CHARLES ADDAMS, (AMERICAN 1912-1988)

Simon and Schuster, 1976

Favorite Haunts First Edition, First Printing: A large very clean book (11.25″ x 8.5″) with a spectacular example of an original full length sketch of "Uncle Fester" looking up at a large dog. Please note, that original final published drawing by Charles Addams can sell in excess of $10,000, and recently a very small 3x5 inch sketch of Uncle Fester just sold for over $2200 at auction!, so original sketches are highly collectible! A superb association copy dedicated to “To Fleur With Love”, and signed and dated by Addams “Chas Addams 1976”. We have other letters between Charles and Fleur showing much correspondence occurring throughout the 1970’s documenting this lovely association between the two. Scarce signed book with an original drawing with a superb association.

The book is in near fine condition with a bit of foxing to a few internal pages. The book is in brown cloth with gilt titles, in a near fine very slightly nicked original dust jacket with a very scarce detailed original drawing by Charles Addams.

In 1935 Addams was hired by The New Yorker as a regular cartoonist. The pay was modest—just $35 per cartoon—but the magazine allowed him to explore his voice and imagination as well as hone the dark humor that would come to define his work. His famous, “creepy and kooky” Addams Family, later adapted for television and film productions. He demonstrated an appreciation for the macabre at an early age. He had a deep fascination for coffins and skeletons, as well as a good practical joke. “We had a dumbwaiter in our house,” he later recounted, “and I’d get inside on the ground floor, and then very quietly I’d haul myself up to grandmother’s floor, and then I’d knock on the door, and when she came to open the door, I’d jump out and scare the wits out of her.”

Addams’s mind went to dark, ghoulish places few cartoonists would allow themselves to venture. His popularity extended to some of the biggest names in Hollywood. Cary Grant wanted to meet the man who called himself “A Defrocked Ghoul,” as did Alfred Hitchcock, who once showed up at Addams’s New York home unannounced to see the cartoonist in the flesh. The “Addams family” cartoons delighted in turning upside down our assumptions about normality and its relationship to good and evil. Charles Addams tapped into the vein of American gothic that has a touch of paranoia about it, seeing behind every comforting façade the uncomfortable truth about the duality of human nature. But where Gothic literature usually combined these themes with romance, Addams made the horror hilarious: disturbing, but at the same time friendly, identifiable, and acceptable.

The book includes page after page of Adams’ fantastic artwork and represents an album of cartoons, most of which appeared in the New Yorker magazine.

Extremely rare with an original drawing and in the original dust jacket. A perfect gift for a Horror collector!

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