The cover of Shadow Ticket
or: how I wasted half a day puzzling over a doctored image
I found out about the cover of the new Pynchon novel from Jared Henderson’s note.
The publisher’s website—how typical—shows the cover but does not seem to mention who designed it. In any case, they used a heavily retouched image of a block of Nagymező utca in the VI. district of Budapest with theaters and cabarets. A sign on the right seems (as we will see, somewhat incorrectly) to suggest that the photo was taken in winter-spring 1938—André Birabeau’s 1937 comedy Pamplemousse (“Déligyümölcs” / “Grapefruit”) had a successful run at Művész Színház that season, in the translation of Attila Orbók. The quality of the image suggests it is from a contemporary magazine—I wonder if the people at RH were able to track it down, or whether they just worked with the scan floating around on line, digitally reworking it to make it printable.
At the end of the block, the street gets narrower. It continues to the left of what seems like another brightly lit marquee and two parked cars in front of it, and the towering black silhouette of a building above. On the far left, a tram, consisting of two cars. The tall pole of a streetlight marks the traffic island of the tram stop. Two cars are coming towards us, making it seem like a one-way street. Between them, someone walking his bike. The camera is positioned in the middle of the intersection with Andrássy út, the avenue connecting the center of the city with the park.
Why is this on the cover of this novel? According to the publisher’s book description, the novel sends the private eye Hicks McTaggart
on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to Lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.
The place to do this in Budapest—hang out with Nazis, Soviet agents, and British counterspies, get tangled up with swing musicians, and show off one’s dancing skills—would have been on just this block of Nagymező utca. There, on the south (in the picture, left) side, Cabaret Arizona (Arizona mulató), Radius movie theater, and the Atelier Dancing Bar were facing (on the north / right side) Művész szinház and the cabaret Moulin Rouge (you can just about make out MOULIN ROUGE, vertically, at the right edge of the cover).
There are other photos that maybe better convey the vibe. The 1930s was not the stone age of image production, not even in eastern Europe.
After I posted a note about the Pynchon cover, I asked my friend Péter Havas, who knows more about what the streets of Budapest look like in 20th c. photos than anyone else. And he did remember having been contacted several months ago by a library’s photo department—they were asking for his help in locating the original of what was a low quality digital image. (The library was trying to help someone who contacted them with this question—who it was, they no longer recall.)
He told me what he told them: that the picture on the cover is a heavily doctored image based on a cropped version of this photo:
A much less glamorous looking but much better picture. The Arizona and the Radius are both there, the Moulin Rouge sign is sharp, and so is what turns out to be a movie poster for the Hungarian movie Nászút féláron (Half-price honeymoon). The bright lights that I took to be windows inside the silhouette of that taller building are in fact street lights suspended on wires (the windows of the building are mostly dark, or in any case darker than the street lights). There are no cars coming—they were added along with a lot of extra “electric” lights. The figure of the suddenly rather lonely cyclist and a few other small details make it obvious that this is in fact the photo on which the cover was based.
The picture really depends on that cyclist.
A nice silver gelatin print of the photo is currently on sale here. The seller dates it to the 1950s. (There is a reddit thread about the cover that just went with the date of the print and assumed it was taken in 1950.) But there is enough information here to date the shot quite precisely. The number 10 tram line disappeared in 1950. The Arizona—where nazis and Brits and Soviets and everyone else were hanging out—was closed in 1944, its Jewish owner and his wife, known as Miss Arizona, murdered. The cars on the left and the cyclist make it clear: the photo was taken before 1941, the year Hungary switched from left-hand to right-hand traffic. At the Radius, they were showing “the perfect color film, Ramona”—Ramona was an 1936 western with Loretta Young, the fourth Technicolor film, released in the US in October 1936. It was playing at the Radius during the first week of February 1937. It opened January 30, and ran for a week.
