The Biblio File: images of readers, for bibliophiles

"After the Ball," Ramon Casas

David Levine on writers: Isabel Allende

David Levine (1926-2009) was one of America’s most prominent illustrators during a career that spanned decades. No less an authority than Jules Feiffer described him as "the greatest caricaturist of the last half of the 20th century,” although Levine continued to work in the early years of this century as well. Levine’s subjects included himself (above) and people from many walks of life. Authors, scribes and scribblers were a big part of the mix, as these caricatures make clear.  

Lit Toons: Cartoons with a bookish bent

First Lines: Arthur Conan Doyle

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.

A Scandal in Bohemia (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes)

Arthur Conan Doyle

"They say it's your birthday" - writers born on July 18

Joseph Ellis  (1943)

Elizabeth Gilbert  (1969)
Nathalie Sarraute  (1900)

William Makepeace Thackeray  (1811)

Hunter S. Thompson  (1937)
Jessamyn West  (1902)
Yevgeny Yevtyshenko  (1933)
 

The Biblio File: images of publishers, for bibliophiles

David Levine on writers: Leo Tolstoy

David Levine (1926-2009) was one of America’s most prominent illustrators during a career that spanned decades. No less an authority than Jules Feiffer described him as "the greatest caricaturist of the last half of the 20th century,” although Levine continued to work in the early years of this century as well. Levine’s subjects included himself (above) and people from many walks of life. Authors, scribes and scribblers were a big part of the mix, as these caricatures make clear.   

Lit Toons: Cartoons with a bookish bent

Mutts

First Lines: John Barth

In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.

The Sot-Weed Factor

John Barth

"They say it's your birthday" - writers born on July 17

Shmuel Yosef Agnon  (1888)

Erle Stanley Gardner  (1889)
Christiane Rochefort  (1917)