A Charles Addams Scrapbook...with a Mystery Cartoon

Scrapbooks, by their nature, are one-off compilations informed by the sensibilities of one or more individuals. Contributor Joel Jacobus has gotten his hands on an old scrapbook of Charles Addams cartoons clipped almost entirely from the pages of The New Yorker. The cartoons date from 1944-1954. They do not appear sequentially and are by no means inclusive. The scrapbooker had a preference, it seems, for cartoons without captions, for cartoons with Addams Family characters (as we today call them), and for gags that over time have become classics.

At the back of the scrapbook are two Addams items unlike the others. There is a Remington Noiseless typewriter ad dating from 1952 which was also taken from The New Yorker. And right before that there is an intriguing mystery cartoon. But let's not get  too far ahead of ourselves...

A Charles Addams scrapbook

The first twenty-five pages of the scrapbook have New Yorker cartoons, generally one to a page with only one exception. I have captioned the photos of the scrapbook pages with the date each cartoon appeared in The New Yorker.

1/10/1948

12/27/1947...1/24/1948

4/16/1949...1/29/1949        
9/25/1948                          

1/31/1948...3/12/1949

11/29/1947...3/27/1948

7/30/1949...8/26/1944

8/14/1948...11/4/1950

12/27/1952...11/22/1952

3/1/1952...6/24/1950

3/20/1954...12/26/1953

2/21/1953...4/18/1953

11/6/1954...5/17/1952

2/14/1953...5/3/1952

Then come seventeen blank pages. Near the back of the album there's a mystery cartoon. It is very small compared with his New Yorker gags. Clearly it is not a gag cartoon from The New Yorker, although conceivably it could be part of an ad (perhaps along the lines of: ...slow heating up? Try Acme hot plates!). It could very likely be from another publication altogether. There are no quotation marks around the caption, which is quite unusual, especially for a gag cartoon. So what is it, exactly, and where and when was it published?

...slow heating up?
Charles Addams

The scrapbook concludes with Addams art trimmed from a 1952 Remington typewriter ad that was published in The New Yorker.

February 16, 1952

Here's the full ad:

https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1952-02-16/flipbook/018/

The same Addams artwork reappeared in The New Yorker in 1955 with a different page layout and altered copy:

https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1955-03-26/flipbook/072/

March 1, 2021 Update:  On October 31, I asked on this page, "What of ...slow heating up? Is it a forgotten gag cartoon or a part of an obscure advertisement? From what specific publication did the unknown scrapbooker remove it? Readers who can help solve this mystery are urged to speak up." And now, someone has! Today, in the comments section below, Jeff Nelson identifies a 1957 ad from the Saturday Evening Post with art from four New Yorker cartoonists. It was clipped three years later than the last New Yorker cartoon in the scrapbook. As Jeff writes, "Evidently the scrapbooker was only interested in the Addams." Thank you, Jeff. Here it is:

Charles Addams        Claude Smith
William Steig           Richard Taylor
Somebody ought to tell them about full Housepower
The Saturday Evening Post, March 16, 1957, page 82

Scan by Jeff Nelson

Note:  My thanks to Joel Jacobus for having the good sense to obtain an oddity like this scrapbook and then for sharing it here. This is Joel's tenth contribution to this blog. The things he comes up with are quite simply amazing.

This is the first complete scrapbook of this sort—or of any sort—to appear here on Attempted Bloggery. It's quite a thing to behold, isn't it? One can wonder why scrapbooks culled from the pages of the New Yorker aren't more common given how many issues have covers, cartoons, writing, and even advertising that are just so damn hard to part with. I would love to hear from others who might have in their possession such scrapbooks containing either pages of a single New Yorker cartoonist, such as Charles Addams, or of multiple artists, writers, or features. In general, do scrapbookers tend to save the work of the more popular contributors that already may be destined for collection in book form, or do they gravitate instead to the rarer material that happens to catch their fancy?

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