The Best of Gluyas Williams!

Our book today is one of those gems that turn up regularly on the outdoor bargain-carts at my beloved Brattle Bookshop: it’s an old Dover paperback from 1971 called The Best of Gluyas Williams, with only a totally perfunctory Foreward by Charles Dana Gibson and a totally perfunctory Preface by Robert Benchley separating the reader from the glories of the artwork Gluyas Williams did for newspapers and magazines eighty years ago.

Williams learned his comedic chops alongside a very creative, antic group of young people at The Harvard Lampoon a century ago; he could specialized in prose comedy fairly easily if he’d chosen – which make it all the more ironic that one of the signature brilliances of his cartoons is that they require no prose at all in order to amuse. One of his most popular regular features was a bit called “Raconteurs” featuring a group of characters huddled around a storyteller, with a long caption giving a hint of what kind of story was being told – bawdy, boring, bragging, etc. And studying those panels again at the prompt of snapping up this book, I’m reminded that good as they are, those long captions are totally unnecessary: you can get every droll detail you need from the pictures alone.

It’s that way with most of his drawings, which rely for their warm comic effect – an effect absolutely undimmed by the intervening decades and the almost total societal shifts that have taken place since the days of Prohibition and dressing up – on the reader happily studying the artwork and supplying the story themselves.

But I really should say stories, since the best Gluyas Williams cartoons are layered affairs. You enter into them with a glance and then are strongly encouraged to wander around inside them. Especially in his “Industrial Crisis” series, Williams builds many little dramas into the big central one organizing the picture, and he expertly guides your eyes around his little canvas. His drawing “The Day A Cake of Ivory Sank at Proctor & Gamble’s” (based on the old Ivory slogan “It Floats!” – which in itself will make no sense to a generation of Americans who take showers instead of baths) is a perfect demonstration of the technique, with the already-happened event in the center – the little ripples where the bar has gone down – ringed by all the drama of the first responders with their panic, their dismay, and their diving suits.

Williams got a good deal of mileage out of gentle dismay (his affectionately scathing portraits of life in suburbia display that with a newcomer’s sharpness), and this great old Dover book captures it all, in all of its facets. SO many aspects of the world Gluyas Williams drew are long gone now, but the cartoons themselves – so grinning and knowing – are still here to remind us, and to make us smile.

And the people are still entirely recognizable.