CRITIQUED BY A FUTURE CARTOONIST
‘TELL’, pseud. [i.e. Jacob EPSTEIN].
A rude Book.
Hartford, Edwin Valentine Mitchell, 1926.
4to, pp. 61, [1 (blank)], [2 (colophon, blank)], with half-title, 26 full-page lithographed illustrations in the text; some foxing throughout (particularly to title, contents, and endpapers); in the original boards with printed label to upper cover, spine largely perished with losses to joints; front free endpaper inscribed ‘Osborn’, pencilled authorial attribution in the same hand to boards, 1927 article clipping by R.C. Osborn loosely inserted (Yale Daily News, 16 March 1927), typescript letter from Cedric Ellsworth Smith to Osborn (21 March 1927) adhered to rear pastedown.
First edition, one of 500 copies printed in the United States, of these satirical sketches of Churchill, Shaw, Beerbohm &c. by the celebrated sculptor Jacob Epstein, our copy owned by the political cartoonist Robert Osborn and accompanied by a scathing review written during his undergraduate years at Yale.
The American-born English sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein KBE (1880–1959), here writing under the pseudonym ‘Tell’, provides satirical poems and twenty-six caricatures of contemporary English, Irish, and Welsh public figures, among them G.K. Chesterton, Augustus John, and the author himself (‘Oh how I wish he were a cutter / In liquorice or lard or butter / So that posterity might miss / His primitive absurdities’).
Our copy was reviewed by Robert Chesley Osborn (1904–1994), who studied at Yale from 1923 to 1928, where he was a member of the Elizabethan Club and a cartoonist for the Yale Daily News. Loosely inserted is a rather unflattering review of The Rude Book, written before Osborn discovered the author’s identity: ‘Perhaps [the author] can be excused on the grounds of being a beginner, but if he is mature, he really ought to turn to bricklaying: he might succeed in laying them; – he has failed in throwing them’. An enclosed letter to Osborn from the publisher’s business manager reveals Epstein to be the author, a fact rather sheepishly noted by Osborn in pencil on the rear cover of the book: ‘I gave it a wretched review in the Yale news … the publisher has only then told us who drew it!’.
Osborn later became one of America’s most renowned Second World War political cartoonists; best known for his Dilbert cartoons, he produced over two thousand posters for Navy pilots, many of which appeared in Life magazine and the New York Times.
