i have been reacquainting myself with the old Davy Crockett Almanacks, by way of this 1986 book published by Jim Crutchfield of Franklin, Tennessee, a copy of which i have just tracked down. His title has another one of those unwelcome apostrophes, not present on the original publications of the 1840s, and the cover leads one to expect the first nine issues when in fact we only get the first seven, up to and including 1841. That makes sense as these seven form a stylistically united group, usually identified as 'the Nashville' series, distinct from the later issues published by Taylor and Fisher. In fact there were apparently 55 issues in all from as many as five different publishers, published between 1835 and 1856. You can see a great display of twenty-one different covers described here and illustrated here that comprised a set offered at auction a couple of years ago. "Collection of 21 Crockett almanacs, all in original pictorial wraps and profusely illustrated with humorous wood-engraved illustrations (many full-page). 21 vols., 8vo, each approximately 20.3 x 13 cm.,"
The stories are excellent antecedents of the modern comic book, with their wildly exaggerated heroics.


Even the wimmen are impossibly tough in these tall tales, told in rough backwoods-speak, as in this brief excerpt from 1847:

"One day when Oak Wing's sister was going to a baptizing, and had her feed in a bag under her arm, she seed a big bear that had come out from a holler tree, and he looked first at her, and then the feed, as if he didn't know which to eat fust. He kinder poked out his nose and smelt the dinner which war sassengers maid of bear's meat and crocodile's liver.

Academia has decided that the earlier Nashville issues are superior, in part because the naive design of their woodcuts appeals to modernist artistic taste (the snake drawing above is a good example), and in part because unpleasant racist elements creep into the later offerings. But i would enjoy the chance to look at the subject more closely under my own cognizance. Here's a later cover, from the 1850 Fisher issue, which is not far from the exaggerated perspective and dynamics of comic books.



(more thoughts to come)

In my neighbourhood

anne in army boots.

In my neighbourhood

one of those moths which have a scary face on their backs when you look up close.

Art historians claim Van Gogh's ear 'cut off by Gauguin'

"Vincent van Gogh's fame may owe as much to a legendary act of self-harm, as it does to his self-portraits. But, 119 years after his death, the tortured post-Impressionist's bloody ear is at the centre of a new controversy, after two historians suggested that the painter did not hack off his own lobe but was attacked by his friend, the French artist Paul Gauguin.
...two German art historians, who have spent 10 years reviewing the police investigations, witness accounts and the artists' letters, argue that Gauguin, a fencing ace, most likely sliced off the ear with his sword during a fight, and the two artists agreed to hush up the truth.

i just did something I've been meaning to do for twenty years. I read Poodle Springs, the Philip Marlowe novel begun by Raymond Chandler, left unfinished at his death in 1959, and completed by Robert Parker at the request of the Chandler estate for publication in 1989. Chandler left us only four chapters of this story, in which his detective of seven previous novels and numerous short stories is now married and living in what i presume to be an analogue of Palm Springs, California. I probably left it so long on account of the unlovely cover, a hotchpotch of film noir cliches. Instead I feel it should have conveyed something of the Palm Springs locale and the hero's discomfort at being stuck in it. here's a much happier marriage of book and cover, from Chandler's 1949 novel, The Little Sister. I lifted it from Wikipedia, which describes the plot's opening:


"The story opens when mousy Orfamay Quest walks into Philip Marlowe's office in search of a detective. Orfamay is a "small, neat, rather prissy-looking girl with primly smooth brown hair and rimless glasses"

NEW YORK - Marilyn French, the writer and feminist whose novel The Women's Room sold more than 20 million copies and transformed her into a leading figure in the women's movement, has died at 79.
*********
From the blog 'A Journey round my skull', Poets ranked by beard weight: "Poets Ranked by Beard Weight is a classic of Edwardian esoterica, a privately printed leaflet offered by subscription to the informed man of fashion and as a divertissement au courant for reading bins and cocktail tables of parlor cars and libraries and smoking lounges of gentlemen's clubs."
(link via Dr jon)
********

Grizzly bear is best man at wedding
"Casey Anderson, a modern-day Grizzly Adams, picked a half-ton bear to be best man at his wedding to Hollywood actress, Missi Pyle."
(link from Wayne Beamer, whom I once drew as a snoring grizzly bear)

somebody has posted a great introduction to the long running Scottish Sunday comic page titled Oor Wullie. I haven't seen it for a long long time, but Wullie always began and ended each week's story sitting on a bucket. in one of my own things I drew myself on Wullie's bucket, but nobody ever mentioned getting the reference.