The Newlyweds and their Baby's Comic Pictures for Painting and Crayoning

Akron/New York/Chicago: The Saalfield Publishing Co.. Very Good+. (c.1917, 1907). Stiff wrappers. [moderate edgewear to covers, internally Fine except for the expected and inevitable age-toning to the pages]. (cartoon strips and panels) A remarkably well-preserved example of this rare vintage coloring book (OCLC reports only four library holdings), containing mostly undated reprints of George McManus's newspaper comic strip, "The Newlyweds," generally considered the first American "family" strip. Created by the then 20-year-old McManus for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in 1904, the strip ran for twelve years, at various times as both a daily (truncated) and Sunday feature; when McManus left the World for the New York American (a Hearst paper), he began a new strip called "Their Only Child" ("a perfect clone," in the words of one historian), while "The Newlyweds" continued in the World, drawn by Albert George Carmichael. Dating the strips in the book would be a major research task, not helped by the mishmash of dates provided: the 1917 date is on the front cover; the title page reads: "Copyrighted 1907 by the Press Publishing Co."; and several of the individual color strips bear a 1916 copyright date, also credited to the "Press Publishing Co. (N.Y. World)." All appear to all be Sunday strips, although some are in B&W (for "coloring-in" purposes, I suppose) and others in color, and despite McManus's sole by-line on the title page, Carmichael's work is also well-represented. (On quite a few, either McManus's or Carmichael's signature is visible; generally speaking, the color versions appear to be by Carmichael and the B&W ones by McManus.) To my eyes, the 1917 publication date signals the publishers' attempt to wring a few more drops of revenue out of a feature that had ended the previous year; the seemingly anomalous 1907 copyright date would seem related to the "birth date" of baby Snookums (yes, that was his name), who was introduced into the strip in that year. [Either that or it's just a "holdover" from an earlier book incarnation, "The Newlyweds and Their Baby," published the same year by the New York World, but not to be confused with the present volume.] But relax: it's not so much a collection (let alone a chronicle) as it is a sampler of "The Newlyweds," and as such is utterly charming. McManus's most successful and best-remembered strip, "Bringing Up Father" (aka "Jiggs & Maggie"), debuted in 1913 and had an amazing 87-year run -- outliving its creator by 46 years! . (Inventory #: 20353)