Download The Best of Kin Hubbard: Abe Martin's Sayings and Wisecracks, Abe's Neighbors, His Almanack, Comic Drawings djvu

Crazy about Kin Hubbard - lots of his pithy stuff is still so applicable today! Price was good - even adding shipping, I still feel like I got a good deal.

Great book with many of Kin Hubbards' folksy illustrations. Abe Martins' philosophy on life is timeless and very accurate on people and politicians..No wonder Will Rogers was a fan!!

A very complete book! My husband has enjoyed reading it. We are from Indiana and visited the Brown County Lodge on our vacation this summer.
The copy I purchased from Amazon was in excellent condition.

Frank McKinney “Kin” Hubbard (1868-1930) was an American caricaturist and humorist who was born in Bellefontaine, OH. His father was editor and publisher of the Bellefontaine Examiner. After quitting school at age thirteen and bouncing around at several jobs, he left Bellefontaine in 1899 at age 31 for a job as a reporter-sketch artist in Indianapolis, IN, with the Indianapolis Sun. Two years later he moved to the Indianapolis News. In 1904, he began daily drawings of a clown-like, rustic character named Abe Martin who lived in the fictional town of Bloom Center located in southern Indiana’s really existing Brown County and who made humorous observations about life. These continued for 26 years.
A couple of years later, Kin decided to capitalize on Abe’s popularity and began publishing a series of annual almanac-like books containing collections of Abe’s sayings, totaling 25 in all. In 1910, the Abe Martin cartoons and epigrams were syndicated nationally in over 300 newspapers after the well-known Hoosier humorist George Ade wrote about them in the American Magazine. The next year, Kin started writing a weekly series of comic essays known as “Short Furrows” which featured stories about Abe as a “cracker-barrel philosopher,” along with others of his friends and neighbors, and these too were soon syndicated. After Hubbard’s sudden death at age 62 from a heart attack, the state of Indiana decided to honor him by naming the new lodge being built in Brown County State Park near Nashville, IN, after Abe Martin.
This hilarious volume, which I picked up at the Abe Martin Lodge gift shop in Brown County State Park when there for a family reunion, is divided into two parts. Editor David S. Hawes, a Professor Emeritus of Theatre and Drama at Indiana University, relates in Part One the life story of Kin Hubbard, including the birth and development of Abe Martin, and then provides in Part Two a sample of Abe's very best sayings, wisecracks, neighbors, almanacks, and comic drawings, supposedly taken from the Bloom Center Weekly Sliphorn. For example, "When a feller says, ‘It hain’t th’ money, but th’ principle o’ th’ thing, it’s the money." And, “It’s no disgrace t’ be poor, but it might as well be.” The kind of home-spun humor of a by-gone era in this book would probably be absolutely lost on a majority of younger people today who likely think only in terms of modern, crass, stand-up comics, but I found it funny and enjoyed reading it.

A good selection of Hubbard's drawings, longer essays, and epigrams with an opening chapter that provides biographical details and insights into Hubbard's life.

For twenty-five years, Kin Hubbard wrote a nationally syndicated daily one-panel cartoon with two epigrams. His work was admired by such luminaries as Groucho Marx, S.J. Perelman, James Whitcomb Riley, Franklin P. Adams, and others. His epigrams were good enough to merit five entries in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. David S. Hawes has cherry-picked his best cartoons, epigrams, and short pieces into a hilarious volume that will leave you combing used book stores for copies of Abe Martin's annual books. What strikes me most about Hubbard's humor is not just the wipe-your-eyes laughter, but how little people have changed since he wrote these sentences.