Francisque Sarcey (1827-1899) was, for much of his career, the most powerful theatrical critic in Paris. He was the perfect model of the blunt bourgeois, championing common sense, anti-intellectualism, and traditional values. He favored light, commercial fare, and railed against Ibsen and Jarry.

He was, predictably, a prime target for young artists. Alphonse Allais took the ridicule to new heights: from 1886 to 1893, he wrote a regular column for Le Chat Noir, which he simply signed as Francisque Sarcey. The pseudo-Sarcey became a grotesque caricature of the smug middle class, a sort of proto-Ubu: an obese, gluttonous, lecherous, hypocritical dolt, prattling on about his constipation and hemorrhoids, in loosely-knit sentences studded with clichés.

“How I Became an Idiot” collects four of Allais’s nastiest columns, translated, introduced and annotated by Doug Skinner.  It’s available in a limited edition of 60 from Black Scat Books. None of this material has appeared in English before: snap one up!

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

The Fortean Society was founded in 1931 to promote the work of that indescribable author Charles Fort.  The founders were: Theodore Dreiser, J. David Stern, Tiffany Thayer, Ben Hecht, Booth Tarkington, Aaron Sussman, Burton Rascoe, Harry Elmer Barnes, Alexander Woollcott, John Cowper Powys, and Harry Leon Wilson.  Sussman was a book designer, and Stern a publisher; the rest were writers.

Fort died in 1932, and the Society lay somewhat dormant for a while.  In 1937, Thayer decided to start a magazine.  His first step was to quarrel with Dreiser, who withdrew from the Society.  He then started publishing The Fortean Society Magazine, which, after 11 issues, he retitled Doubt.

Beginning with that 11th issue, too, Thayer put his name in big letters on the cover.  For Doubt, although inspired by Fort, was full-throttle Thayer.  Fort’s ruminations on the interconnectedness of all things, his flights of fancy, and his satires on confirmation bias were replaced by Thayer’s noisy denunciation of all authority and dogma.  Art Castillo’s cartoon from #25 summed it up well.  Dogma was a slavering Cerberus of Church, State, and Science: “all three are merely Orthodoxy in a different set of clothes.”

Latter-day Forteans usually document scientific anomalies; Thayer was more interested in political issues: government waste, compulsory vaccination, atheism, the Indian aristocracy, pacifism, scientific boondoggles.  He also promoted the activities of the society’s members, who were often doing interesting things: Caresse Crosby, Buckminster Fuller, Henry Miller, and others.  There were 61 issues; the magazine folded in 1959 with Thayer’s death.  It was consistently irritating, sophomoric, puzzling, and profoundly entertaining.

You can read a longer article I wrote about Thayer for The Fortean Times over here; and below is a sampling of covers.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Well, I’ve given you 200 children’s card games to eyeball, so now it’s time for a change.  Here’s the first of a series of fortune telling cards.

You can, of course, tell fortunes with ordinary playing cards, or with the tarot (or, it must be said, simply by free association); but card manufacturers have nevertheless provided some attractive art for the purpose.  As with the children’s games, no artists are credited.  These were drawn by the anonymous and the unsung.

This 36-card deck, “Old Gypsy Fortune Telling Cards,” was issued by Whitman in 1940; I’m afraid the key to what the cats meant is missing.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

We return to the great French journalist, humorist and nonpareil, Alphonse Allais.  I remind you that my translations of his Captain Cap stories, Captain Cap Volumes 1 and 2, are available from Black Scat Books; and that further installments are scheduled for July and August.  A collection of his immortal mockery of the reactionary critic Francisque Sarcey is also slated for June.

Allais sometimes appended a brief “Petite Correspondance” to his column.  It permitted responses to real and fictional correspondents, extra jokes, addenda to previous columns, running gags, plugs for his books, and other odds and ends.  Here is a sampling, taken from Le Journal, 1895-1897.

I received numerous contributions intended for the Franco-Lapp Society, to draw cyclists up the slopes with reindeer.  Unfortunately, due to an accounting error, the sums received were used in large part to pay for the cold drinks that I had to consume last week.  The remainder was put into the hands of an umbrella seller in Le Havre, a city in which I was surprised by a sudden storm.  A thousand pardons. 

