Robert Benchley's Copy of The Making of a Magazine: A Tour Through the Vast Organization of The New Yorker by Corey Ford

It was the humorist Corey Ford who gave the name Eustace Tilley to The New Yorker's dandy peering at a butterfly through a monocle. Rea Irvin drew him on the cover of the first issue, of course, but it was the illustrator Johan Bull who depeicted him in Ford's satirical history The Making of a Magazine: A Tour Through the Vast Organization of The New Yorker (1926).

Robert Benchley's copy was inscribed to him by Ford. It was offered on eBay in August for $700. The price was slowly lowered until the book sold for $275 in late November.

Corey Ford
eBay listing ended August 28, 2025

https://www.ebay.com/itm/116744600621?itmmeta=01K4TTMQGXRKAKXDWCYJ1MQME3&hash=item1b2e853c2d&pfm=1

Corey Ford
eBay item description

Sold!

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Florence Nash's Copy of Actorviews: Intimate Portraits by Ashton Stevens With Drawings by Gene Markey

Writer Steve Stoliar brightens my new year with news of his most recent acquisition:

It's a 1923 book called Actorviews, written by noted Chicago theatre critic Ashton Stevens. (Orson Welles said he based Jed Leland on Stevens, who was also George Stevens's uncle.) It was issued in a signed/limited edition of 210 and is also inscribed by Stevens. The book is signed to Florence Nash, a theatrical actress and poetess who is mentioned in Stevens's interview with Nora Bayes.

In addition to Stevens's inscription, there is a fairly accurate caricature of Stevens drawn by Gene Markey, who did the illustrations for the book. Since you blogged about Markey's drawing of Benchley and Woollcott, I knew you'd know who he is. He also did a famous caricature of a young Ben Hecht—and he was married to Joan Bennett, Hedy Lamarr, and Myrna Loy, though not at the same time.

For me, Chicago in the '20s has the same sort of romantic image as New York in the '20s: Gangsters, speakeasies, Hecht, Lardner, Dreiser, all those newspapers, etc. This particular copy evokes so much of that time.

Picked it up for $25.

Actorviews
Title page

Limitation page
No. 89/210

"For Florence Nash,
My friend since she
was a baby poet,
my admiration ever.
Hers faithfully,
                               The Author"
and
"The Venerable Critic on a quiet
night in what he has nick-named
'The Windy City.'
To Flo-Flo—
                                         GM"

So did Stevens truly "nick-name" Chicago "The Windy City," as Markey suggests? It wasn't his coinage. Steve writes back, "I also checked earlier and saw that Stevens didn't invent 'The Windy City' but, to my surprise, he was well-known for having popularized the term." Aha!

Steve also provides some helpful Wikipedia links for those of us who aren't quite so up-to-date on 1923 Chicago-based literary celebrities:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashton_Stevens

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nash

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Markey

Note:  I'm so grateful to Steve Stoliar for sharing this find here on Attempted Bloggery. I had no idea such a book was out there. This is Steve's eighth contribution to the blog if I'm counting correctly and his thirty-seventh if I'm not. Steve is the author of Raised Eyebrows: My Years Inside Groucho's House. If you don't have a nightstand, buy one and place this book on it.

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Rube Goldberg's Pipe

If you hang around New York enough, you'll find traces of the great cartoonists of yesteryear all over. Last night, after dinner on West 36th Street at Keens Steakhouse—the apostrophe has been abandoned to history—we admired a display that was a small part of the world's largest collection of churchwarden pipes. The chop house's past patrons included more than 90,000 members of the Pipe Club, whose pipes were registered and stored on the premises by a pipe warden, and dutifully retrieved when the customer returned by pipe boys. Many twentieth century luminaries were members of this club: Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Albert Einstein, Enrico Caruso, Will Rogers, Babe Ruth, Robert Benchley—and cartoonist Rube Goldberg. I've given his pipe it's own photograph:

Which is not to say that Goldberg's pipe doesn't share the display case with the pipes of some mighty fine people.

There are some more recent members of the Pipe Club as well. Some of the names may be familiar.

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A Vip Library

Virgil Partch (1916-1984), better known as Vip, published numerous cartoon collections and illustrated books from the 1940s to the 1970s. Illustrator and collagist Stephen Kroninger has a great many of them in his personal library. He has photographed the covers and shares them with us here.

1945 and 1944

Joe The Wounded Tennis Player by Morton Thompson
with an introduction by Robert Benchley
1945

1951, 1950, 1953
1951, 1954

The Disappearing Buck
Promotional piece
No date

1956

1959

1959 and 1961

1962 and 1955

1964 and 1956

1970

1971

2014 reissue of Partch's drinking cartoons

Scan by Stephen Kroninger

Note:  Thanks to Stephen Kroninger for allowing us VIP access to his Vip library. This is his twenty-eighth contribution to Attempted Bloggery.

Quick Links to the Attempted Bloggery Archives:

Virgil Partch

Stephen Kroninger

Attempted Bloggery's Bookish Index

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Nathaniel Benchley's Copy of Charles Addams' Nightcrawlers

When Charles Addams was to delight his friends with drawings in copies of his 1957 cartoon collection Nightcrawlers, he often used a blue ballpoint pen and created bold full-page images. A copy inscribed "For Nat" was given in the year of publication to author Nathaniel Benchley (1915-1981) who, in 1955, had published a biography of his father, the Algonquin Round Table's Robert Benchley and prior to that, in 1954, had collected his father's pieces in The Benchley Roundup. The drawing shows the mischievous Pugsley Addams with a pet lizard, the one tended to by Wednesday on the dust jacket cover, thankfully on a leash. The boy had appeared in cartoons for decades but was not to receive his first name until the development of "The Addams Family" television series in 1964. Addams initially had wanted to call him Pubert.

Nathaniel Benchley's children are the late Peter Benchley (Jaws, 1974) and writer and actor Nat Benchley. Apparently no one in the family wished to hold on to this cartoon book.

Charles Addams
AbeBooks Listing Retrieved November 21, 2018

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=7231626020&searchurl=kn%3DCharles%2BAddams%2B%26sortby%3D1&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-image5

Charles Addams was later to illustrate the cover for Nathaniel Benchley's The Visitors (1965).

Nathaniel Benchley, The Visitors, 1965
Cover illustration by Charles Addams

December 4, 2022 Update:  Sold?

November 4, 2023 Update:  Maybe it wasn't sold at all, but there has been a change in consignment. The book is now being offered by Sotheby's at the same $3,750 price with the same photos.

https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/_nightcrawlers-eb81

Note:  Readers lucky enough to own books like this one (Nightcrawlers) with original Charles Addams drawings like this one (of Pugsley) are encouraged to share them with a blog like this one (Attempted Bloggery).


Quick Links to the Attempted Bloggery Archives:

Charles Addams

Pugsley Addams

The Addams Family

Signed Books with Original Drawings

Attempted Bloggery's Bad Boy Index

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