AMERICAN FRIENDS
the Brevoort Grill, and escorted him on board the Olympic with a present of chocolates for his daughter and a candle of good luck to be lit in his cabin.
To have visited the United States and made the acquaintance of so many hitherto unknown admirers remained a lasting source of pleasure to Rackham. Henceforth he often had the American market in mind, as with The Lonesomest Doll by Abbie Farwell Brown (1928), which was published only in America, and Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1928). Many of the drawings for these two books found their way into the collection of Columbia University, New York. In the England of jazz and Noel Coward the whimsical and fantastic had grown increasingly out of fashion. With The Vicar of Wakefield of 1929 and The Compleat Angler of 1931 (see pages 127 and 131), the frontispiece for which is to be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Rackham played safe by turning to historical costume and river landscape, in which he had long been supremely accomplished and successful.
Altogether, despite some good years and the high prices paid for Rackham originals in America, the post-war period had been somewhat disappointing to one who had made his name in the Edwardian era. Rackham summed up the situation a trifle despondently in a letter to Howard Angus Kennedy of 28th June 1929:
‘…I need not say what a difference the war has made. The market is now divided up among stacks of cheaply produced & relatively inexpensive books. The “Trades” have so settled it – not without great consideration. And the difficulty of bringing out a rather better book is so great as to be all but prohibitive. I recently went over to the States to see for myself exactly what the conditions were there. And found them much the same. I might tell you of one experience. One of the great firms of New York agreed, after much deliberation,
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