The Hokinson Festival

Unpaginated. Helen E. Hokinson's characters, urban, suburban and exurban, have been on view for a delighted public since the first year The New Yorker was published in 1925. Now at last here is a collection of her "best," a bonanza of 484 drawings -- plus, for the first time in a book, 4 of her inimitable New Yorker cover designs in full color. Since Miss Hokinson's characters are so enchantingly timeless, her publishers have never felt tempted to present the drawings in a rigid, chronological order. After all, in Miss Hokinson's world, very little changes except the hemline, and even this moves upward and downward only with the greatest circumspection. Miss Hokinson's characters are above both rubies and too-precise dates. The cartoons have been edited under the affectionate supervision of James Reid Parker, who wrote most of the original captions, as well as the Memoir reprinted here, and who has also included in this volume an Appreciation by John Mason Brown, and the New Yorker editorial which appeared at the time of Miss Hokinson's death in 1949. The book is presented with the happy assurance that Hokinson fans, old and new alike, will feel a special delight in owning -- as well as giving -- this supreme and final collection of a great satirist's work.