The American edition of The Square Egg & The Vicious Circle (1968) puts one of author Ronald Searle's New Yorker cartoons on the dust cover. This drawing is evidently the reason the title has to be in two parts.
 |
Ronald Searle
The New Yorker, November 12, 1966, page 59 |
The New Yorker drawing, with some color added to the eggs, wraps around onto the spine and just onto the back of the dust jacket:
No doubt very shortly after its November publication, Searle turned this cartoon into a 1966 lithographic print in an edition of 50 (Gurlitt 1). Here, I believe, he answers a fan's inquiry about it:
Searle takes a very different approach with the cover of the British Edition. It is called simply The Square Egg, and no vicious circle is anywhere to be found. Instead, the cover features a man walking with an open umbrella, overwhelmed by a cascade of rubber stamped pointing hands. This is a rather paranoia-inducing image, with the square egg relegated merely to a floating border around title and author.
The German edition of Ronald Searle's The Square Egg is called Das eckige Ei and it closely resembles the British edition. Robert Hansen's former copy is inscribed by the artist in English. There is a sketch of a bird sitting on a very tall square egg, more of a square pillar, really.
 |
Ronald Searle
AbeBooks listing accessed December 26, 2021
|
When the above AbeBooks listing is robo-translated back into English, the title becomes "The Angular Egg."
The 1974 German-language paperback has a different, eggless New Yorker drawing on its cover.
 |
Ronald Searle
The New Yorker, September 23, 1967, page 42 |
Searle created a new color cover for the 1981 Penguin paperback:
Why let a good idea go to waste? It can be fascinating to watch a cartoonist work through variations on a theme. Here's one of Searle's best, slightly cropped, perhaps because it is scanned from a postcard. (You can see the full composition in Ronald Searle in Perspective, page 85. Its shape is somewhat, well, square.)
The Outsider (large detail, 1977) |
Ronald Searle
|
Searle's secretary Jean Ellsmoor's copy of The Square Egg is the book on the right, one of three sold at auction in 2006. It is, I believe, the quintessential example of a personalized copy of The Square Egg.
 |
Copyright information from the British edition of The Square Egg (1968)
|
 |
Cartoons by Warren Miller and Ronald Searle
|
 |
Cartoons by Robert Kraus and Ronald Searle
|
August 26, 2022 Update: Regarding the copy of this book with the laid-in note to Mrs. Milton Mones, I thought I'd include the full eBay auction here as an appendix to the post. Offered at $81, a best offer of $50 was rejected automatically. The book was then sold on March 1, 2022, for a best offer of $55.
 |
Ronald Searle
eBay listing accessed March 1, 2022
|
Note: You can see more of Ronald Searle's birds and their eggs—square and otherwise—on Perpetua, the Ronald Searle tribute blog curated by Matt Jones, right here.
03891
