Roz Chast at the Cornell Club

Yesterday I attended a reception at the Cornell Club in New York City. In the third floor library, I was delighted to find a copy of Roz Chast's Theories of Everything (2006) opened to the Charles Addams page where it was signed by Ms. Chast. The  piece recounts her childhood experiences in the browsing library at Cornell University, where her parents found "intellectualism" while she discovered the New Yorker cartoonists, particularly Charles Addams. The book was mounted on the library wall under glass in a room full of incandescent lights and was therefore ridiculously difficult to photograph. Of course, I could have avoided many of the reflections by turning out the lights in the library mid-reception, but there's only so much I'll do, even for my readers.

"When I was a kid, my parents and I used to escape the city and spend the summer up near Cornell University, in upstate New York."

Gift of

Laurey Mogil and Rob Hellman

Cornell Class of '76

Charles Addams by Roz Chast appeared in the first Cartoon Issue of The New Yorker before it was collected in Theories of Everything:

Charles Addams by Roz Chast
The New Yorker, December 15, 1997, pages 118-119

Note:  Your roving blogger seeks for scans or photographs of original works of art by Roz Chast.


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