Vanity Fair: 2revised Edition

I adore this book, and I pick it up again and again. And my guests are always fascinated when I show it to them. This is a collection of the "best of" Vanity Fair magazine in the 20s and 30s, when it was quite a different magazine than it is today. It is extremely witting and entertaining and funny, and it also has a lot of depth. There are plenty of long, interesting essays about everything under the sun, interspersed with hilarious little jeux-d'esprit. And the photographs are just amazing. They are amazing in their photographic art (and I'm a person who doesn't give a hoot about photography as an art), and they are fascinating in their subject matter. So many famous people of the era, but younger than you've probably ever seen them. Here is Katharine Hepburn in a photo probably taken when she was at school at Bryn Mawr, to judge by her apparent age, posing in front of a statue of Athena. Here is Cary Grant looking about nineteen years old and cute as a button. Here is Princess (now Queen) Elizabeth at the age of eight, looking very purposeful but unconsciously sticking her tongue slightly out in her concentration. This is THE book to have if you have any interest in the Roaring Twenties! You will really treasure it, and I don't say that sort of thing often or lightly. Oh, and if you love this book, you will also love "First Encounters: A Book of Memorable Meetings" by Nancy and Edward Sorrel, which whas inspired by one of the humorous sketches in the Vanity Fair book.

An awful lot of what went on during those two decades had significant influence on the world in which we live today. "Vanity Fair," one of the leading magazines of the era, covered, among other things, personalities, taste, art and trends of the period spanning the years from 1919 to 1935.Early in the era we're treated to fiction and/or poetry by such luminaries as Anita Loos, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, and a myriad of others.There are photos of Nijinsky, a very young Douglas Fairbanks, Caruso, young Helen Hayes, Lionel Barrymore, and more prominent personalities than I can list.Each year, a half dozen or so personalities were nominated to the "Vanity Fair" Hall of Fame.A few of the many nominations:1919: Tyrus (Ty) Cob and George M. Cohan1924: Edna Ferber, Rebecca West, and Will Rogers1929: Robinson Jeffers1931: Walter Disney (He hadn't become Walt yet)1935: Thomas Wolfe, Clifford Odets and Igor StravinskyThere were lists for every year from 1919 to 1935.One of my favorite articles from 1931 was titled "Impossible Interviews." It included dialog from these pseudo interviews along with hand drawn colored caricatures of the participants. The two interviews included here were "John D. Rockefeller, senior (sic) versus Joe Stalin" and "Greta Garbo versus Calvin Coolidge."A 1930 article, "The Art of Dying," which discusses how people die, their last words, and their attitudes towards death, is as pertinent today as it was over 70 years ago.Another article, this by Aldous Huxley, titled "The importance of the Comic Genious," talks about how few are the examples of comic genius in the arts, when compared to the many examples of genius of more serious type. Huxley mentions especially, Chaucer, Rabelais, Shakespeare's 'Falstaff,' and several others including some Dickens characters, in addition to the pictorial works of Daumier and Goya. He then goes on to discuss why these are works of genius, and how difficult it is to portray this sort of serio-comedy.Article after article, work of fiction upon work of fiction, poems, photographs. illustrations, and biographical cameos fill this coffee table sized book of over 3oo pages with articles of nostalgia that make me wish that I could have been around then.