#Ervine Metzl

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Shakespeare Weekend!

This weekend we explore Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy, Romeo and Juliet the twenty-ninth volume of the thirty-seven volume The Comedies Histories & Tragedies of William Shakespeare, published by the Limited Editions Club (LEC) from 1939-1940. Among Shakespeare’s most popular plays, Romeo and Juliet was likely written in 1595 and first printed in corrupt form in 1597 with a corrected version printed in quarto in 1599. Two more quarto printings appeared before the play's inclusion in the First Folio of 1623. Shakespeare’s version of Romeo and Juliet calls back to a deep tradition of tragic romances and while it was heavily influenced by Arthur Brooke’s Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, Shakespeare is credited with expanding the plot and creating supporting characters who contributed to the tension and comedy of the play.  

The LEC edition of Romeo and Juliet was illustrated by American graphic artist Ervine Metzl (1899-1963). Metzl attended the School of the Art Institue of Chicago and became well known for his boldly colored graphics and simply designed posters. He created a series of illustrations for the Chicago Transit Authority, Fortune Magazine, and several stamps for the United States Postal Service. Metzl was president of the Society of Illustrators from 1956-1957 and was an inaugural recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Award in 1960. Inspired by Shakespeare’s main characters, Metzl illustrated Romeo and Juliet with simple line portraitures set against a backdrop of Verona and pivotal scenes within the play in a restrained color palette.  

The volume was printed in an edition of 1950 copies at the Press of A. Colish. Each of the LEC volumes of Shakespeare’s works are illustrated by a different artist, but the unifying factor is that all volumes were designed by famed book and type designer Bruce Rogers and edited by the British theatre professional and Shakespeare specialist Herbert Farjeon. Our copy is number 1113, the number for long-standing LEC member Austin Fredric Lutter of Waukesha, Wisconsin. 

View more Limited Edition Club posts. 

View more Shakespeare Weekend posts. 

-Jenna, Special Collections Graduate Intern 

[ultraozzie3000]

A Decade of Delights

With this post (No. 413), we mark the tenth anniversary of The New Yorker. Since I began A New Yorker State of Mind in March 2015, I’ve attempted to give you at least a sense of what the magazine was like in those first years, as well as the historical events that often informed its editorial content as well as its famed cartoons. Those times also informed the advertisements; indeed, in some…

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[“Prison activists in a variety of locales criticized behavior-modification programs for women, objecting to both their involuntary character and their harmful consequences. At stake was the propensity of corrections officials to enlist biomedical knowledge and practice in the service of quelling dissent and eroding constitutional safeguards for prisoners’ rights.

Medical humanities scholar Jonathan Metzl has shown that cultural and political discourses about racial protest were imprinted on medical diagnoses of mental illness in the 1960s and 1970s, and “new ‘psychochemical’ technologies of control merged with concerns about the ‘uncontrolled’ nature of urban unrest.” As activists involved with the black liberation, Puerto Rican independence, antiwar, and Red Power and Brown Power movements were sent to jails and prisons on charges linked to their political activities, prison administrators registered an acute sense of concern that prisoner dissent was aided and abetted by imprisoned radicals and the larger social movements with which they were affiliated.

For example, the warden of McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in Washington State, speaking at a 1969 meeting of the American Correctional Association, identified the “fomenters” of what he called the “new rebellion” as “former prisoners, militants, far-out liberals, subversives, and even a few clergymen, educators, and social workers.” Prison administrators identified special control units (which in some cases were called “alternative program units”) and attendant behavior-modification regimens as a frontline strategy for suppressing dissent. Black, Latina/o, and indigenous prisoner organizers were routinely targeted for isolation and treatment. Prison psychiatrists underwrote the expansion of these practices by investing control units with medical expertise. As sensory deprivation, psychotropic drugs, and electroconvulsive shock therapy eclipsed the psychoanalytic and education-based approaches that had predominated in the 1950s, they “muddled commonplace distinctions between what constituted punishment, rehabilitation, and torture.”

Behavior modification contributed to what the sociologist Alondra Nelson refers to as the “biologization of violence” in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1967, psychiatrist Frank Ervin and neurosurgeons William Sweet and Vernon Mark, all affiliated with the Boston-based Neuro-Research Foundation, argued in the Journal of the American Medical Association that, in addition to the structural inequalities that spurred the black urban uprisings of the mid-1960s, “brain disease” was also to blame for “urban violence.”

In 1971, these proponents and practitioners of psychosurgery received a combined total of $600,000 ($3.6 million in today’s dollars) from the National Institute for Mental Health and the Department of Justice’s Law Enforcement Assistance Administration to “develop a way to identify and control persons who commit ‘senseless’ violence, as well as those ‘who are constantly at odds with the law for minor crimes, assaults and constantly in and out of jail.’” That same year, Boston newspapers reported that geneticists from Massachusetts General Hospital had collected fingerprints and blood samples from selected women prisoners at MCI-Framingham as part of a screening program designed to detect women’s genetic capacity for violence.”]

emily l. thuma, from all our trials: prisons, policing, and the feminist fight to end violence, 2019

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ERVINE METZL (1899-1963) CHICAGO. 1924. 

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Ervine Metzl

[luxandember]

Hello & welcome to Ember's Reading Room. Where I revisit childhood classics & include some commentary from an adult perspective. In this episode we read Never ask for a Goochoo Bird by Katherine Marcuse. Book - Never ask for a Goochoo Bird Author: Katherine Marcuse Illustrator: Ervine Metzl https://goo.gl/ahJziO - This is a link to Amazon. Ebates: Cash back for shopping. $10 Welcome bonus when you sign up & make a qualifying purchase http://ift.tt/2ld6Ceg Patreon: http://ift.tt/1QBkKXg ko-fi link: http://ift.tt/2fH8Xvx

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ERVINE METZL (1899-1963) CHICAGO. 1924. 

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ERVINE METZL (1899-1963) BY THE NORTH SHORE LINE. 1923.