A few minutes with Andy Rooney... at the Mayfair Bookshop

A chariot driver and team of horses leap across the landscape (Manhattan?). Following that graphic, the title, Today's Books, jumps out at you on the cover of this little bookshop catalog. Today is March 1946 and Today's Books could be purchased at the Mayfair Bookshop, owned by George W. Stair in New York City at 7 West 49th Street--Rockefeller Center.

Thumbing through the catalog for items of interest sixty-five years ago, an ad for this book caught my eye: The Story of the Stars and Stripes: A Paper for Joe, by Bud Hutton and Andy Rooney. Yes, that Andy Rooney--the 60 Minutes journalist and author. You could also call him an ex-college football player (Colgate University) and a World War II veteran. And he was already a veteran author in 1946, having written his first book while serving in Europe in 1944.


Rooney was drafted into the Army in 1941. In 1942 he began reporting for the military newspaper The Stars and Stripes in London. The following year, 1943, he and five other correspondents flew with the Eighth Air Force on the first American bombing raid over Germany. Rooney's first book (also co-authored) was Air Gunner (Farrar & Rinehart, 1944), about his observations of the Eighth Air Force during his time with them.

Rooney went to work for CBS in 1949 and did a tremendous amount of writing for them in the form of essays, scripts and series. I can't find another book he published until 1981's bestseller, A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney (Atheneum, 1981), which launched a run of some 15 books to date. These are the books we associate today with Andy Rooney.

But during and immediately following World War II, a young pacifist turned soldier cut his journalistic teeth and parlayed his wartime reporting experiences into his first two books. You could probably find both of them at the Mayfair Bookshop in Manhattan back in 1946.

And by the way, that young soldier/author is 92 years old today.

Happy Birthday, Andy Rooney!

Comments

  1. MrCachetJanuary 14, 2011 at 7:09 AM

    What a great story and a great find, Chuck!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Chuck WhitingJanuary 15, 2011 at 8:33 AM

    Appreciate it, Dave. As always, thanks for reading and taking time to comment.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to open a book

Image
Cataloging books the other day, I came across an 1890s multivolume set called Messages and Papers of the Presidents . Inside one of the volumes was a slip of printed paper with a bookbinder's message: How to Open a Book . The set was published by the Government Printing Office, so they are the likely source of this piece of paper, which reprints a passage from a publication titled, Modern Bookbinding . No other bibliographical detail is included for that title, but I have found a magazine from that era, Modern Bookbinding and Their Designers . No clue, though, as to the author of this particular piece. You might wonder (I did) why there would be a need for instructions to open a book. And if you put those instructions inside the book, doesn't that defeat the purpose somewhat? Opening a book is not as easy as you might think. At least if you read these instructions and try to follow them. Here's the gist of it in the opening run-on sentence: Hold the book with its back on a ...
Read more

A Bookaholic and Bibliophile in Ukraine

Image
A favorite piece in my Bibliophemera collection is an unused postcard illustrated by Ukrainian artists Romana Romanyshyn and Andriy Lesiv. It features two interesting, whimsical creatures embracing each other while maintaining engagement with their books. Cat-like and bird-like, one in high heels and one barefoot, one with a long tail and prominent ears and one with tail feathers and no visible ears, both with beaks, and both with books. They can’t put their books down even in this intimate moment. Appropriately, they are labeled Bookaholic and Bibliophile. Might they even be an imaginative rendering of the artists themselves? Romana and Andriy were both born in Lviv, Ukraine in 1984 and continue to live and work there. The illustration on the postcard is a fitting depiction of their artistic lives where books and their illustrations comprise their passion for illustration, book design, and writing. Together, they started Art Studio Agrafka in Lviv where they have produced award-win...
Read more

F.F. Hansell & Bro., New Orleans 1900

Image
But for the winds of fate that first weekend in September of 1900, the building pictured above (and below), may have crumbled and the publishing & bookselling firm of F.F. Hansell in New Orleans would not have had produced the billhead above. What if the Great Storm of 1900 that leveled Galveston on September 8, 1900--America's worst natural disaster--had caught steering currents that took it north well before a Texas landfall? Hansell's billhead, dated September 28, 1900, owes its existence to the elements of nature, whatever they were at the time: High pressure over New Orleans pushing the storm west? A weak front approaching the Texas coast, pulling the storm toward it? Whatever, this storm could just as easily have veered north with a change in conditions and destroyed New Orleans. A lot of these storms that enter the Gulf of Mexico seem to make that right turn before striking the Texas coast. We (Houston-Galveston area) got lucky last summer with Gustav. Not so lucky w...
Read more