In his introduction to the new edition, Gaiman, himself a writer for impassioned followers of many stripes, calls it “probably the best book in the world.” It is, if not identical to, then at least reminiscent of the original 1950 Simon & Schuster edition I have. But now, the New York Review Children’s Collection, publishers of a number of fabulous books that had ignominiously fallen out of print, has reissued “The 13 Clocks” in a beautiful hardcover version.
My own Thurber love is “The 13 Clocks” (illustrated by Marc Simont New York Review Children’s Collection: $14.95, all ages), an eccentric children’s story that took apart and lovingly reconstructed the fairy tale long before William Steig wrote “Shrek” or William Goldman penned “The Princess Bride.” For years, I gave away copies of a flimsy Dell/Yearling paperback edition that I had bought in bulk. But Thurber aficionados do not present a united front because usually people are devoted to a single aspect of Thurber’s comic genius: his dogs, noble animals carrying on with dignity in a world gone mad the stories in his hilarious gem of a Midwestern memoir, “My Life and Hard Times” his cartoon characters, brilliantly described by Neil Gaiman as “lumpy men and women who looked like they were made of cloth, all puzzled and henpecked and aggrieved.” We Thurberites would need a convention to honor all our different passions. His work is perennially in print, and his “Writings and Drawings” have merited a Library of America edition. You don’t hear much about James Thurber (1894-1961) anymore, and it’s not just because the glory days of the New Yorker as a humor magazine are many decades in the past.
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