Somehow the following image hides the name of P. G. Wodehouse:
This was part of a series of contests run by newspapers in the mid-to-late 1930s, the "Great Names Contest," with substantial cash prizes. Essentially, a paper printed daily cartoon panels that depicted visual clues or rebus-style puns representing famous historical figures, celebrities, places, books, etc. Readers were tasked with identifying the correct "great name" depicted in each cartoon, often choosing from a set of options and figuring out the wordplay. Participants collected the cartoon prints over the course of several weeks, filled out their answers, and mailed the completed sets back to the paper in designated contest envelopes.
An excellent post at Attempted Bloggery has gone into detail regarding the game's history and mechanics, and offers a collection of high quality photos of Peter Arno's art for the New Yorker's competition. You're strongly advised to read the post through to get an idea of the scope and impact of what was called at the time the "Contest Craze."
The image above belongs to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's own series and was published on February 1, 1937. The list of options for this particular cartoon was unusually large:
"As You Like It"; "Accent on Youth"; "The Master Builder"; "The Charge of the Light Brigade"; "The Last Days of Pompeii"; Geoffrey Farnol; "Three Weeks"; "The Merry Widow"; Eleanor Powell; "Lover, Come Back to Me"; "Poor Little Rich Girl"; "Hotel Imperial"; "Stars and Stripes Forever"; Barbara Frietchie; Minnie Maddern Fiske; "The Canterbury Tales"; "The Highwayman"; "The Silver Cord"; "The Little Colonel"; "Three Men on a Horse"; Horace Greeley; "Born to Dance"; Irene Castle; "Let Me Call You Sweetheart"; "Tea for Two"; Birmingham; "Much Ado about Nothing"; "The Count of Monte Cristo"; "Me and the Moon"; Elizabeth Bergner; New Rochelle; "The Face on the Bar-Room Floor"; Rupert Brooke; "Now It Can Be Told"; Sir Harry Lauder; "Alone at a Table for Two"; "Lulu's Back in Town"; "Stand Up and Cheer"; Sheila Kaye-Smith"; Memphis; Joan Crawford; Karen Morley; "Manhattan Melodrama"; James Buchanan; Robert W. Service; "Romeo and Juliet"; "Dream Train"; Pelham G. Wodehouse; "Ruggles of Red Gap": Lynn Fontanne; Emily Post; "The Music Master"; Emil Jannings; Grace Moore; "Rembrandt"; Beryl Mercer; "Sing before Breakfast"; "Love on a Dime"; Bobby Breen; "Lullaby of Broadway"; "The Postman Always Rings Twice"; "Five Star Final"; "Farewell to Arms"; Meriwether Lewis; "His Brother's Wife"; "My Lucky Star"; Franklin Pierce; James Hilton; "The Impostor"; "The Play's the Thing"; Adrienne Ames; Rocky Point; Madagascar; "These Three"; James Madison; "Tam O'Shanter".
Compare the first two of the series from November 1936, with only a few options (click to enlarge):
The answer to our first cartoon was published on March 16, 1937:
This illustrates how insanely difficult the game could get. Every detail is strictly accurate:
- Both the language and the situation point to the historical setting where the solution must be sought.
- The OED defines pel as "A stake at which swordsmanship was practised in the 14th century," with a single source from 1801, which in turn reproduces a text from a 14th century manuscript.
- The form wode is a Middle English spelling of the adjective wood, for which the OED gives definitions like "out of one's mind" and "extremely fierce or violent," all marked as: "Obs. exc. dial. or rare arch."
- The astrological sense of house is easy--I mean, in comparison with the rest of the rebus. "A twelfth part of the heavens as divided by great circles through the north and south points of the horizon; the whole sky, excluding those parts that never rise and that never set, being thus divided into twelve houses, numbered eastwards, beginning with the house of the ascendant, and each having some special signification attached to it" (OED again).
- G as a medieval numeral for 400 is just diabolical. We are used to I, V, X, L, C, D, M (if that). But in F. Cajori, A History of Mathematical Notations vol. I (1928), p. 37, we learn that one Tartaglia in 1556 wrote a General trattato di numeri which included conventions like "A 500; B 300; C 100; D 500; E 250; F 40; G 400; H 200" etc.
- The fact that M simply stands for "M" is a nice twist. In addition, you need to know that Pelham is pronounced /peləm/ or even /pelm/.
The first prize was $10,000, which in today's money is about $234,000. No wonder the papers didn't believe in making things easy for their contestants.
