NEWS ON THE MARCH

IN EXACTLY ONE WEEK, my wife, daughter, and I will move into our first house house. While most of the books and kitchen items have been boxed, NONE of the gazillion children's books or toys, or clothing, or office supplies, or toiletries, or files, or archives, or computing devices and their ancillary hardware, or library books, or things in the drawers in the nightstand, or shoes, or things hidden under the couch or beds or bureaus that we don't know about but will be discovered once those pieces of furniture are moved, or things that have been bought for the new house but are still in bags on the floor in our bedroom, or miscellaneous items that we didn't know what to do with after our last move and haven't used in the whole time we've lived here but are still in a milk crate at the top of the closet, or toys squirreled away for my daughter that she doesn't know about, or luggage, or shoe boxes, or non-perishable food in the pantry have been packed. Plus a few other things. As you may have guessed, in order to address this impossible situation (after breakfast, of course), I'm going to have to rearrange my life priorities, which will mean that We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie will sink to three (okay, five) on the priorities list. I hesitate to say I am putting the blog on hold, especially since I have a lot of future posts in various stages of completion, but it is safe to say that I will not post until we are in the new house next week. Depending on other things (like unpacking, for instance), my posts may be further delayed, but I will do the best that I can to post as frequently as possible.

Please use this opportunity to sift back through the older posts and comment away. Also, to check out some of my other writing as listed in the "Digital Footprint" section of this page's footer. Or my Flickr sets, which include manifold scans of things mentioned (and things not mentioned) on We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie. And there are some pretty cool things on the Blogroll page. Just as long as you don't leave me for them. (There's enough electronic love for everyone.)

EUGENE IONESCO: STORY NUMBER 4

STORY NUMBER 4 is Eugène Ionesco's final children's book. Originally billed in Ionesco's memoir Present Past Past Present as "a tale for children less than three years old," in picture book form it became a story "for children of any age."

JOSETTE KNOCKS on her parents' door as she does every morning. Papa indulged his gastronomic vices a little too much the night before and does not want to get up. Mama is not there. "'Where is Mama?'" Josette wonders. "'She has gone to the country to see her Mama.'" Satisfied with this answer, Josette makes her usual demand: to hear a story.

But today, Papa is all business. He has to get ready for work. "He goes into the bathroom. He closes the bathroom door."

Josette demands to be let in. But Papa is washing. Papa is shaving.

'I want to come in, I want to see.'
Papa says: 'You cannot see me, because I am not in the bathroom anymore.'
Josette says (behind the door): 'Then where are you?'
Papa answers: 'I don't know. Look for me...'

Josette follows her father's directions to the dining room. He is not there. (But he's been able to shave some without interruption.) Next Josette's sent to the living room and the kitchen and instructed to look under tables and inside pots and pans and behind doors. (And papa shaves and dresses.) After having run about the apartment looking for her father (based on her fathers' called directions through the bathroom door), Papa at lasts steps out of the bathroom ready for the day.

Then Josette's mama arrives, and suddenly Josette awakes. Her morning game of hide-and-seek was a dream. She gets up and...

"She goes to the door of her parents' bedroom..."

IN 2009, an omnibus edition of all four stories was released with illustrations by Etienne Delessert. Since Delessert did not originally illustrate Story Number 3 or Story Number 4, I assume that the art for those tales was newly created, but I have not gotten my hands on a copy and there does not appear to be any plans to release it in English.

To see almost all of the art for Story Number 4 by Jean-Michel Nicollet, see my Flickr set here.

For more background on Eugène Ionesco and his other children's books, see my posts:

Story Number 1
Story Number 2
Story Number 3

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EUGENE IONESCO: STORY NUMBER 3

THE CHILDREN'S LITERATURE SCHOLAR Selma G. Lanes reviewed Eugène Ionesco's Story Number 3 for The New York Times in a joint review with a book by former Ionesco illustrator Etienne Delessert, and Donald Barthelme's National Book Award winner The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine (a future We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie entry). She found Delessert's book (a collaboration with Jean Piaget) to be an utter failure. Barthelme's book showed promise but was overall a disappointment. And Ionesco's book?

