101 Cartoons from Le Chat Noir: Early Comics from Bohemian Paris is now available from Black Scat Books!

“Le Chat Noir” was one of the liveliest avant-garde papers in 19th century Paris. Published by the legendary cabaret, it delivered a weekly blast of anarchism, pranks, Decadent poetry, and black humor by such luminaries as Alphonse Allais, Charles Cros, and Paul Verlaine. It was also famous for its cartoons. Here are 101 of them: the poetic fantasies of Adolphe Willette, the slapstick animals of Théophile Steinlen, the military sketches of Caran d’Ache, the bawdy gags of Döes and Fernand Fau, and much more. With an introduction, translations, and notes by Doug Skinner.

You can find it on Amazon, or from Black Scat Books.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Hello Buddy was a small magazine (4 1/4″ x 5 1/2″, 32 pp.) intended to be sold by disabled veterans during World War 2. It contained jokes, poems, and cartoons, mostly on military subjects; it was published by Service Men’s Magazine in NYC, and subtitled “Comics of War, Facts of Service.”

This copy is undated, but a search shows there were other issues, sometimes with the same cover.

A few samples:

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

“Merry-Go-Round,” a 1910 offering from Milton Bradley, encouraged the players to collect a series of ten cards, in order, from one to ten. The cards are small (1 x 2.5 inches), with elegant black-and-white illustrations of the components of the merry-go-round.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Six of the videos Michael Smith and I made back in the ’90s will be screened in London, as part of the series TBCTV, curated by Mel Brimfield. Screenings are from 11:00 to 6:00, Friday Oct. 5, in the Lancaster Rooms of the very large and historic Somerset House. It’s free; also on the program are splendid videos by Brian Dewan and Michael Robinson. Tell your friends! There’s more info here.

Several more books are in the works from Black Scat, including a curated collection of cartoons from the 19th century paper Le Chat Noir (a major inspiration, for Black Scat, of course), a collection of my own cartoons, and an Alphonse Allais Reader chosen from my translations.

I will be reprising my concert of music from fairies and other dubious sources in November in NYC, again under the auspices of Morbid Anatomy. More info later…

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Charles Cros: Collected Monologues is now available from Black Scat Books!

Charles Cros (1842-1888) was one of the most brilliant minds of his generation, equally adept at poetry, fiction, and scientific inquiry. He wrote smutty verses with Verlaine, synthesized gems with Alphonse Allais, contributed wild prose fantasies to Le Chat Noir, and experimented with color photography and sound recording, only to die young, poor, and alcoholic. Not incidentally, he also invented the comic monologue for the actor Coquelin Cadet. In these strikingly spontaneous and modern sketches, he introduces a gallery of fools and obsessives—The Clean Man, The Fencing Master, The Capitalist, The Friend of the Family—all nattering away, assaulting the audience with trivia, and blithely unaware of their own failings.

This edition collects all 22 of Cros’s monologues, translated, annotated, and introduced by Doug Skinner, as well as performance notes by Coquelin and two essays by his friend and colleague Alphonse Allais.

Available from Amazon; more info at Black Scat Books.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

The American Boys’ Book of Signs, Signals and Symbols, by Dan Beard (1918), is a richly illustrated (“362 illustrations by the author”) collection of symbols: hobo chalk signs, cipher alphabets, common gestures, lantern and whistle railway signals, semaphore, and more. Here, for example, is a page of “Toot-Talk,” the signals used by steamers. Many of these seem to be similar; I suppose much of the meaning is in the context. I appreciate Mr. Beard taking the trouble to draw different kinds of ships.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Gelett Burgess’s story “The Man Who Lived Backward” (Blue Book Magazine, January 1946) uses anagrams in a way I haven’t seen before. The story is, as the title warns us, about a man who lived backward, aging into an infant. The man is named Levi Wicet, and we are informed that the men in the family are always named with anagrams of Levi: Viel, Ivel, Eliv, Ilev, Elvi, and, of course, Evil and Vile (the last two pronounced “Eveel” and “Veelay”). Burgess’s systematic enumeration omits one possibility, leaving it to the reader to figure out the anagram “Live Twice.”

