Inhabiting the same topography and timeline as Jules Feiffer‘s Village Voice strips, Bill Manville’s Saloon Society, and, dare I say, even Rod McKuen’s youthful reminiscences, The Conformers by Jack Wohl* (‘who has been, at various times, a child, a larger child, a musician, a composer and creative consultant and art director for our advertising agencies‘, helpfully notes the blurb on the back) is a charming little book with colourful squares and circles for characters. Like many other publications whose existence I previously ignored, I found it in a used bookstore that assigned it the somewhat random price of seven dollars, 41 cents, which was pretty good, considering that the employees probably didn’t know what it was or how to price it.**
Published in 1960, the book consists of ‘shapes cut out of colored paper with scissors‘, cheekily described in the introduction by Roger Price*** as Wohl’s psychiatrist’s idea. These blobs may be firmly situated in NYC’s Greenwich Village, but no matter how technologically advanced we get, most human preoccupations are the same some 60+ years later… so most readers will be able to effortlessly recognize themselves in the lives of Harriet (red circle), Howard/Herbie (purple square) or Arthur (green square).
~ ds
* Definitely not the American far-right conspiracy theorist, fraudster, and convicted felon.
** No shade is intended towards used bookstores in general, which are places I love being in, but this particular bookstore has staff that seem to wildly overprice most things without consideration for their condition or the simple question of ‘who in their mind would buy this at that price?‘.
*** As the author of Droodles, Price was particularly well positioned to write an introduction to The Conformers.
Who's Out There? 