The principal item in this set is a bound collection of 24 hand-colored caricature cards that were inspired by the divorce proceedings brought by George the Fourth against his wife, Queen Caroline. The trial and its ignominious lead-up of libels, charges and counter-charges, was a scandal of the day that today would have produced endless fodder for the tabloids and would certainly now be dubbed, "the trial of the century" or "the divorce of the century." Because it involved the king, the trial was held in the House of Lords, which ultimately rebuffed the king's petition. Car... View More...
Scarce male objectifier's glossary! Unsurprisingly, no copies located anywhere. No publication information whatsoever, as standard with racy or pornographic ephemera. N.d., circa 1940s, based on hairstyles to some degree. 10 by 8 cm. 22 pp., including wraps. Funny, some might say also offensive, labeling of different shapes and sizes of women's breasts. We have the "hot water bottles", 'ukeleles", "full moons", "cup cakes", and onward -- twenty in all. Also taking aim at various female types. Like it or abhor it, this is a genuine relic of mid-20th century... View More...
Fabulous collection of army caricatures, as well as actual photos of many of the soldiers and officers. The artwork has an inimitable naive, folk art-ish and outsider art-ish quality that is simply captivating. Even with the captions mostly unreadable by us written as they are in an indecipherable Suettelin Schrift, the humor and narrative generally comes through very clearly. The artwork is mostly focused on the soldiers' lifestyle -- hunting, womanizing and wooing, drinking and carousing, day to day activities, and other than their being in uniform mostly, relatively light on actual milit... View More...
Circa 1879. One illustration near the end of the album is dated 1879, and so we assume they all come from that date, or a few years prior or after. Oblong, 15 by 24 cm. 25 pp. with fine, even brilliant, pen-and-ink caricatures and cartoons. The work is unquestionably of professional quality, but there are no signatures or other indicia of authorship. The style would have fit right in with "Punch", and one can see a kinship with Tenniel or DuMaurier, to name two of the best known contributors to that humor magazine. Here the heads are often oversized atop miniaturized bodies. The... View More...
Oblong, 11 by 19 cm. Nine leaves with 17 cartoons or caricatures, all done on a miniature scale, which is a part of their charm. Each drawing has a short caption written in block letters. The drafting is quite fine -- these drawings could pass for published work of the mid-Victorian era. And the visual humor, showing drunks, sleepers, musical bandits, the injured, etc., holds up remarkably well. Neat though the captions are, an inscription presumably to the artist's sister is not entirely legible to us, and thus we can not identify the artist, other than to state that the artist was proba... View More...
Oblong, 24 by 34 cm. 132 pp. Caricatures and humorous primarily about the Italian navy but venturing into other areas as well, including music and sport, inasmuch as touch naval officers and enlistees. Wraps are foxed, title page as well in margins. Otherwise, generally clean. Quite scarce. View More...
8vo. 22.5 by 18 cm. 270 pp., almost all with one or more colorfully painted cartoons and caricatures depicting the early part of World War One, beginning in 1914 and possibly all the way through 1915. The album was made with a notebook with ruled lined paper. On most pages, the lines have been covered over, and are at most barely visible. One of the specific events alluded to is the sinking of the Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy by one German submarine, an event which occurred in September, 1914. The sinking of the Lusitania and chemical warfare are alluded to well into the album, which brin... View More...
[62] pp. With colored pictorial wrapper cover. A profusely illustrated (line drawings) catalogue of the inaugural exhibition of a local association of humorists at the Galeria Emporium. 30 pages reproduce cartoons, with other leaves mostly devoted to a list of the artists and their works, with a few short textual humor riffs. Among the subjects lampooned are the battle of the sexes, politics, and the many indignities of modern life. The text is rendered in Catalan, not standard Spanish. One need not have a command of either language, though, to understand and chuckle at the rather broad v... View More...
Brilliant imitation of the style of the great French caricaturist Alfred Grévin. (Cosnefroy we presume was a gifted amateur -- we have no further information on him. N.d., circa 1890. 4to. 31 by 24 cm. 37 original watercolors, all humorist, and superbly capturing the irony and risque spirit of Grévin. We are unaware of any outright copying -- we can not rule that out -- but given that Cosnefroy assiduously, and humbly, asserts "After Grévin", we are of the view that that was precisely what he meant. We do not know anything about Cosnefroy other than his name at this time. We as... View More...
16mo. 11.5 by 8 cm. 55 pp. Scarce, with one physical copy listed on OCLC First Search, at the Canadian Science and Tech. Museum. In this booklet, bicycle terminology is used as a basis for an illustration that generally has nothing to do with the bicycle object itself. So for "Sweater", depicted is a man besieged by the sun. "Waiting Race" shows a Chinese man seeking to get into the U.S. but blocked by a padlocked door. This latter speaks to a topicality, as well as a Rascist tinge, to a few of the entries. `One of the entries, in fact, is "Races", and here are shown stereotypical image... View More...
