"What's New" Archives: March 2018
March 5, 2018:
March 5, 2018:
Phantom Books
Back in 1940, Atlantic Monthly published an article by one Paul Hollister titled "Walt Disney, Genius at Work." Almost fifteen years later, the New York Times and Variety published notices to the effect that Hollister's biography of Walt, titled "Man or Mouse," would be published in October 1955 by Atlantic Monthly Press-Little Brown. It wasn't, and I'm wondering what happened, and where Hollister's manuscript wound up. In the Disney "main files," I'd guess—the book was to have been "profusely illustrated," no doubt with copyrighted material—but who knows. For sure it's not with the Paul Hollister papers at the Archives of American Art in Washington, because that was a different Paul Hollister. The "Disney" Hollister was an advertising man who died in, I believe, 1970. The other Paul Hollister was an author and art critic specializing in the history of glass. He died in 2004, no doubt exasperated by fielding dumb questions about his nonexistent book on Walt Disney.
[A March 7, 2018, update: Well, that's embarrassing. As Garry Apgar points out, Neal Gabler in his Disney biography refers to the Hollister manuscript, a copy of which is at the Walt Disney Archives. Using amazon.com's "look inside" feature, I find that Gabler refers to the Hollister manuscript about twenty times, mostly in endnotes but also in a paragraph that decribes how Roy Disney torpedoed its publication. I should have remembered that, and I should have checked Gabler's book when was writing this item; I'm afraid I let my skepticism about his work get the better of me.]
Another mystery author: James C. Lynch. At the time of his death in May 1955, at the age of 53, he was, according to his obituary in the Los Angeles Times, "writing 'History of the Art of Animation' for the Walt Disney Studios." He was, again according to his obituary, a contributor to Saturday Evening Post and Collier's, and was "the author of a popular Illustrated Bible" that was on the verge of publication. Probably Lynch's work on animation history was subsumed in the Don Graham-Bob Thomas Art of Animation, although I find nothing in the editions of the book I own that credits him for any work on that project. Presumably his work papers also wound up in the "main files," if they survived at all, but it would be interesting to know if that's the case.