• U.S.

Books: Currier & Ives

2 minute read
TIME

MR. CURRIER & MR. IVES—Russel Grouse—Doubleday, Doran ($5).

When 13 Manhattan acres were swept by fire (Dec. 16-17, 1835), it was a blow to the city but a boost for Nathaniel Currier. Four days after the fire he was selling lithographed prints of the disaster by the thousand; his years of hard sledding were over. In 1852 Currier was joined by James Merritt Ives, “a young man who yearned to be an artist but who was a bookkeeper because he had no particular desire to starve.” Till 1907 the firm of Currier & Ives kept its existence, though Currier retired in 1880. Ives died in 1895.

Few U.S. citizens have never seen a Currier & Ives print; “in the middle 19th Century almost every American home had at least one of their pictures.” Subjects were of every variety except the sexy: clipper ships, famed fires, wood-burning locomotives, horse-racing, prizefights, pioneers, Prohibition propaganda, baseball, domestic scenes, deathbeds of the Presidents, etc., etc. Now collectors’ items, one Currier & Ives print (The Life of a Hunter-A Tight Fix) has brought $3,000. Though many of the prints were colored, they came off the presses plain, went to a great centre table where women workers added blues, reds, greens with lavish brushes. The 32 reproductions in this book give a good cross-section of the more than 4,000 subjects. Says Colyumist Grouse: “Now no one who owns the prints would think of hiding them. Indeed, today hanging isn’t considered too good for them.”

The Author. Russel Grouse, colyumist of Manhattan’s Evening Post (“Left at the Post”), also writes for the New Yorker, once acted in a play (Gentlemen of the Press) by munching a ham sandwich, darting into a telephone booth. Caustic playgoers called the sandwich appropriate.

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com