1958 Calendar

Minneapolis: Brown & Bigelow, 1957. First Edition. Spiral Bound. Very Good Minus. No one satisfies that itch for kitsch as well as Lawson Wood! 37 by 21 cm. Title leaf missing. But calendar complete, with 12 leaves, one for each month, and each, with a large window into Lawson's "Planet of the Apes" world. Anthropomorphic chimpanzees playing horseshoes, moving, having an open house, etc. Lawson Wood is the Norman Rockwell of the chimp world. Another close kinship would be with the canine artist extraordinaire, C. M. Coolidge, roughly a contemporary and also an artist who worked for Brown & Bigelow. His smoothly rendered, colorful fantasies are certain to produce a grin in even the most hardened cynic. Through chimps Wood pokes fun at human busy-ness, pretensions, vulgarities and excesses. The pictorials are the greater part of each page, amounting to two thirds of it. Wood was an English illustrator and painter known also for his humorous takes on dinosaurs, cavemen, policemen and other animals. Top leaf, January, slightly chewed on top, and December, or bottom leaf, a bit more so on top.