I originally used the show at the Művész theater to date the picture on the cover. But the name of the show has changed! While the cover clearly has “Déligyümölcs,” in the original photo, it is “Egy pohár viz”: which is Eugène Scribe’s Le verre d’eau ou Les effets et les causes, translated by Zsolt Harsányi, a best-selling author of novels and biographies in the interwar years—think Stefan Zweig.
What is going on here?
Both plays did run at the Művész, although not at the same time. To understand what happened we need to look at the images more closely.
The link between the two images—the cover and the original photo—is a third image that can be found in a few places on line—for example, here. Let’s call it Image B, just because we need to call it something.
Image B is the full, uncropped version of the photo, with all the modifications noticeable on the cover, including the cars, and the rather crudely added lights. Although in one place, the person doing the doctoring actually just “lit up” a sign that was actually there. In this cropped version of the original photo, look for a faint vertical ATELIER sign:
Here it is on the Pynchon cover:
(The same intervention can also be seen in the even lower res version of Image B. Atelier by the way was renamed to OKÉ Bar—oké being the Hungarian spelling of American OK / okay.)
There is one important difference between Image B and the cover of Shadow ticket: namely, the title of the play showing at Művész szinház. Unlike, the cover, Image B retains Egy pohár viz and the cast list, although it adds a fringe of light bulbs as a frame. The light bulbs follow the outline of the text.
Here is the original photo:
Here is the detail in Image B:
And here is the detail on the cover:
There is little one can see in these low-quality images (and the email version will also not keep them all the same size, I just can’t deal with it now—look at the post on substack for better experience…), but it seems obvious that the title “Déligyümölcs” and the cast of that play were used to replace the original play title “Egy pohár viz” and the cast list, and that this switch happened after Image B was created—since Image B and the cover are otherwise identical.
“Egy pohár viz” premiered on January 21, 1937. The original photo is thus from winter or early spring 1937 (the run of the show ended in May, but the trees are still bare.) “Déligyümölcs” ran exactly a year later, premiering January 20, 1938.
Péter (who at this point should be recognized as a co-author of this post) pointed me to a photo of the theater from a slightly different angle:
This photo is in the collection of the Hungarian National Museum. It seems quite plausible that the title with the cast list was copied from here—there is a similarity between how the E in “Déligyümölcs” has a small speck both on the cover and in this photo.
But why would anyone bother to replace one play with another, thus shifting the date of the photo? And who would bother to do that?
Maybe the cover is based on an Image C. I assume Image B is from a black-and-white illustrated magazine (or maybe a postcard?). Not a color glossy one, but a black-and-white Sunday supplement, printed in black and brown duotone, a richer version of black-and-white, common in the 30s. Image C could be a slightly updated version of Image B. They already worked up an image of this part of the theater district. But it had the title of the show from last season. So just update it using the title of the current show, and use it as if it was new—no one would remember, and in any case, it may not even be in the same newspaper. (Of course inserting that little piece cropped from the later photo would have been a tricky thing—it would probably have involved working on paper, and then taking a second negative image. Still, doable, and the image quality was probably rather poor anyway, those horrible light specks are really painful to look at.)
Anyway, that is one possibility. One would need to find Image C to be sure of it.
The other possibility is that it was the cover designer of Shadow ticket who did the update. Why—were they worrying about the copyright issue?
Or maybe, just maybe, but definitely more intriguingly, in the novel Hicks McTaggart hangs out in Nagymező utca in 1938, and Pynchon has done the kind of research that places McTaggart outside Művész theater, wondering about the Hungarian title of the comedy Pamplemousse? It is, after all, directly across the street from the Arizona and the Atelier, and next door to the Moulin Rouge—the places he would have been going dancing.
But by the time they were showing Déligyümölcs, Atelier Dance Bar—whose barely legible vertical neon sign is visible on the left hand side of the cover—was was already renamed OKÉ. Appropriately for a work of fiction, the changes to the cover image create a moment that never was.
Impressive detective work. From the publisher's materials, which I hadn't read before, it sounds like a Wes Anderson version of a Thomas Pynchon novel. But maybe they all do in summary.
Fascinating! Is the novel worth reading?