I won’t be in the studio this afternoon to write my usual newsletter. Michael and I are going down to The New Yorker offices to visit their library. Very much looking forward to that. We are both nuts about this history. I want to share a few historical photos before we go.
Here is the building where The New Yorker was founded by Harold Ross and Jane Grant. It’s on West 47th Street.
Here they are, we think in the backyard of that building.
And here is a letter from New Yorker editor Katherine White Angell, writing to cartoonist Helen Hokinson about doing drawings at the NY Public Library.
And Michael and I have an original piece from Hokinson from the resulting series she drew. It’s gorgeous.
And is is a rather poor photo (sorry) of the actual series when it ran in the magazine
Happy Thursday. I know there’s a lot of politics going on today— I won’t be watching much, just getting alerts as usual. See you tomorrow!
I so envy you both.. Katharine Sergeant Angell (not Angel) was married to Ernest Angell, a lawyer and activist. She was the mother of New Yorker writer, editor, and methuselah Roger Angell, and she later married E.B. White. My wife Linda H. Davis wrote the first and only full biography of her. Ms. Angell was very serious about her work and was sometimes remembered for being stern (she was indeed a tough critic of writers and cartoonists; she chaired the weekly cartoon meetings for a long time). And she indeed had a good sense of humor. Once, in the days after WWI if I remember right, a pilot crash-landed his place in a field next to where she was living. She ran out. When she reached him, he was just coming to, and he saw this young, slender (at the time) woman scouting the situation. "Where am I?" he asked. Her reply: "Why, you're with the Angells!"
Thanks for the history lesson.