Fischetti Travel Sketches

Sketches from
the
John Fischetti Manuscript Collection
at
Columbia College Chicago

"Main Street St Laurent Brittanny"

France, 1945

New York, 1948

"American shoes proved to be much more interesting
to the Danes than the American wearing them"

"The Danes really live when they greet each other"

"5 O'Clock Rush"

Denmark, 1949

"Traffic"

France, 1949

"Journal de Paris - McCarthy: 'J'accuse!!' "

Paris, 1953

"Rialto Bridge Venice"

Italy, 1960

President Kennedy's Oval Office

Washington DC, 1961

"Other side of the tracks -- Canal Street"

Chicago, 1970

"It's windy"

Washington DC, 1970

All illustrations are © the Estate or Assignees of John Fischetti.
The images have been posted here with permission.

"John Fischetti was born in Brooklyn, New York on Sept. 27, 1916, the youngest in an Italian family of four children. His urge to draw developed early and, in fact, he graduated from the Pratt Technical Institute before earning his high school diploma. After graduation he went to California and worked for the Disney Studio.

Eye strain forced him to give up animation and he moved to Chicago where he began working for Coronet and Esquire magazines. When Marshall Field started the Chicago Sun and bought up the Coronet/Esquire syndicate, Fischetti began doing political cartoons for the Sun; however, World War II intervened and he spent the latter part of it cartooning for Stars and Stripes.

When his Sun job was no longer available after the war, he moved to New York and joined Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), and then the New York Herald Tribune. It folded in 1966 and he moved back to Chicago and the Chicago Daily News, where he was given complete autonomy to choose his styles and topics.

Fischetti was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. After the Daily News ceased publication in 1978, he finished his career at the Chicago Sun-Times. John Fischetti died on Nov. 18, 1980." [source]

Following Fischetti's death, an annual editorial cartoon award was established in his name, administered by the School of Journalism at the Columbia College in Chicago. [link]

The John Fischetti Manuscript Collection was recently digitised by Columbia College and includes a large number of the artist's sketch books encompassing original political cartoons, completed comics, preliminary and rejected drawings and a collection of his travel sketches.

The travel collection is a fascinating record of mid-20th century urban settings in its own right, but it also showcases Fischetti's undeniable talents as an animator, caricaturist, sketch artist, wit and observer. {I confess to not even having seen any of his political/satirical cartoon and comic work yet}

Via the Visual Resources Center blog at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. Thanks again Mike!

The Theatre of Cruelty

Richard Verstegan (aka Richard Rowlands) (?1548-?1636) was a Catholic Anglo-Dutch antiquarian, goldsmith and book publisher. The first half of his life was spent in England, but his religion prevented him from obtaining a degree from Oxford University, where he is thought to have studied English history and the Anglo-Saxon language.

Either following from the prejudice he suffered at Oxford or as a response to the incarceration and treatment of Mary Queen of Scots* (her 1587 beheading is seen above), Verstegan published the first edition of his martyrologium, 'Theatrum Crudelitatum', in 1583. The book may also have been conceived as a Catholic version of the famous Protestant 'Book of Martyrs' [published in 1563 as 'Actes and Monuments'] by John Foxe.

Verstegan's book attempted to record, in gruesome detail, the cruelty, torture and murder of Catholic martyrs in Europe - including English victims under the reigns of Mary I and Elizabeth I* - at the hands of Protestant heretics. Upon publication, the author was arrested and imprisoned for libel against the Crown and all books were confiscated and destroyed (a single page has been saved). Through the intervention of friends in the clerical hierarchy, Verstegan was able to secure his release and he fled the country, ultimately settling in Antwerp.

Verstegan became a very prolific and influential author and publisher in his adopted city. One of his early works was the expanded and definitive version of 'Theatrum Crudelitatum' which was published in Latin in 1587. At least some of the engravings were produced by the author (artistic training having been acquired through his goldsmith apprenticeship). It proved to be a popular book and translated editions were released soon after for the various European markets.

Although his publishing house concentrated on the production of Catholic devotional literature, Verstegan himself was known to have worked as an intelligence agent for Roman, English and Jesuit Catholics and he penned political and satirical articles for a newspaper (making him one of the earliest known journalists), all the while operating as a book and people smuggler during the Reformation*. A question mark apparently remains over a lot of works, in terms of attribution, both because Verstegan's publishing output often lacked identification marks and also because his son, with the same name, became increasingly involved in the firm's productions.

The chapter titles from the book (seen as title tags on mouseover of the unordered images above) that are included at the top of each illustrated page [the last three images above show the layout for all illustrated pages] are:

-- Persecutiones adversus Catholicos à Protestantibus Caluinistis excitae in Anglia
-- Horribilia scelera ab Hugenotis in Gallijs perpetrata
-- Horrenda inhumanitatis genera à Geusijs Belgicis peracta
-- Schismaticorum in Anglia crudelitas

• 'Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum Nostri Temporis' {The theatre of cruelty of the heretics of our time} by Richard Verstegan, 1587, is hosted online by HAB Wolfenbüttel. [Most, if not all, the images were saved in this set; the majority are seen above] {Amazon}
  
• Richard Verstegan: New Advent / Wikipedia. There are more citations around, but they tend to be fairly specialised academic articles and the like.

Les Champignons

Edible & Poisonous Mushrooms

'Histoire Naturelle des Champignons Comestibles et Vénéneux' [The natural history of edible and poisonous mushrooms] by the French pharmacist, Guilliame Sicard, was published in 1883 and is online at Bibliothèque nationale de France. [note the thumbnails link in the sidebar] There are a few more in the set.

Other versions of this book are available (but I think the BNF copy has the best quality illustrations) from the Biodiversity Heritage Library [eg. one; two] and the Internet Archive. [Addit: Amazon has what appears to be a facsimile edition of the book]

The BNF librarian who originally logged Sicard's book was incredibly thorough: not only was there a library stamp on every single page, but they managed to ensure that the stamp was always at least partially covering an illustration. Bravo! I took the liberty of removing these as well as performing some occasional remedial cosmetic work to the background scuffs and splodges. There are doubtless errors in the Genus names in the title tags: either because I misread the handwriting or because the names have been superseded.

'Mushroom' and 'toadstool' are informal words without precise meanings, although in the modern parlance, 'toadstool' tends to be applied to poisonous or suspicious varieties of mushrooms.*

Picking and eating wild mushrooms has something of a romantic dimension and I totally understand the attraction of a half day romp in the forest with a special someone collecting a free evening meal. But there is an enormous body of literature out there devoted to the diagnosis, treatment and case studies of people who became gravely ill or died as a result of mistaking poisonous toadstools for yummy mushrooms.

I've done some really crazy and stupid things in my life [such as: redacted] but there are only two ways that I'd consent to eating the produce collected during a wild mushroom hunt: if I was accompanied by a mycologist - who took the first bite - or if I obtained a degree in mycology myself.

Via the BNF's Gallica blog post: 'La cueillette des champignons en forêt', which lists a number of other fungi-related works in the French National Library (that I haven't seen).

Previously: Forest Fungi and in general, flora.

Die Tode Stuhle -- Mushroom Observer -- Cornell Mushroom blog.