Jan 14, 2006

Virgil Ross, pre-Bugs Bunny


A great cartoonist's business card. How many of these do you see?

I've been exceptionally lucky in my life to have either stumbled upon some amazingly cool stuff, or have it stumble onto me, much of it by way of my pre-CalArts job working at Larry Edmunds Bookshop in Hollywood.
"Larry Edmunds" was begun as two guys, Larry and his partner Milt Luboviski, selling rare and out of print books to the screenwriters and development execs(yes they had them back then)stationed at the studios in the 1930s; eventually they opened a brick and mortar shop on Hollywood Blvd., more or less across from Musso & Franks, where it still stands today, still selling new and old books on film, theatre and all the attendant ephemera--stills, posters, lobby cards.
On one occasion an elderly man came into the shop to have his collection of materials appraised--much of it having to do with Warner Bros cartoonist Virgil Ross. In gratitude for the appraisal he gave us a couple of items, including this business card. I'd guess it's from no later than the very early 30s.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Jenny, those animation drawings of Bugs Bunny, which are from "Mississippi Hare," are almost certainly not by Virgil Ross, but by Ken Harris. That's according to Greg Duffell, who cites Harris as his source, but it's also what my eyes tell me. Virgil did indeed own those drawings, as well as animation drawings from a lot of scenes that were unquestionably his, and I think he had talked himself into believing in his later years that Chuck Jones had borrowed him from Freleng's unit to animate that dance scene; but it's more likely that the drawings made their way into his possession for some other reason.