Thursday, July 19, 2007

Richard Erdoes: Jokes Jokes Jokes

Found at the Community Bookstore: JOKES JOKES JOKES Selected by Helen Hoke, with illustrations by Richard Erdoes. Published in 1954 by Franklin Watts, Inc., 699 Madison Avenue, New York 21.



As you can clearly make out, JOKES JOKES JOKES had seen lots of use in the 53 years before I found it. I thought I'd show you a bit of this tome today. First, the good news:


The endpapers! As soon as I saw them, I knew I'd buy the book. Love Erdoes' style.


Above: the next page. Just that one goofy guy with a hat and wearing a bowtie. A bowtie, for goodness sake! Kinda creepy, huh?


Now you can see that this is part of a series.


More great cartoons. They're like part cartoon, part 50s design.


Above: the bad news. Here's the first joke of the book. The drawings may have aged like fine wine, but these jokes -- I don't know!




OK, that's all for JOKES JOKES JOKES today. Just like "Joe" likes his school -- we, too, are closed!

8 comments:

Paul Giambarba said...

Great stuff, Mike. We all tried to draw like that in those days. LIFE ran a lot of his best work.

Mike Lynch said...

Paul, thanks for your somment. You're the only person I know who's heard of Erdoes! Great to hear that there is more material out there. Now, if only I had some old LIFE mags to scan!

Creative-Type Dad said...

Nice!

I've never heard of Erdoes - I'll have to look for more of his stuff.

Eric Sturdevant said...

I have a few scans from a children's book Erdoes illustrated called, "Policemen Around the World". He illustrated two others of the "... Around the World" series, similar to M. Sasek's "This Is..." series. The scans are on my flickr page here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/91502146@N00/tags/erdoes/

CJ said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mike Lynch said...

Thanks for the kind words. As the months pass, it seems there is more Erdoes on the Web!

Polkka Jam said...

Here's the Erdoes' artwork of one LP I found today from one flea market.

Casual Debris said...

My elementary school library had these Helen Hoke books and my brother and I used to read them. This was the mid-1980s. Our public school was so run down and the library so dated that I wouldn't be surprised if they still had them.