Page:Some examples of the work of American designers.djvu/29

 FREDERIC G. COOPER

Mr. Cooper is, so far as we know, the only one of our contributors who has published an illustrated story of his life and works. The little picture on the next page appears on the cover of this eight-page "autobiography," the drawings for which are burlesques of his own designs. He even caricatures some of his caricatures, almost as complicated a performance as Eddie Foy's imitation of Elsie Janis' imitation of himself. In it we learn that he was born in Oregon and that in his boyhood days the mothers of other boys in the neighborhood got into the habit of telling their sons to "keep away from that Freddie Cooper," and that he came further East as a youth and on getting off the train "thanked the porter kindly." Further,that he desires to give credit to Sir Charles Buckle Falls for instruction so delicately and tenderly applied, "and finally, buried under much persiflage, a statement of his art principles: "The only justification for accepting payment for your stuff is that the stuff shall result in the selling of the commodity which it illustrates or advertises," and "the shortest cut to distinctive individuality lies in an understanding of the fundamental principles and construction of the thing delineated and a strictly personal interpretation of that thing, ignoring entirely how anyone else ever did it." It may interest you to know that the pamphlet, which is a literary curiosity, costs only ten cents, the tenth part of a dollar, and may be had from the Marchbanks Press, New York (advt.), also that there is more about Mr. Cooper on the next page.