Each card is a folded leaf of medium weight card, with the humorous figure -- two are of bums, one, a bellhop, another, a waif -- on the front. These are all made using paper and fabric pastedowns, with no printing of the figures directly on the cards. The cards are promoting Atalaya's calendars and other novelty printed products in the Spanish market, with the text entirely in Spanish and the Spanish outpost located in Berlin. Given the company's novelty products, the collage dimension of the figures makes complete sense. Inside the card in three instances is a pitch in the form of a longe... View More...
Six installments, with each installment including 12 folio-sized cartoons, in addition to front cover of the wraps bound in and a smaller vignette on the rear. Captions are generally rendered in Dutch, French and English (always English), not that captions are generally needed to make the point. Ramaeker employed broad strokes in his chalkwork reminiscent of Daumier. His style was perfect for the depiction of brutes, the faceless victims and masses, the pathetic, the macabre! The cover art uses a little shadowy color -- otherwise, the images are black and white. The folio is 15 by 11 inches... View More...
Satiric hand-colored print of liveried black servant shaking the hand of a tall, thin, elderly aristocrat. N.d., early to mid nineteenth century, unsigned. Loosely racist humor. The print itself is oblong, 10 by 15 cm., and with mat, 28 by 35.5 cm. View More...
Satiric hand-colored print of an absentminded man, his head in a book, a fishing rod over his shoulder, as borses and wagon drive off edge of cliff. N.d., early to mid nineteenth century, unsigned. Loosely racist humor. The print itself is oblong, 10 by 15 cm., and with mat, 28 by 35.5 cm. View More...
A colorful burlesque of visual humor, with oversized heads, acrobats, tourists, lawyers, astronomers, etc. all made absurd. N.d., circa 1880. Each card oblong, 13 by 22 cm, and each with four movable pieces. Movable elements attached to card with brass rings. Cards with one or two short captions. Figures drawn in broad caricature. Note that there are similar, yet different, lotto cards from the same period. The twelve we believe to be the full complement of cards issued together. Condition: light to moderate wear. Some light scattered foxing. No box nor chips. All moving pieces, tho... View More...
The inefficient efficiency of Deutsche Post -- a whimsical and fun take on postal services and innovations! 4to. 24.5 by 21.5 cm. Unpaginated, 29 leaves, each with original illustrations done with pen and ink and watercolors. The manuscript was created as a tribute or gift for a retiring postal official (the Oberpostinspektor) in Munich, whose name was Karl Scherner. The illustrations are absurdist cartoons that don't require an understanding of the text. Along with the title and caption of each illustration, there is usually a small clipping pasted in that represents the actual postal n... View More...
Scarce compilation of grisly wartime cartoons and caricatures printed in the Netherlands. 8vo. 24 by 18.5 cm. 48 pp. Cartoons are black and white, with many also featuring red. The message of the cartoons is generally easy to discern, even if one can not read the captions, and while they were created by a variety of artists, many have a surreal quality, very appropriate for the material, that brings to mind artists such as Max Ernst, and beyond that, the "degenerate" art so deplored by the Nazis. Pages toned but clean. Light soiling to the paper pastedown. Minor edge chips to D... View More...
Wonderful "pinwheel" calendar with comical color illustrations of elongated, El Greco-ized men attired in eighteenth century garb riding bicycles. Each month is marked by a card, most of which is dominated by the illustration. At the top of each card are four or more lines of rhymed promotional doggeril. The cards are 20 by 8 cm, and one can fan them out, with the decorative pin acting as a pivot point. The color palette is red, gold and green mostly. Scarce, with no copies of this located on OCLC or elsewhere, and the format, combined with the original illustrations, we also find... View More...
A mix of caricature, more straightforward or intended as realistic portraits, and a few town scenes and depiction of buildings. No conclusive date, but mid-19th century -- 1850s to 1880s. There is one illustration, possibly of a school house, captioned with "About 1852". We think it is quite plausible this was meant to be a backwards look in time, and so all it indicates is that the drawing was later. Another illustration has a date of 1884, which we think is the actual date of that illustration. Obviously, not all the illustrations need to have been done in a given year. While portraitur... View More...
Oblong, 15 by 23 cm. Unpaginated, with 42 pages containing ink illustrations and/or verse, most of which are outlandish and nonsense often in the spirit of Edward Lear. The album had a few contributors, each of whom initialed his contribution. One poem is signed William Colquhoun. Otherwise, the contributions are initialed and their precise identities are unknown. It is probable that a number of the limericks and/or ink illustrations were done by children of the Walter Long, created the First Viscount Long, and their friends. The book carries the bookplate of Long on its FEP, and many of... View More...
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