RMW Ramblings

  Frenzy Frenzy looks up Broad Street in Philadelphia at the city hall.  The frenetic gulls echoing the evening commuter rush. The domed building on the left, now a hotel entry, was a series of banks which I remember as Girard Trust Corn Exchange.  

  Cocorico A year ago you met Chanticleer,          https://rmw-ramblings.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-chickens-are-home-to-roost-1.html    Caligula,          https://rmw-ramblings.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-chickens-are-home-to-roost-2.html     and Carolino , (by daughter Betsy).             https://rmw-ramblings.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-chickens-are-home-to-roost-3.html   This afternoon I finished Cocorico.    Cocorico  is welcoming the new day by crowing out his name.  It's in French, since he is of the Gallic persuasion.  The Arts & Crafts clock has just arrived at the time of our usual arising time.  My signature monogram is the maker's mark on the copper clock.

  Americus & Delavarsus   Tonight's Super Bowl game reminded me of two small companion paintings I did while a painter was working at our cottage. My Americus and Delvarsus were symbolic of our country and state. Our sports team-tattood painter read them as the Philadelphia Eagles and the University of Delaware Fighting Hens.   Here's Americus ...       And here's Delavarsus...   The frames inspired the postcard size paintings.  I wiped them with a acrylic paint to achieve the polychromatic effect.  Here they are roosting now in the cottage kitchen...  

    On the Avenue Back when the Del Rose was still on Delaware Avenue, I did this watercolor, On the Avenue.   And here is the Morning After.        

  The Mystery of Ruth Belew And the Dell Mapbacks   As a kid in the 1940’s I was fascinated by the piles of paperback mysteries that sat around my grandmother’s cottage.   I poured over them in the flickering yellow light of the “coal-oil” (kerosene) lamp   while playing Hot Pretzels or The Pennsylvania Polka   on the crank-up Victrola.    I studied them carefully, but I wasn’t reading the stories.   Instead I was fascinated with the covers.   Specifically the back covers.   The mysteries   were 25¢ Dell paperbacks, those we know today as “mapbacks.”       Over the years I have accumulated two dozen or so of these graphic design classics.   They were produced from 1943 to 1953.   They had a style all their own.   Dell Books was a venture of George Delacourte, a New York publisher, and Lloyd Smith of Western Printing and Lithography in Racine, Wisconsin.   (Much of this information comes...