On Sunday, one of my favorite auction houses sold all kinds of ephemera or paper items: vintage advertising trade cards, Christmas cards, greeting cards, album cards, postcards, books, female pin-up prints, recipe booklets and calendars.
In one glass case, I spotted a children’s book with a brown boy on the cover. It was called “Nimbo: Story of an African Boy,” from 1934, first edition written by Josephine Van Dozen Pease, illustrated by Eleanor Mussey Young.
Lying next to it was another book, with a black-and-white cover of images that resembled African masks. Intrigued, I opened it up to take a look. Its title was “Mad Man’s Drums.” On another page, the title was completed: “A Novel in Woodcuts by Lynd Ward.” It was published in 1930.
I flipped the pages and was wowed. A book of beautiful woodcuts. Remarkable.
I had never heard of Lynd Ward, but I was immediately impressed that he has used this artistic medium to tell a story. How imaginative. Not a single word. There weren’t even numbers on the pages. Just the graphic illustrations, more than 100 of them.
I grew even more interested when I saw some of the first woodcuts and realized I could interpret the story without words. They are very detailed and expressive:
In the foreground, an African man pounds a drum among the bushes and trees, and in the background a small figure of a white man (obviously a slave trader) with a sword looks down on him.
The slave trader forces African men and women (one woman carries a baby) toward the shore, where a ship waits on the ocean.
The slave trader and Africans are seen aboard the ship.
An African man is being sold as a slave.
As I flipped through the novel, I never saw the Africans again. The rest of the story appears to be about the man and his relationship with his wife and son. The website beaverpond.com quoted Ward as saying the book is about human relationships and how we deal with them.
Lynd Ward was my latest discovery of an artist, and I’m very very glad I came across him. I had never heard of him before and had never seen any of his works, but I’ll be on the lookout for more of them, especially those with a black theme.
Ward was born in Chicago in 1905 into a home of an activist Methodist minister father. The son attended the Teachers College at Columbia University and sailed to Europe after graduating in 1926. He studied graphic arts in Germany, and came under the influence of illustrators Frans Masereel of Belgium and Otto Nuckel of Germany, who were using woodcuts to tell stories in pictures without words.
Ward created his first woodcuts novel “Gods’ Man” in 1929, followed by “Mad Man’s Drums” in 1930 and “Vertigo” in 1937. He produced six such novels (“Wild Pilgrimage,” “Prelude to a Million Years” and “Song Without Words” ) and illustrated many other books, including some written by his wife May McNeer.
He also created children’s picture books that won the Caldecott Award and other honors. In 2001, Georgetown University held an exhibit of some of his original illustrations, primarily those for children’s books. Ward died in 1985.
Ward was very outspoken (he denounced fascism in the arts in the 1930s and McCarthyism in politics in the 1950s), and carried his passion for activism over into his art. He illustrated a children’s book in 1947 called “North Star Shining: A Pictorial History of the American Negro,” written by Hildegarde Hoyt Swift.
Ward noted in a sketch on “The Book Artist: Today and Tomorrow,” published in 1947, that we need a world:
“without ideas of enslavement and exploitation, of master races and inferior peoples, of special privilege and individual enrichment at the expense of others. Those ideas, and the complicated social and economic practices that stem from them, stand between us and the future. Only in a world completely free shall we be able to fulfill the promise of our heritage from the past.”
