Description
This is a scrapbook/album filled with Disney “Silly Symphony” and “Canyon Kiddies” illustrated comic sheets from Good Housekeeping magazines of the 1930s.
Many of these stories were issued as short Silly Symphony films as well as the one-sheet comic poems subtitled “from the Walt Disney Silly Symphony”. The comic sheets were illustrated by Disney artist Tom Wood, but according to a 1936 letter by Roy Disney, “We have one very capable man [Wood] who has been steadily preparing the artwork for the pages, but with respect to the verses, I haven’t been quite so fortunate. Instead I have had to rely on getting it done here and there around the studio…”, so the verses apparently were done by a number of different writers.
The album contains 11 Silly Symphony sheets (Peculiar Penguins, Elmer Elephant and others), as well as 44 Canyon Kiddies sheets by James Swinnerton. These have been trimmed so the dates and magazine information is not included. There are also 9 trimmed Saturday Evening Post covers by Norman Rockwell, J. C. Leyendecker and others, and a few misc sheets such as Mickey Mouse. 68 sheets in all! They are all pasted down to the larger album pages. Size is 12 1/4″ x 14 1/2″.
In an interesting side note, Oz book author Ruth Plumly Thompson also wrote Silly Symphony stories for David McKay books in the 1930s, with “story and illustrations by the staff of Walt Disney Studio”. However, Thompson worked for the publisher and not directly for Disney. The Autumn 1991 Baum Bugle checklist confirms that Thompson wrote the McKay books Peculiar Penguins, The Tortoise and the Hare and “probably” others such as Elmer Elephant, but the story details are different than those in the magazine sheets offered here.
Along with the album, I will include a somewhat worn reference copy of Walt Disney’s Mickey and the Gang, a 359 page book that includes full images of all the published Silly Symphony magazine poems, with accompanying information.
