Great things from Great Barrington

We packed up from Northhampton and drove down (or over) to Great Barrington where a new client had arrange for a lovely bed and breakfast (note to self, find more clients who are willing to put you up in nice places when you visit with them). We checked in and then rushed over to meet with him at a very nice restaurant (absolutely amazing lemon grass and ginger soup with dumplings). He is an exceptionally talented illustrator and cut his professional teeth, as it were, at the National Lampoon in the late 1960s and early ‘70s…that is, the golden age (this was also the period that P.J. O’Rourke was writing there, etc).

We spent much of Sunday going through his archives for books and ephemera related to his time at Lampoon, his books and his work in films, etc. I have not has so much fun since I got married. We kept pulling out one amazing, wonderful and/or bizarre piece after another…some great books (he did this great series of “You Can Build…” books…paper modeling) and some really amazing art pieces. Shown here is one of the three “faux stained glass” pieces done for the Lampoon’s religion issue (circa 1967). The piece was on “Saints who should have been,” this being Saint Onan. It is so good…and so wrong at the same time.

I have only just started to really catalog the collection, there is so much and it is such fun, amazing stuff. I can’t wait to see what I find next. Thus far I have found several unique Grateful Dead items (as well as some other major, late ‘60s bands), an amazing set of “pens as spaceships” that were done to support an article by O’Rourke and a stack of first printings of pretty much everything R. Crumb ever published. Wow.