Sign In

- Or use -
Forgot Password Create Account
This item has been sold, but you can enter your email address to be notified if another example becomes available.
Description

Original Artwork For Carl Rose Pictorial Map of the United States at the Height of The Gin Rummy Fad

Interesting pictorial map of the U.S.G.R. (United States Gin Rummy), drawn by Carl Rose, at the height of America's obsession with Gin Rummy.

Carl Rose was a well regarded cartoonist in the middle of the 20th Century, receiving the National Cartoonists Society's Advertising and Illustration Award for 1958.   Several of Carl Rose's printed maps survive, including his 1940 New York World's Fair map and 1949 The U.S. A Political Map . . . 

The map illustrates people across the country, from all ethnic groups and walks of life, playing the popular card game, Gin Rummy.  Popularized during the depression, the game was ubiquitous part of American culture during World War II.

Gin Rummy

The game of Gin Rummy dates to the early 20th Century. Popular sources suggest that game was invented in 1909 by Elwood T. Baker, a Brooklyn Whist teacher. In 1952, Culbertson's Card Games Complete notes 

The principal fad game, in the years 1941-46, of the United States, Gin Rummy (then called simply Gin) was devised in 1909 by Elwood T. Baker of Brooklyn, N. Y., a whist teacher; the name, suggested by Mr. Baker's son, played on the alcoholic affinity of rum and gin; the game was resurgent 1927-30, then dormant until 1940, then adopted by the motion-picture colony and the radio world, who gave it the publicity essential to a fad game. Gin Rummy is a two-hand game and is hardly worth playing, except by addicts, in any other form. 

Rarity

We have been unable to find a printed version of the map.

Carl Rose` Biography

Carl Rose (1903 – 1971) was an American cartoonist whose work appeared in The New Yorker, Popular Science, The Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere. He received the National Cartoonists Society's Advertising and Illustration Award for 1958.

Rose created one of the most famous New Yorker cartoons, published December 8, 1928, with a caption by E. B. White. In the cartoon, a mother at dinner says to her young daughter, "It's broccoli, dear." Her daughter answers, "I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it." (The phrase "I say it's spinach" entered the vernacular; in 1932, Irving Berlin's popular Broadway revue Face The Music included the song "I Say It's Spinach (And The Hell With It)".) Elizabeth Hawes adopted it for her critique of the clothing design industry: Fashion is Spinach (1938).

Rose illustrated Bennett Cerf's best-selling book Try and Stop Me and its sequel Shake Well Before Using. Rose also illustrated Have Tux, Will Travel, the supposed autobiography of actor Bob Hope (actually ghost-written by journalist Pete Martin).

Between 1958 and 1961 he also illustrated the educational comic strip Our New Age, written by Dr. Athelstan Spilhaus.