"With a rare gift for transforming trivia to poetry Ionesco holds us rapt as the tale's papa recites to his small daughter: 'We're going to take a trip in an airplane. So I put on your underpants, I put on your little skirt, I put on your undershirt, I put on your little pink sweater....' How sweet are the commonplaces of everyday existence! And how comforting to a child!"

The lulling rhythm of oral storytelling, complete with call and response between father and daughter, are just as pleasing to an adult. Perhaps it's not surprising that the dramatist Ionesco truly comes alive in his only children's book in the form of a dialogue.

"LITTLE JOSETTE--just as she had done the day before and just as she did every morning--knocked on the door of her parents' bedroom...."

Mama is already awake and in the bath, but Papa, who had gone out the night before for a round of restaurants, movies, and puppet shows, is still in bed. Josette climbs into bed with him, and demands a story.

"'We're going to take a trip in an airplane," Papa begins. And he describes how they will get ready to go out, the tidings Mama will give them, the warnings the maid Jacqueline will provide ("She must not lean out of the window; it's dangerous. She might fall."), and the trip out of the apartment to the street.

On the way out, the superintendant's wife will also warn Josette that she musn't lean out the window, lest she fall out.

They will pass the butcher's shop. "Josette hides her eyes: I don't want to look! Mean butcher!"

They will take the bus. They will arrive at the airport. "'We climb into the airplane. It goes up and up, see, just like my hand: vvrrr...'"

They will look out the window and see the neighbor's house. The cars will be tiny, as will the people, and the animals in the zoo. Papa pretends to be the lion in the zoo, but it scares Josette, so he reassures her that he is not a lion; he is Papa. Then they see friends and fields and the mayor's house and the steeple and the priest and the country, the windmill, the ducks, the fish in the water ("We don't eat nice fish; we eat only the bad fish."), "And then we go up, we go up, we go up...

And reach the moon. They each eat a piece of the moon. "It's delicious; it's made of melon." But they take to the airplane again, and continue on to the sun.

The sun is hot, so very hot. They want to return to earth, but it's so hot the airplane has melted. It's all right though, because they can walk back home just as well. They need to hurry or lunch will be cold.

"At that moment, mama comes in and says: 'Get up, get out of bed and dress yourselves.'"

WHEN STORY NUMBER 3 appeared in Ionesco's memoir Present Past Past Present it, like all four stories, was subtitled "Tale for Children Less Than Three Years Old." But when it appeared in picture book form (illustrated by Philippe Corentin), the subtitle had changed to "For children over three years of age." Why it was decided that Story Number 3 was for an older audience than Story Number 1 or Story Number 2 is unclear. Perhaps it is because Papa says, "If the butcher kills any more calves, I'm going to kill the butcher..." Or the repeated warning that Josette could fall out of the airplane and be hurt. Or simply that the nuance of an imagined story within the story, one that Josette fully participates in as a co-storyteller as well as a character, requires a more mature mind than when Papa tells a simple story as in the earlier two books. In any event, a reader (or listener) of any age will feel comforted (and amused) by Ionesco's masterful dialogue.

Coming Soon: Eugène Ionesco's Story Number 4.

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EUGENE IONESCO: STORY NUMBER 2

EUGENE IONESCO'S SECOND PICTURE BOOK, Story Number 2, appeared one year after the first. It again finds the young Josette knocking on her parents' bedroom door early in the morning. This time Papa and Mama stayed home the night before and are already awake. In fact, Mama has already gone out.

"Jacqueline [the maid] told Josette that her mama had just left the house, with her pink umbrella, her pink gloves, her pink shoes, her pink hat with flowers on the hat, her pink pocketbook with the little mirror in it, her beautiful flowered stockings, with a gorgeous bouquet of lowers in her hand."

So Josette seeks her papa, who is on the telephone in his home office, conducting an antagonistic call. When he hangs up and Josette asks if he is speaking on the telephone, Papa says, "'This is not a telephone.'"

Josette insists that it is. Everyone has told her so. Everyone is wrong. It is called a cheese. But then, what is cheese?

"'Cheese isn't called cheese. It's called music box. And the music box is called a rug. The is called a lamp. The ceiling is called floor. The floor is called ceiling. The wall is called a door.'"

"So papa teaches Josette the real meaning of words."

Jacqueline, that champion of reality, enters and immediately starts an argument with Papa as to who is speaking correctly and who is saying the opposite. Josette believes they are actually in agreement.

