Jane Doe No More?

Who is the mysterious Jane of the Saul Steinberg inscription to a 1954 (first edition) of The Passport, found in the stacks of the College of Staten Island, and reported in this space on November 16? Jane Mansfield was proposed, by your correspondent. No connection there. The writer, Jane Bowles, by friend-of-the-blog, One More Folded Sunset. Unlikely, despite a tantalizing Staten Island connection (more to come on that soon).

The Research Bureau has been wearing out the digital shoe leather, and now they're convinced they've got their Jane.

Jane Grant was a cofounder  of the New Yorker, in 1925, with then husband William Shawn. After they divorced 9 years later, Grant worked as reporter for The New York Times and wrote for many other publications. Saul Steinberg began contributing illustrations to the New Yorker in 1941. In 1954, Steinberg was publishing The Passport; according to the Steinberg biographer Deirdre Blair, he asked Jane Grant, among others to contribute a blurb for the jacket. She did. (The RB has not been able to locate the text yet.) And thus, the lovely inscription and illustration.

The volume is stamped in red ink, "Donated to the College of Staten Island" and elsewhere, in the same ink, "June 22, 2000." Grant died in 1972, so how did her inscribed copy of the album--if it was hers--wind up being donated to the college 28 years later? Let's give the boys from the Bureau some rest before we send them back at it.

One thing links Grant, illustrators, and your correspondent (long before his own SI daze). In the mid-1980s, when part of my job at a NYC publishing house was to hunt down "scrap" (reference material) for our freelance illustrators to use for a series of gardening books, I discovered the catalogs from White Flower Farm, in Litchfield, CT. I knew nothing about flowers then, and still don't, but I do remember those beautiful catalogs. White Flower Farm was founded by Grant and her second husband William Harris.

For much more about Grant, see the online exhibit by the University of Oregon, source of the photo above.