Blogging Woolf

This all started with a series of e-mails from the VWoolf Listserv about a New Yorker cartoon.

The cartoon, pictured at left and titled “Bloomsbury Squares,” was an obvious parody of the American TV show “Hollywood Squares” and the British program “Celebrity Squares.“

Information from list subscriber Sarah M. Halls told us that Robert Mankoff, the artist who created the cartoon, is also cartoon editor of The New Yorker and editor of The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker (Black Dog & Leventhal), the best-selling coffee-table book for the 2004 holiday season. It features all 68,647 cartoons ever published in The New Yorker since its 1925 début.

It seems the cartoon appeared in the book Urban Bumpkins, a softcover book published by St. Martin’s that Mankoff wrote.

Of course I had to visit The New Yorker archive. And I had to search for Bloomsbury items. That is when I discovered that the cartoon is not the only New Yorker parody of Bloomsbury. Here is what I found:

• “The Bloomsbury Group Live at the Apollo” was a 1975 parody portraying the Bloomsbury Group as a jazz group. In it, the writer invented musical identities for group members.
• Scram! You Made the Pants Too Short” was a 1977 fictional account of a search for a pair of pants worn by E.M. Forster that reviewer Victoria Glendinning declared were too short.

There are other items about Bloomsbury as well. Take a look and see.