"Suddenly mama arrives, like a flower." She has been out gathering flowers. "And Josette says, 'Mama, you opened the wall.'"

BARBARA NOVAK, IN HER NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW, considered Story Number 2 to be a saving grace in a children's book market that had become simple-minded and banal.

It is the most natural thing in the world for Ionesco to write for children. The reversal of usual relationships, the fantasy, the credibility he donates to the incredible, along with the sheer delight in nonsense, all are more readily assimilable by children than by their elders.

She concludes, "Ionesco, you are welcome to picture book land."

Despite such a laudatory review, Story Number 2 is rather slight, devoid as it is of story, and with word play that is no more than substitution, not the delightful nonsense of Dr. Seuss or Edward Lear. Delessert's surrealistic images have little to do with the text, which is in some ways their strength, adding a second set of symbols beside Ionesco's. Gerard Failly's illustrations for the 1978 edition makes the connection to the surrealists explicit in his final image for the book of Josette's mother...

...which is a tribute to Salvador Dalí's Mae West.

For other Failly illustrations, see my Flickr set here.

Coming Soon: Eugène Ionesco's Story Number 3.

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EUGENE IONESCO: STORY NUMBER 1

IN 1968, EUGENE IONESCO RELEASED "a personal memoir" entitled Present Past Past Present. It was a collection of memories presented in short passages that flowed easily from childhood to adulthood. 1967 sat beside 1940. His earliest memories were paired with memories of his daughter as a toddler. And sandwiched between these often dark and brooding reminiscences were four light stories "for children less than three years old" simply numbered Story Number 1, Story Number 2, Story Number 3, and Story Number 4.

At the time the memoir appeared, Ionesco was one of the towers of theater. His biting satires eschewed straight narrative--in fact, they often seemed to be a sequence of non sequiturs--and concerned themselves with the philosophical questions of the relationships between the individual and the state, the individual and reality, and the individual and death. His most famous play Rhinoceros premiered in 1959. It is the story of a small town in which all of the inhabitants but one turn into rhinoceroses, Ionesco's symbol for a person with blind faith in the state. Two years later, the critic Martin Esslin included Ionesco in a group of playwrights--along with Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov--who practiced what he called the Theater of the Absurd, plays that address Albert Camus's discussion in The Myth of Sisyphus that man's search for meaning and order in life is futile. For a writer usually engaged in such heady topics, Ionesco's children's stories, jammed as they were in his memoir, seem somewhat out of place.

Which is perhaps why they were immediately excised from the memoir and released in the form of picture books. Story Number 1 was published by Harlin Quist in the same year as Present Past Past Present.

"JOSETTE IS THIRTY-THREE MONTHS OLD, and she is already a big girl." Every morning she creeps to her parents room to wake them, and on this particular morning, Josette's parents are hungover in bed after a night of nightclubs and restaurants. This is of course lost on Josette, but not on the maid Jacqueline, who in annoyance at her employers' laziness pushes her way into the room with an overladen breakfast tray.

Father orders Josette and Jacquline away, and the two retire to the kitchen where they devour Papa and Mama's food.

This doesn't put Josette off for long. She returns to the bedroom where she demands a story from Papa. "And while mama sleeps (because she is exhausted from having celebrated too much), papa tells Josette a story."

There was once a little girl named Jacqueline. She had a papa named Jacqueline and a mama named Jacqueline, and sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, toys, in short, everyone in her life was named Jacqueline too.

Papa's story does not progress much beyond that. And soon the real Jacqueline puts an end to it as utter nonsense.

Instead Jacqueline takes Josette with her to do the day's shopping.

At the market, Josette meets a girl whose name happens to be Jacqueline. She immediately informs the girl, to the horror of all of the customers, that she knows all about it. Jacqueline has a papa named Jacqueline, a mama named Jacqueline, a little brother named Jacqueline...

Once again the real Jacqueline steps in to assert reality. She addresses all of the customers who look at Josette "with big, frightened eyes."

"'It's nothing,' the maid says calmly. 'Don't be upset. These are just the silly stories her papa tells her.'"

ALL FOUR OF IONESCO'S CHILDREN'S STORIES are often said to have been written for his daughter Marie-France. If that is the case, they were likely written in 1946 or '47 as Marie-France was born in 1944. Why Ionesco would let twenty years pass before publishing the stories, or in that case, why he would chose at that late date to publish the stories at all is unclear. I suspect it is more likely that they were written for a granddaughter, but I have been unable to find if Ionesco had a granddaughter. If anyone has more definitive information, please share.

