I had forgotten the Saturday Review (a magazine which folded in 1986) though I clearly remember the Saturday Evening Post, from a recent Norman Rockwell show at the Brooklyn Museum. What was the whole "Saturday" craze in naming magazines of the late Victorian era?
I guess Saturday represented blissful leisure.
The Saturday Review apparently was a highbrow magazine, like the New York Review of Books today. This is a collection of cartoons from the magazine, published by the Vanguard Press in 1946. I found it in my garage. It reveals the world of college-educated American thinkers of mid-century. Numerous jokes involve bookstores, many of them not very funny. (My favorite shows a man with a white beard and turban — who actually resembles me. Apparently, he is a psychic, because he tells the bookstore clerk: "No mystery stories please, I always know the solutions right away!") (Notice the stilted locution, typical of these captions.) In another cartoon, two cops are interviewing a bookshop owner who’s sitting on the floor, his legs and torso tied with rope. The store has been ransacked, and a safe pried open. "His steel-gray eyes were serene, but at the same time they flashed defiance. His sensitive nostrils quivered with excitement, while a scornful smile played around his thick lips. He took fifty-four dollars," the bespectacled owner recounts.
In another drawing, a woman with a small and silly hat asks a bookstore clerk: "Have you anything to counteract Aldous Huxley?" The most avant-garde of these book-dealing witticisms has the cheerful clerk proffering a volume to a wary woman, explaining: "You can’t put it down. Every chapter ends in the middle of a sentence."
Even shipwrecked people are literary, in Laughs. On page 71 (yes, the pages are numbered!) a couple is marooned on a tiny island where they’ve built a lean-to of palm fronds to protect their stacks of books. The wife — her hair long and tangled — turns to the man and exclaims: "I just can’t help thinking about the fines at that lending library."
And criminals read books! Two convicts bust out of a prison, as one remarks, "I got the idea from a line I read in a poem. ‘Stone walls do not a prison make.’" A similar cartoon shows an empty jail cell with a single book lying on the cot: Occult Powers. The Saturday Review of Literature understood that books help us escape the prisons of our individual selves, into an unlimited universe.
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