Do I even need to ask?) Readers will search in vain for anything even remotely akin to what the cover illustration suggests.

And while "Intimate Confessions" might be accurate, the alleged behind-the-scenes "goings-on" happen outside of the club: the story's impact lies in its sheer vagueness, the incompleteness of its narrative. 

Oddly enough, Night Club does actually contain one genuinely controversial  story: The Mother Has the Custody was rejected by numerous magazine publishers because it dealt with the subject of abortion, which of course was absolutely taboo in 1928. The story appeared in print for the first time anywhere when the hardcover edition of Night Club was published in 1929. 

The Little Sins cover is certainly the tackiest and tawdriest of all the pulp covers. Look closely: I am quite certain that the décolletage was drawn in. And that icky guy squishing his greasy face against the girl? 'Nuff said.

Pulp Fiction IV: Banned in Pittsfield

From the "That's Incredible" File:

The 1949 Avon reprint of You Go Your Way was actually banned in Pittsfield, Massachusetts for having an obscene cover! Not for the content of the book, mind you, it was banned for its cover! Booksellers and newsstands were ordered to remove the book, along with a handful of other titles deemed equally offensive.

Kay, of course, defended her work (and rightly so), saying "there's not a salacious word in it!" Kay publicly took full responsibility for the debacle, admitting that she should have been more vigilant and not allowed the book to be released in its immodest new attire in the first place. But in the same breath she went on to assert that the cover photograph certainly wasn't that different or any worse than much to be found in current advertising, giving a pretty clear indication of just what she thought of the Pittsfield officials' decision...  

Even by 1949 standards, Pittsfield must have been one hell of a straight-laced town!

Grande Dame

So today I took the day off and rode the train up to Windsor, CT to look over the Katharine Brush papers in the Loomis Chaffee archives. Loomis Chaffee is a private high school just north of Hartford; Kay's son Thomas Stewart Brush, Jr. went there (Class of '40). In the late 60s, TSB gave money to Loomis to build a new library, completed in 1970 and named after his mother. And he gave them all of his mother's papers, too, which, as I mentioned, they very graciously let me examine. 

Hanging in the library is this colossal portrait of Kay. And "colossal" is hardly an exaggeration: it's 8 or 9 feet tall!

It was painted in 1933 by Leon Gordon, who was known for his celebrity portraits: Calvin Coolidge, Winston Churchill, Helen Keller, Will Rogers, and Dorothy Gish (to name but a few) all sat for him.

If we take Kay at her word, the diminutive authoress was somewhat abashed by the grandiose scale of the thing: "...the effect is distinctly that of a billboard ad for cigarettes, even though the painting is superior."

The portrait originally hung in Kay's apartment at 322 East 57th Street. 


"I'm already beginning to wonder," Kay wrote in 1940, "what the portrait's future is, if any. 



"I think ahead to the days when it will be known to my son and his wife and their offspring as 'Grandma's portrait,' and when the problem of what to do with it will plague them ceaselessly. I even  seem to hear the treble pipe of childish voices, inquiring wonderingly, 'Was Grandma really nine feet high?' 

"No darlings, no. Not really. She was five feet three in her stocking feet. It was just that she took life in a big way, there, for a while."

Kay Brush never had any grandchildren.