Mr. Wicet’s peculiar condition was apparently due to a strange man (“I could imagine him playing the role of Mephistopheles in Faust“), known either as Dr. Santa or Elvid.

Once Burgess establishes the use of anagrams, he amuses himself by inventing names that mock the implausibility of his plot. Levi Wicet adopts a number of synonyms: Lei Felsa, Eli Busgo, and Eli Drauf. He marries a woman who takes the last name of Keaf. Our narrator hears the story from a gruff and sarcastic Hungarian named Dr. Kojer. We not only have an unreliable narrator, but one who boasts about it with recreational linguistics.

(Posted by Doug Skinner. The illustration is by Burgess, from his “helter-skelter rigamarole” from 1909, Lady Méchante.)

“Les Plus Beaux Tableaux du Monde” (“The Most Beautiful Paintings in the World”) was published by F. Nathan, in Paris. There’s no date. It’s identified as a “Jeu des Families”: a game in which the players collect four of a kind (a “family”), like the American game Authors.

Twelve painters make the cut (with their French spellings): Léonard de Vinci, Albert Dürer, Raphaël Sanzio, Hans Holbein le jeune, Tiziano Vecellio dit le Titien, Pierre-Paul Rubens, Antoine Van Dyck, Rodriguez de Silva y Velasquez, Esteban Murillo, François Boucher, Thomas Gainsborough, and Rembrandt Van Ryn.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

An old scrapbook of musical instruments yielded this interesting picture of Juan Miguel and his “Jazz Guitar.” A Google search turned up nothing. It’s hard to believe that the elegant Juan and his remarkable instrument disappeared without a trace, but these things happen.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

I’m now translating the comic monologues of Charles Cros (1842-1888), and am consequently unraveling the various versions of his first one, Le hareng saur. It’s not only one of Cros’s most popular poems, still dutifully recited by French schoolchildren, but one of the few translated into English. Most English readers, if they know Cros at all, know him for “The Salt Herring.”

This is mostly due to Edward Gorey’s illustrated version, first published in a limited edition in 1971, and subsequently included in his collection Amphigorey Too. Tammy Grimes also recorded it on her album Gorey by Grimes.

Gorey credits the English translation to Alphonse Allais, and it’s included in François Caradec’s edition of Allais’s complete work. There seems to be a problem, though.

Paul Allais (Alphonse’s brother) noted in 1880 that Alphonse read an English version to the Hydropathes, a group of bohos devoted to writing poetry and avoiding water, which included both Cros and Allais. The Irish writer George Moore included a translation in his book Memoirs of My Dead Life, and it’s often assumed that he got it from Allais..

However, Moore never mentions either Allais or Cros, but credits the poem to the composer Ernest Cabaner, who did indeed set it to music. Furthermore, he gives slightly different versions in the various editions of his Memoirs (1906, 1923, and 1926), which leads me to believe that he was the one who translated it. Gorey used the 1926 version.

Cros himself published two versions of the poem, one in 1872 and one in 1880; it was the latter that became popular. Moore’s translation is freely based on that one; for some reason, though, he omitted the first three lines.

Harold B. Segel, in his book Turn-of-the-century Cabaret (1987), assumes that Allais read to the Hydropathes from Moore’s book, which seems unlikely, since the reading was in 1880, Allais died in 1905, and Moore’s book came out in 1906.

Here, at any rate, is Moore’s first version:

THE SONG OF THE “SALT HERRING”

He came along holding in his hands dirty, dirty, dirty,
A big nail pointed, pointed, pointed,
And a hammer heavy, heavy, heavy,
He propped the ladder high, high, high,
Against the wall white, white, white,
He went up the ladder high, high,
Placed the nail pointed, pointed, pointed,
Against the wall—toc! toc! toc!
He tied to the nail a string long, long, long,
And at the end of it a salt herring dry, dry, dry,
Then letting fall the hammer heavy, heavy, heavy,
He got down from the ladder high, high, high,
Picked up the ladder and went away, away, away.
Since then at the end of the string long, long, long,
A salt herring dry, dry, dry,
Has swung slowly, slowly, slowly.
Now I have composed this story simple, simple, simple,
To make all serious men mad, mad, mad,
And to amuse little children tiny, tiny, tiny.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)