Complete Cheerful Cherub, 1001 verses by and 50 similar items

The Cheerful Cherub was an American single-panel newspaper cartoon written and drawn by Rebecca McCann. McCann began publishing Cheerful Cherub cartoons in the Chicago Evening Post in 1917, when she was just twenty years old, after editor Julian Mason took an interest in the little drawings and verses that dropped out of McCann’s portfolio as she tried to show him more serious work. Each single-panel cartoon featured the title character, accompanied by his pet dog, speaking a short verse, generally in iambic meter, offering wisdom, wit, and insight on sundry topics such as ambition, education, friendship, lies, sin, and work. The feature was soon picked up for syndication, and at its peak appeared in over 100 papers around the United States. After McCann's sudden and unexpected death, Covici Friede Publishers compiled 1,001 Cheerful Cherub cartoons and published them as Complete Cheerful Cherub in 1932. It included all of the verses and illustrations from Cheerful Cherub, Series 1 and Cheerful Cherub, Series 2 along with 404 more which had never before been published in book form. This complete compilation of McCann's work also included a short, touching memoir by McCann’s friend, Mary Graham Bonner. The book was a perennial favorite and was reprinted repeatedly from 1932 onward, first under the Covici-Friede imprint, and later on, after the companies merged, under the Crown Publishing imprint.