IN A 1971 ADVERTISEMENT for the first two of Ionesco's children books, a prominent blurb reads, "Ionesco's poker-faced absurdities and Delessert's uncanny illustrations reflect the interior world of childhood with immense originality. Their Story Number 1 and Story Number 2 must be considered among the most imaginative picture books of the last decade." The source of that blurb? Maurice Sendak. I'm sure he was not at all swayed by one of Delessert's surreal illustrations in which there is a cameo of a certain wild thing.

IN 1978, Harlin Quist published a second edition of Story Number 1 illustrated by Joel Naprstek. To see all of Naprstek's illustrations, visit my Flickr set here.

Coming Soon: Eugène Ionesco's Story Number 2.

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GEORGE PLIMPTON: THE LOST PICTURE BOOK

YOUNG BOY: But there are more things I want to know. I want to know about the rabbit with the umbrella.

GEORGE PLIMPTON DID LITTLE to appease that young boy in the epilogue to his children's novel The Rabbit's Umbrella (1955). (See my previous post here.) There were suggestions and insinuations, but really at best what the reader got was a wink. "Life is full of mysteries, and it's nice to have a mystery that is a rabbit with an umbrella."

But in 1989, future Oregon poet laureate Lawson Inada hoped to grant children access to Plimpton's umbrellaed rabbit community. Lawson had co-founded Kids Matter in 1986 with David Zaslow, a publishing and recording company that primarily offered modernized versions of traditional Mother Goose rhymes and fairy tales.

He hoped to add The Rabbit's Umbrella to the Kids Matter list, and adapted a portion of Plimpton's epilogue into a picture book script intended for younger readers.

"I want you to know about rabbits with umbrellas, let me tell you about them."

At the time, Inada taught creative writing at Southern Oregon University. He approached one of his students, Nancy Bright, who was also an artist and asked her to illustrate the book, which she did.

"And where are these rabbits to be found?"

"Skipping about behind closed doors...And hopping through the magical dreams of tabby cats."

It's not clear why the book reached the completed art stage, but was never published. And it's not clear to what extent George Plimpton was involved with the project. Perhaps when he was informed of it, he disapproved. In any case, even though the book is listed in some library records, The Rabbit's Umbrella by George Plimpton, adapted by Lawson Inada with illustrations by Nancy Bright never saw print. But...

"If you want to know about squirrels with small pianos...and mice skating on frozen lakes...I'll tell you about them..."

Thank you to Nancy Bright, for dusting off this beautiful artwork and giving me the opportunity to at last let it be seen. For more of Ms. Bright's art for The Rabbit's Umbrella, see my Flickr set here. And for more bunnies and other art besides, visit her website Bright Creations Art.

"Good night, young child, good night."

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ILONKA KARASZ WRAP UP: THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS AND PHYLLIS MCGINLEY'S MERRY CHRISTMAS, HAPPY NEW YEAR

LAST WEEK I WROTE about William Maxwell's children's book The Heavenly Tenants illustrated by Ilonka Karasz, and also discussed Ilonka Karasz's work as a mapmaker. Karasz's career is so broad and prolific an entire blog could be dedicated to it. For now, as I've previously mentioned, the best overview of her career can be found in Enchanting Modern: Ilonka Karasz by Ashley Callahan. I want to take this opportunity to highlight two additional books illustrated by Karasz, both inadvertently about Christmas: The Twelve Days of Christmas and Merry Christmas, Happy New Year by Phyllis McGinley.

From The New York Times review by Ellen Lewis Buell:

One of the most beautiful books of the year is "The Twelve Days of Christmas." Here Ilonka Karasz has set the verses of that lovely old carol against twelve pictures which combine modern technique with the exuberance of the medieval tradition...It is a miracle of design and imagination.

Karasz chose to include The Twelve Days of Christmas in the annual exhibition held by the Book Jacket Designers Guild in 1949. And the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) selected it that year as one of the "Fifty Books of the Year."

To see the rest of the art for The Twelve Days of Christmas visit my Flickr set here.

