America for the Foot-Loose: An Indispensable guide for Married Couples Contemplating Seperate (sic) Vacations

Apparently unpublished, but possibly intended for publication in Esquire Magazine. There are many humorous little details… from “Farm house (ask for daughter)” to the red lights on Havana, Tijuana, Mexicali and Cuidad Juarez and on and on. Overall this is in very good condition… though there are a couple small losses including some of the lettering of “Blue Bell” PA… which parenthetically he’s written as “Blue Balls”.

Steve Heller of the New York Times, writing Bill Charmatz’s obituary in 2005 notes that Charmatz is best remembered as a “humorous editorial and advertising illustrator best known in the 1960's and 70's for pictorial essays in Sports Illustrated that captured the joy and folly of sporting events,… Mr. Charmatz's distinct impressionistic style was a curious synthesis of his favorite European cartoon artists, André François, Raymond Savignac and Georg Grosz”.

As a young man Charmatz joined the Navy during World War II where he drew his first charts. “In the late 40's he also worked for Alexey Brodovitch, the influential art director of Harper's Bazaar, who urged Mr. Charmatz to chronicle his bicycle travels through France; from this project came more than a hundred drawings and watercolors of the everyday people of France, in bars, bicycle shops, restaurants, on the street and along the rivers. Rendered with a vigorous brush line, these images earned him frequent commissions from Esquire, TV Guide, Time, Life and The New York Times, where from late November 1996 through April 2004 he was the regular illustrator for the Crime column by Marilyn Stasio in the Book Review. He also worked on many advertising campaigns, including ones for the radio station WCBS-AM in New York and American Express.

Mr. Charmatz wrote and illustrated several children's books, including My Little Duster. He also published a collection of cartoons, Endeerments (Ballantine Books, 1971), featuring dozens of line drawings that were puns on the words "dear" and "deer", like "deeranged", illustrated with a picture of buck in a straitjacket” (Heller).