Louis Untermeyer and Ralph Shikes were among the more public intellectuals in the U.S. at the turn of the 1950s, particularly the former, who was a founding panelist on the television series What's My Line? (starting in 1950). They shared a love of humorous writing and art generally, and published in 1950 the first of what would eventually be a three-volume series of Best Humor annuals, the first Best Humor 1949/50 and the next two The Best Humor Annual (without years tagged on the cover, they were published, unsurprisingly, in 1951 and '52). By 1952, Untermeyer's life was beginning to unravel in a big way, as a victim of Red-baiting of the era...he had apparently written too much for The New Masses in the 1930s (as he had for the more broadly socialist/radical The Masses earlier), before moving on to found his own magazine The Seven Lively Arts, and later signed a few too many petitions circulated by Leninist fronts and/or Leninist-supported groups for the liking of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and
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the House Un-American Activities Committee and similar agencies, and he was hounded off the series and tv generally by March, 1951...leading to depression and agoraphobia, but they still managed to get the third volume of the annual out; probably as a consequence of the "scandal" of his sympathies, the 1952 volume was the last to be published. In 1953, both men went onto new, similar projects, Untermeyer editing a single issue of The Book of Wit and Humor for Mercury Press, which had recently sold The American Mercury to another publisher (where it, as edited by William Bradford Huie, became even more the post-war voice of the Conservative Movement in the US), but continued to publish Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and a few other titles, including the Mercury Mystery line of novels in digest-sized format...that periodical series, and the similar Bestseller Mystery, would become full-fledged magazines after the sale of EQMM in the late 1950s. Shikes kept his hand in with the first volume of Cartoon Annual, for Ace Books; subsequent second and third volumes were eventually published as edited by "Brant House" (a hardy Ace house pseudonym, even house brand, possibly employed in this case by Donald A. Wollheim). While both men would go on to notable further publication, and Untermeyer at least one more humor anthology, these were a little burst of industry in this field that apparently was both pioneering and cut short by blacklisting as much as anything else.
From the first volume, the Holt annual was meant to be a big-tent affair, featuring a wide range of approaches from satire to mildly amusing upbeat stories that were a bit more elaborate than the collections of anecdotes and jokes Bennett Cerf, Untermeyer's essential successor on What's My Line?, was prone to assemble (often without crediting his sources). Most of the most famous humorists of the period were represented in the three volumes, even if the number of cartoons in those volumes was rather restricted; Kirkus Reviews noted about the 1950 entry, "In full and in part, here are poetry, articles, fiction, cartoons, whose authorship ranges from Cleveland Amory, Robert Benchley, Bob Considine, Wolcott Gibbs, the Gilbreths, Langston Hughes, John Lardner, David McCord, Ruth McKenney, Ogden Nash, [S. J.] Perelman, [Robert] Ruark, on to Louis Zara and Maurics Zolotow. " Only the editors didn't slight women contributors quite as much as Virginia Kirkus or her staff did here, and such up and comers as Ray Bradbury are also included. The conceit of arranging the contributions alphabetically by author was abandoned after the first book.
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With the discontinuation of the Holt annual, and Untermeyer's passage through his period of (understandably mildly paranoid) depression, Lawrence Spivak at Mercury Press, already the moderator of NBC-TV's Meet the Press at this point, presumably felt safe enough to release the one issue of the prospective magazine The Book of Wit and Humor, which while less time-bound than the previous annual was similar in content and diversity, featuring many short bits and unlike the other Mercury Press magazines essentially no original material in the issue aside from editorial introductions and the weak exception of a joke column or two. Meanwhile, perhaps sundered in the face of anti-Untermeyer Activities (and his houseboundedness), Shikes moved onto the first annual multi-source collection of cartoons I'm aware of, drawn from the same sort of magazine and newspaper sources (Saturday Evening Post to The New Yorker to the New York Herald-Tribune) they had tapped for the Holt annual; perhaps the notoriously low royalty rates at Ace dissuaded Shikes from continuing, even though Ace did...one doubts that Ace was his first choice of publisher.
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Indices for these titles to come...the 1949/50 volume just arrived yesterday, and I haven't had the opportunity to get to a scanner for a cover image; the blue volume is the 1951 volume, the red and black the 1952.
For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog. I believe I'll be collecting the links next week, as Patti takes the family holidays seriously.
Indices for these titles to come...the 1949/50 volume just arrived yesterday, and I haven't had the opportunity to get to a scanner for a cover image; the blue volume is the 1951 volume, the red and black the 1952.For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog. I believe I'll be collecting the links next week, as Patti takes the family holidays seriously.
The "Brant House" volumes:
