Monday, October 31, 2011

More Pumpkins / The Quirt, October 1921


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I promise a short post tonight. Perhaps in part due to my ode to the qualities of pulp in my last entry, just now I've performed a very quick and light edit leaving the pulp plenty visible on this little magazine while chomping on miniature candy bars and otherwise pilfering my kids' plastic pumpkins where they stashed the evening's booty. I was looking for something appropriate to share for the holiday, and the cover above reminded me of the Bolles pumpkin girl from the Spicy Stories two posts back. Here is this issue of The Quirt with a Halloween-themed cover (one in a series of holiday-themed covers from that year). I've found exactly zilch concerning this little humor mag on either the net or in my magazine indexes. It's a Capt. Billy's imitator from right across the river in Minnesota started not long after Fawcett got his mag up and running, but, from the first 20 pages I read before bed last night, I find it not nearly as much to my liking.

Of course, the publisher, F.M. Near, who I know absolutely nothing else about, would later challenge the state of Minnesota in Near v. Minnesota, one of the bedrock cases regarding the 1st Amendment, which was the result of state censorship dealt out in reaction when one of his scandal rags published articles making light of the Minneapolis police force's penchant for corruption:

http://lawbrain.com/wiki/Near_v._Minnesota

I plan on reading the rest of the issue tonight, probably while I grit and grind my teeth from all the sugar I've consumed. Hopefully it will get better. I have a few more Quirts that I'll make sure and get scanned in the future, as it seems a very scarce publication in need of preservation.

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