Drummer’s Yarns, Part 1
This Monday & next, examples of an overlooked group of late Victorian Age comic booklets, generically labelled as Drummer’s Yarns.
“Drummer” was 19th century slang for a travelling salesman (drumming/rapping at your door). As depicted below in a page excerpted from the 1925-1926 52 Letters to Salesmen - contrasting the pitching style of then-contemporary salesmen versus those of the past - the approach of “drummers” was to sit around telling jokes with a client, with the aim of becoming their friend in order to sell to them.
Click on any picture, to open a larger version.
As drummers were popularly known for telling jokes, titling joke books as being collections of their yarns/stories, was a natural.
These paperback collections began with nearly all prose content, with but a spattering of cartoons — such as the two Excelsior Publishing House books whose covers are reproduced below — Drummer’s Yarns (1886), and Capital Jokes and Traveler’s Yarns (1887). The art on the cover of the below 1886 Drummer’s Yarns — showing travelling salesmen gathered in a hotel lobby, telling each other funny stories, while the hotel’s desk clerk (in the role of potential purchasers/readers of the book) listens in and enjoys their yarns - is a theme found in the cover art of nearly all later Drummer’s jokebooks.
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Following the success of NYC Excelsior House’s Drummer’s Yarns book, rival publisher George W. Ogilvie of Chicago, released their Yarns by a Thoroughbred Drummer, May 1887, Humor Series Volume 1, Number 2. The cover art here is similar in theme to that of Excelsior’s, showing a travelling salesman (drummer) in a country store, telling jokes to an appreciative customer and clerk behind the counter.
Differentiating Yarns by a Thoroughbred Drummer from the earlier Excelsior House booklet, is the addition of significant cartoon content, including sequential comics — most if not all, likely lifted from other sources. A couple examples are shown below.
In 1895, another Chicago publisher — Laird & Lee — published Hearty Jokes and Drummer’s Yarns, two printings of which are shown below. The cover art of Hearty Jokes is patterned after that of the original 1886 Excelsior House book (plus further Excelsior House books in the series, which I’ll show next week). The contents of Hearty Jokes, reprints the entirety of Yarns by a Thoroughbred Drummer above, including all the same cartoons, plus adds still more pages and cartoons.
Below is an example two-panel cartoon — Absent Minded, by Wilder — which is amongst the newer material added to Hearty Jokes and Drummer’s Yarns. These cartoons, I’m certain, were lifted from humor periodicals.
Next Monday, in Part Two, we’ll concentrate on the series of Drummer’s Yarns paperback digests published by Excelsior House. Excelsior quickly picked up on Ogilvie’s addition of cartoons to the Drummer jokebooks, populating their later versions with cartoons and sequential comics.
— Doug
