The Works of John Held Jr

New York: Ives Washburn. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. (c.1931). First Edition. Hardcover. [slight bump to upper rear corner, minor wear to base of spine; the jacket shows some wear along top and bottom edges (with various small nicks, tiny tears, and creasing) and along the flap-folds]. (B&W engravings) Held, one of the most prominent magazine illustrators of his day, basically had two great subjects: the Twenties, for which he essentially created much of the iconic imagery in "real time," so to speak, much of it in the form of magazine covers for the old Life, Vanity Fair and other publications; and the 1890s, which along about then began to be referred to as "the Gay Nineties." (Held in fact contributed a feature by that name to The New Yorker beginning in 1927, from which many of the illustrations in this book are derived.) It was just enough in the past (a generation and a half, more or less) that people could be both nostalgic and gently mocking about it, and at least among illustrators, nobody took that attitude and ran with it better than Held. Just as his flappers and their slicked-down boyfriends were emblematic of the Jazz Age, so did his gigantically-bustled ladies and mustachioed-and-top-hatted (or straw-hatted) gents, depicted (as here) in faux-woodcut style, help frame the image of that fading-into-memory decade in the popular imagination. Very uncommon in the dust jacket. .