Ruination & Despair

“Of course there is some truth in advertising. There’s yeast in bread, but you can’t make bread with yeast alone.”

 — Dorothy L. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise (1933).

Wholesale buyers who dislike consulting the Archelaus website when deciding which of our fine cards to order may now request a copy of our exciting, never-before-seen, twenty-page, full-color catalog instead. The cover, depicting Cadwalader’s alarming brain at rest, appears below.

Faced with declining sales, Life struggled to survive the disastrous downturn its cartoonists were so busy chronicling. In December 1931 the magazine switched from a weekly to a monthly format. Although individual issues were thicker, the net result of the change was to cut the annual page output of the magazine by approximately half. As the Depression continued, the publishers also attempted to cut costs by reducing the quality of the magazine’s paper stock (a sacrifice more lamentable today than it probably seemed at the time).  (Continue reading . . .)

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream, an exhibit exploring “the vibrancy of early modern views of sleep and dreams,” opened today at the Folger Shakespeare Library. I mention this fact both because the exhibit is well worth a look and because one of the curators is an avid customer of ours. The exhibit runs until May 30, 2009.

After weeks of inclement weather, we were finally able to send a lackey back to Washington’s famous Eastern Market today. Since his report on what happened there appears to be highly embroidered at best, I am approaching it with extreme caution. Still, he does appear to have sold an acceptable number of cards for a chilly February day in a sour economy, so I suppose there is no cause, as yet, to sell his family into slavery.

“May contain . . . peanuts.”

 — Allergy warning for Emerald® Dry Roasted Peanuts.

Up to now, I have been arranging the posts in this series thematically, but Life published so many interesting and relevant cartoons in 1931 that I cannot bring myself to omit all of those that did not happen to fit somewhere else. (Continue reading . . .)

Some years ago, a non-native speaker asked me about the English suffix ‑ling, as in gosling or hireling. Her inquiry inspired a brief but enjoyable quest to compile a list of examples of this rather peculiar form, which has after all given us such fine words as princeling, hatchling, and earthling. The better to amuse myself, I have now reconstructed that list, expanded it, and researched the matter properly through Archelaus’s office copy of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). (Continue reading . . .)

As consumer demand for our notorious checkbox cards appears almost insatiable, we have produced another thank you note along those very lines.

We realize that “Misbegotten sea creature” is unlikely to appeal to everyone, but we hope at least some of you will feel an overmastering need to purchase it. The illustration depicts an aquatic specimen reportedly sighted along the French Riviera between Antibes and Nice in 1562. And very handsome it is, too (assuming you go in for that sort of thing).

As the chief designer for a greeting card company, I could not resist giving this cartoon, “Greeting Cards for the Depression,” by Nate Collier (and “W.W.S.”), a post all to itself. Although the cartoon appeared in Life magazine on April 17, 1931, most of its gags could scarcely be more relevant today. (As always, for a larger, more readily legible image, just click on it.)

Don’t overlook the rest of our series on Life’s cartoons from the Great Depression! And there’s much more to come!

“Our present civilization has broken out with the hives.”

 — Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur (Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of the Interior), 1932

One frequent focus of Life’s cartoons during the early years of the Great Depression was the dismal state of American business. Once again, most of these cartoons should be self-explanatory. (Continue reading . . .)