This auction is for an original, Art Deco illustration rescued from a disbound book featuring drawings by Don Blanding.
Date Published: 1948 by Dodd, Mead and Company, New York
Print size 8 1/4 inches x 5 1/2 inches
The print is in excellent condition and is 67 years old! This is not a reproduction, it is an ORIGINAL book plate illustration.
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Donald Blanding (7 November 1894 - 9 June 1957) was an American poet who sentimentalized warm climates and was sometimes described as the "poet laureate of Hawaii". He was also known as a journalist, author of prose, illustrator and speaker.
Blanding was born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma. He trained between 1913 and 1915 at the Art Institute of Chicago.
He enlisted (for a year, or the duration of World War I) plus up to six months in the Canadian Army's predominantly 97th ("American Legion") Battalion, training with them for trench warfare for eight months in 1916, but leaving service under 'unknown circumstances' a few days before the unit shipped out for Europe. (He omitted reference to that service and training a year later on joining the U.S. military.)
Blanding became suddenly fascinated by Hawaii and traveled there, staying for the year until his enlistment in the U.S. Army in December, 1917. Entering as an infantry private, he underwent officer training and was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant before being discharged in December, 1918, soon after the Armistice.
He pursued further art studies in 1920, in Paris and London, traveled in Central America and the Yucatan, and resumed living in Honolulu in 1921. Finding work as an artist in an advertising agency, he happened into two years of writing poems published daily in the Honolulu Star Bulletin for an advertiser. These featured local people and events, and became well-known and popular -- whether because of or in spite of always mentioning the Aji-No-Moto brand of MSG.
The popularity of these ad-poems led Blanding to follow the advice of newspaper colleagues by publishing a collection of his poetry in 1923. When his privately published 2000 copies quickly sold out, he followed it with a commercially published edition the same year, and with additional verse and prose books. For his fifth book in 1928, he no longer used a local or West Coast publisher, but the New York publisher Dodd, Mead & Company, who published the illustrations in the selection I am offering in 1937. The initial result, Vagabond's House, was reviewed promptly by the New York Times, and was a great commercial success. By 1948 it went through nearly fifty printings in several editions that together sold over 150,000 copies.
In 1928 he suggested and founded the annual holiday, Lei Day, in Hawaii.
While he remained strongly attached to Hawaii, his connections to the world of celebrities drew him often to the mainland, and his income made hotel life and multiple residences feasible. During his high-school years in Lawton, Oklahoma, he is said to have saved the life of a 7- or 8-year-old neighbor, Lucille "Billie" Cassin, by picking her up and telephoning for a doctor, when she had jumped off her porch and deeply cut her foot on a broken milk bottle. Cassin later took the stage name of Joan Crawford, and their reacquaintance in 1936 on the set of "The Corgeous Hussy", which starred her, suggests the level of his own celebrity.
Blanding married Dorothy Binney Putnam (described as a "socialite") on 13 June 1940, and they lived in Fort Pierce, Florida. They divorced in June 1947, and he had no descendants.
Blanding was strongly affected by U.S. entry into World War II, including the knowledge of his island paradise as a military target, the reactions of those he met on his lecture tours, and the fall of Bataan. Bataan surrendered 9 April 1942, while he was on tour, and he wrote "Bataan Falls", 16 emotional lines in response. On the 25th, he enlisted as a private, at the age of 47. He served eleven months in the 1208th Service Corps Unit, Infantry, and was discharged as a corporal.
Don Blanding died of a heart attack, at his home in Los Angeles on 9 June 1957, at the age of 62.
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