PHYLLIS MCGINLEY (1905-1978) was a children's author and poet considered one of the best American writers of light verse in the twentieth century, on par with Ogden Nash and Dorothy Parker. Her poems appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Good Housekeeping, The Saturday Evening Post, and many others. Her 1949 children's book All Around the Town illustrated by Helen Stone was a Caldecott Honor book, and her 1957 children's book The Year Without a Santa Claus inspired the 1974 TV classic of the same name. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades. And she appeared on the cover of the June 18, 1965 issue of Time magazine where it was said that

Phyllis McGinley's appeal can best be measured by the fact that today, almost by inadvertence, she finds herself the sturdiest exponent of the glory of housewifery, standing almost alone against a rising chorus of voices summoning women away from the hearth.

(She also accepts an invitation to The White House by President Lyndon Johnson in the same article.)

In 1958, Phyllis McGinley released a collection of her Christmas poems (and one essay about New Year's) as Merry Christmas, Happy New Year with decorations by Ilonka Karasz.

In the first poem in the book (after the brilliant Greeting Card for Bibliophiles), McGinley turns her wry sense of humor to the twelve days of Christmas, giving Karasz an opportunity to revisit the same material from her own Christmas book.

For the rest of the art from Merry Christmas, Happy New Year (and especially to read the aforementioned Greeting Card for Bibliophiles), see my Flickr set here.

AND TO WRAP UP my discussion of Ilonka Karasz, as is inevitable in any discussion of Ilonka Karasz, I present some New Yorker covers.

First, an instance of personal plagiarism:

Karasz's 1946 cover for The Heavenly Tenants.

September 20, 1947

March 28, 1953

And while we're on convergences, a wholly accidental children's book convergence:

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WILLIAM MAXWELL: MRS. DONALD'S DOG BUN AND HIS HOME AWAY FROM HOME

FOR ALL THE FANFARE that met William Maxwell's first children's book The Heavenly Tenants, his second children's book Mrs. Donald's Dog Bun and His Home Away from Home (1995) appears to have made no mark at all. None of the major newspapers reviewed it. His own New Yorker did not review it. The first biography of Maxwell, William Maxwell: A Literary Life by Barbara A. Burkhardt does not mention it once.

The book is illustrated by the great James Stevenson, who has contributed over two thousand cartoons to The New Yorker and written and/or illustrated over one hundred books for children. (I particularly like Could Be Worse.) But Stevenson maintains a reclusive shroud around his personal life, and so, no light can be shed on Mrs. Donald's Dog Bun through that channel.

The only personal tidbit available is the dedication: "For Bun's faithful friend E.G.M., without whom this book would be nowhere." "E.G.M." is Emily Gilman Maxwell, Maxwell's wife of fifty-five years. (They were so committed to each other that they died of natural causes within a week of one another.) For many years, Maxwell wrote a series of fairy tales, which he called "improvisations," for his wife, stories that he would tell her before they went to sleep at night. But Mrs. Donald's Dog Bun is not a once-upon-a-time story. Rather, it's a humorous, cozy story about a dog who is not quite a dog, but is definitely not a person.

"THE DOG THAT BELONGED to Dr. and Mrs. Donald was named Bun, and he was partly Boston bull, partly sheepdog, and partly Labrador retriever, so he was very sensitive to remarks about his appearance." Bun lives in a nice house where "the bones that came from their table were worth waiting for," but he is forced to sleep on an old piece of carpeting in a much-traveled hallway. Bun, for all of his comforts, dreams of one day having a house all his own.


And then, the movers arrive. The Donalds are moving--not far away--but to a "new house [that] was larger and more comfortable than the old one."

More importantly, there's a little house out back "made of two upright piano boxes nailed together." It had been a child's playhouse, but Bun immediately sees its potential. He sets out to restore the house. He repairs the roof, paints the shutters and the trim and the floor and the walls, and buries some bones in the yard "just to make the place seem lived in."








No sooner has he finished then the local dogs come by to see the new neighbor and examine his luxurious doghouse. A cocker spaniel and an Airedale, a poodle and an Irish terrier, and those dogs' friends and friends of those dogs' friends.

"That made lots of dogs, and there was something about the Irish terrier that the Airedale just couldn't stand, and the Irish terrier felt the same way about the Airedale, and the first thing Bun knew there was a dogfight going on right there in his own front yard."

