AMAZE FRIENDS! Speak French fluently!

J'ai l'habitude de ne pas avoir des attentes élevées pour un magasin d'aubaines. Sij'ai de la chance je pourrais trouver un livre de poche vintage avec une grande couverture ou d'un album ancien record. Ces jours-ci je trouve de plus en plus que les choses vraiment bonne est vendu en ligne par certains de ces magasins. Donc, généralement, j'évite la plupart des magasins d'aubaines. Mais alors un écart d'acquisition a ouvert ses portes à beaucoup de fanfare. Pas plus d'une sorte de magasin grungy, c'est un endroit très bien organisé qui donne même des rabaissupérieurs un jour par semaine. J'ai trouvé ce livre, Fractured français, la semaine dernière.

Maintenant, si tout cela semble être le français fracturées ne me blâmez pas. J'ai utilisé de traduction de Google pour créer le français. 

If the above appears to be very bad French, dare I say fractured French, don't blame me. I don't speak French so I let Google do the translating for me. Now if I did speak French it would most likely be as it appears in the book I'm featuring today.

I usually don’t hold high expectations for a thrift store. If I’m lucky I might find a vintage paperback with a great cover or an old record album. These days I’m finding more and more that the really good stuff is being sold online by these stores. So generally I avoid most thrift stores. But then a new Goodwill opened up to much fanfare. No longer a grungy sort of store, this is a very well organized place that even gives senior discounts one day a week. I found this book, Fractured French, last week.

The book, Fractured French, was originally published by Doubleday in 1950. The author was Fredrick S. Pearson with illustrations by Richard Dennison Taylor. The edition shown here was published in 1951 in Britain by Putnam.























I'm finding little biographical information about the author, Fredrick S. Pearson, other than he was the son and grandson of engineering financiers and he graduated from Yale in 1934.

I have found a bit more about the illustrator, Richard Dennison Taylor.

Richard Dennison Taylor (1902-1970) was born in Fort William, Ontario, Canada. He studied art at the Royal Canadian Academy of Art, Central Technical School in Toronto, and the Ontario School of Art and Design. A comic strip entitled Mystery Man was his first published art appearing in the Toronto Evening Telegram.

In the 1930s his work began to appear in the New Yorker. Eventually he sold work to Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. His work also ran in Playboy.

He moved from Canada to Bethel, Connecticut where he met his future wife, Maxine McTavish, the daughter of Canadian Magazine art cirtic and editor Newton McTavish.

In 1947, the artist authored and illustrated a “how-to” book entitled Introduction to Cartooning, which was published by Watson-Guptill, Inc. He stressed the necessity of honing skills in composition and life drawing before tackling a professional career. Taylor went on to illustrate and publish many of his own humor books including The Better Taylors (1940), One for the Road (1949), Fractured French (1950), Compound Fractured French (1951), Fall of the Sparrow (1951), By the Dawn’s Ugly Light: A Pictorial Study of the Hangover (1952), and Butchered Baseball (1952).

To see more about Taylor visit Ask Art. To read a brief column in the December 30, 1950 New Yorker click here.

By the way, the new Blogger is buggier than a muggy moonless July evening in Florida stuck out in a swamp. I'm not happy.