M. Jules Renard, the author of Natural Histories:  Like you, I adore cats, and have proven it.  But I do not share your opinion on these exquisite beings’ romantic discretion.  When they are in love, they cry it from the rooftops.

To some compassionate souls:  Many thanks for the sympathy you have expressed for the son of my former concierge.  The poor lad has finally found a position.  He is employed in the thoroughly artistic atelier of M. Rochas, a photographer in Blois, where he has had the good fortune to encounter photographic plates even more sensitive than himself.

Mme. la Marquise de B., in Compiègne:  No, a thousand times no!  If you go out in the street in a diving-suit, do not take an umbrella; you will make yourself conspicuous.

M. Paul Escudier, municipal counselor in Paris:  I received your thirty francs, but basic honesty compels me to inform you that I am no longer a voter in the Saint-Georges district.  M. Bompard, for whom, here, I promise to vote, will be glad to reimburse you.

Mademoiselle Nina Pack, of the Opéra-Comique:  You are charming, miss, but your anthropological conclusions are somewhat frivolous.  There is no reason, because a man is of normal height, to assume that he is the son of a dwarf and a giantess.

R. C. of the Vésinet:  The story to which you refer, in my book 2 + 2 = 5, originally appeared in Le Chat Noir, whereas the cabaret song in question is from last year.  It is therefore your friend who is an imbecile and a thief.

M. Léon Gandillot, in Paris:  You have not been deceived, sir; cats that eat flies never grow fat.  Nor tigers!  Especially if they eat nothing else.

In the past few months, I have received a recrudescence of letters, full of cordiality, but a bit familiar, in which I am addressed as “My dear Alphonse”; some even go so far as to call me “pal.”  I warn these ladies and gentlemen that, in the future, I will only open correspondence that treats me with respect.

To some readers:  Absolutely!
To others:  Not on your life!

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Today is Shakespeare’s birthday, maybe; the exact date is uncertain.  But it’s a good uncertain date to appreciate that Stratfordian ullage, Shakespeare’s apocrypha.

Although the canonical plays have long inspired artists, the apocrypha have been largely unillustrated.  Many of them are perfectly fine plays, but suffer that curious stigma of being once ascribed but now rejected.

Fortunately, a staunch Victorian edition, The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakespere, gave space to the doubtful and attributed plays, and supplied characteristic engravings.  Note the spelling “Shakespere”: fashions change.  Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Titus Andronicus were classed as doubtful in this collection; perhaps future scholars, using criteria now unthinkable to us, will smile upon The Merry Devil of Edmonton.

Fourteen of the apocryphal plays were illustrated; here are seven:

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

For our 200th example of that curious, under the radar, often anonymous graphic genre, the children’s card game, please contemplate “Choice Thoughts by Longfellow,” an 1890 offering from Milton Bradley.  The player collects sets of five (a title and four quotations from a poem), as well as a binding card that affects the scoring.  I’ve chosen Longfellow’s sublimely silly poem “Excelsior,” a favorite of mine.

And here’s the colorful box.  What a nice house for choice thoughts!

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

(Posted by Doug Skinner.  The illustration is from Safe Counsel, by B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols, 1928.)

Our final gallery of caricatures begins with one by André Rouveyre.

Jean Veber, who drew a number of portraits of Allais, chose to portray him as a horse in this sketch.  At least, I think that’s a horse.

The playwright Sacha Guitry, who had the unfortunate experience of trying to write a play with Allais, made this sketch:

As well as this one.

And, to finish off, another cover by Siné.

And let me remind you that my illustrated translations of Allais, Captain Cap Volume 1 and Volume 2, are available from Black Scat Books.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

I didn’t know that the Illinois State Department of Health issued cartoons; this one is striking.  I found it in a 1928 book called Safe Counsel, by B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols.  Don’t be like this man!

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Georges Lorin made this sketch of Allais sometime in the ’90s.

Jean Veber added to his gallery of Allais caricatures, with a portrait of Allais in the costume he proposed for the members of the Académie Française.

Jean Villemot drew this curious portrait for the cover of Le Sourire.

An anonymous silhouette, from a country fair.

And, just to get my two cents in, my drawing of Allais, Captain Cap, and a potato, from Captain Cap, Volume 2.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)