Mrs. Donald douses the combatants, and the dogs agree to a truce. As long as they agree to be peaceful they are welcome at Bun's house. And they take great advantage of Bun's welcome.

Soon Bun is forced out of his own home. Someone else sits in his favorite chair. There's no room for him inside when the weather is nasty. Bun's home away from home just isn't that homelike. So...

He padlocks the house, puts out a sign that reads "to let" and moves back in with the Donalds. "'Why, Bun!' [Mrs. Donald] exclaimed. 'This is a surprise...Yes, yes, of course, and we've missed you too.'" Bun trots to the back hall and finds his old familiar piece of worn out rug, and lays down content.

MRS. DONALD'S DOG BUN AND HIS HOME AWAY FROM HOME does not make clear why the primary downside of having your own home is that other people come and live in it. (After all, couldn't Bun just padlock the door for the doghouse from the inside, and have everything he wants?) But Maxwell's quiet humor matched with Stevenson's dogs provides a wry chuckle for dog lovers.

Still, in many ways, one of James Stevenson's cartoons for The New Yorker, which predates Mrs. Donald's Dog by only a few years, sums up Bun's problem--perhaps all dog's problems-- in a more succinct fashion.

All images are copyrighted © and owned by their respective holders.

ILONKA KARASZ: CARTOGRAPHER

EXACTLY ONE YEAR AFTER HER DEATH, the Greenwich Village gallery Fifty/50 staged a solo show of work by the modernist designer and illustrator Ilonka Karasz. In the New York Times article on the show, Karasz's versatility was highlighted.

...very few designers had such breadth in 1912, when Miss Karasz's career began, according to Ralph Cutler, the gallery's co-owner.
     "I had a guy who collects her ceramics and didn't know she did magazine art," Mr. Cutler said. "Another woman knew her as The New Yorker's most well-known cover artist, and had no idea she did anything else."

Karasz did more than anything else. She designed textiles, wallpaper, wrapping paper, furniture, nurseries, tea sets, china plates, and book jackets. She illustrated books and magazine covers. She practiced interior design and painted. She co-founded the Society of Modern Art, a collective of European-born American Artists, and provided many of the illustrations for the Society's arts journal Modern Art Collector. She appeared in Vanity Fair, House Beautiful, and countless art magazines. She was an immigrant (born and educated in Hungary), a mother of two children, and an important player in introducing European modernism in the United States. And as Ralph Cutler said in The New York Times, "Her success is more remarkable because she worked in a time when few women were designing..."

Another skill, rarely talked about, was Ilonka Karasz's cartography. On numerous occasions, her work as an illustrator called for her to draft maps, always with illuminations and her distinctive style.

The Outline of Man's Knowledge: The Story of History, Science, Literature, Art, Religion, Philosophy (1927) by Clement Wood was illustrated by Louis Bromberg. But its maps, depicting three stages in world history, were by Ilonka Karasz.

As were the four-color endpapers for the 1944 My Unconsidered Judgment by Noel F. Busch, which credits Karasz with "Decorations in line" even though the maps were her only contribution to what is otherwise a book without illustrations.

In her wallpapers, Karasz believed that decorative designs should be two-dimensional; they should not try to introduce depth to a room. She carries this adherence to two-dimensional design in her maps, rendering the illuminations for the maps in My Unconsidered Judgment as mere silhouettes, so as not to detract from the overall flatness (they are in a book afterall) of the composition.

In addition to books, Karasz also did large scale maps, such as this stunning Plan de Paris.

But the book for which she prepared perhaps the greatest number of maps is New York: Not So Little and Not So Old (1926) by Sarah M. Lockwood.

From the front cover to the endpapers...

and throughout the book...

Karasz's distinctive maps blend perfectly with her woodblock illustrations.

And her proclivity for maps combines directly with her illustration in her most famous work, the covers of The New Yorker.

Background information on Ilonka Karasz's life and widespread art career comes from the only book length study of her work Enchanting Modern: Ilonka Karasz by Ashley Callahan, which, however, makes no mention of Karasz's maps.

To see all of the illustrations from New York: Not So Little and Not So Old, visit my Flickr set here. Don't miss Karasz's rendition of the Jolly Roger, the stocks and noose, and the Flatiron Building.

All images are copyrighted © and owned by their respective holders.