EC owns a wonderful, but not very politically correct, little pocket sized book inherited from her father called Reg Manning’s Cartoon Guide to California (1939). Its almost original condition becomes important in the valuation of books.
Manning, the original self-made journalist, was born Reginald West Manning. A high school teacher taught him a few things about art. He went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1951. The BRILLIANT carton that won that prize dealt with the Korean War. It featured a double palleted cartoon with the first image showing glorious hats on a stick at the United Nations facility in Lake Success, NY. The cartoon stating the title as “Hats”—and depicts shiny tops hats on a hat stand, in a bare field with no background. Yet, the next image shows a lonely grave maker in Korea, a cross with a helmet, stating the title “Hats: Korea,” a simple lonely grave marker of a cross with a soldier’s helmet to the apex. The cartoon won the Pulitzer prize at the height of the Korean War in 1951.
Reg Manning syndicated in 170 US newspapers (1948-1971)
People discussed his editorial cartoons around water coolers for 40 years.
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Reg travelled to Phoenix, Arizona from St. Louis in the early 20th century with his young mom, after she lost her husband at the age of 39. Manning loved the desert, satirizing the West in such books as Cartoon Guide to Arizona, Cartoon Guide to Boulder Dam Country, and the exemplary What Kidna Catcus Izzat? He discovered Arizona golf and published From Tee to Cups. Finally after really getting to know Arizona, What is Arizona Really Like? (1968).
In later years he bought a diamond edged wheel and etched crystal with images of his beloved desert and cactus on vessels of glass. His etched glass works were published in a book Desert in Crystal (1973).
Some people fall in love with the desert
Manning fell wholeheartedly. He signed his syndicated cartoons with a little cactus with a BIG nose, then his signature “Reg Manning.”
EC’s book, intended as a tourist guide to California, came with a fold out map. It included California history as understood in 1939, cities of note, and geographical oddities, as only a person from the Midwest saw those oddities.
Dealers who regularly sell Manning’s vintage books seem kind of crazy themselves. K and B Books in Tucson specializes in outlier genres such as books on outlaws, lawmen, Tombstone, and those people who in the day sought their fortune. In short, such book dealers sell to Wild West aficionado collectors. Who knew that is a genre? THAT pushes the valuation UP.
The bond with the West, including Arizona and California, came early in his Manning’s life. His dad was a postal clerk with the Sante Fe Railway when people knew Missouri as the Gateway to the West.
Key to Cartooning
Manning, at age 21, began designing editorial cartoons for the newspaper The Arizona Republic. He said, in later life, that the key to cartooning is that “there is no humor without knowledge of experience.” If we enjoy our modern satirists on late nigh TV, we hear an echo of that sentiment.
Throughout his career, Manning published humorous postcards. He liked to contrast the fabulously buxom women of the West with the scruffy cowboys. In the 1930-40 the West became a haven for divorcees. His series of “Travel Cards” issued by various publishers are in hot demand by postcard collectors today.
I see a good copy of Cartoons of California in undamaged shape brings $125 or more.