Let’s not forget illustrator Cor Icke

You ever had successful writers who disappeared in the fog (who remembers The square in sun and rain and all those other ‘Haagsche novels’ by Eline van Stuwe?) and you have forgotten writers about whom it is written every ten years that they should not be forgotten.

Such an unforgettable forgotten writer is CCS Crone (1914-1951), the author of the collection of short stories The sliding trumpetwhich never became a bestseller but which earned Crone a modest posthumous fame as ‘the Utrecht Nescio’, recommended by Simon Carmiggelt, FB Hotz, Martin Bril and other lovers of subtle melancholy.

Since 1947 The sliding trumpet reprinted several times. The penultimate edition was published in 2012 by IJzer publishers, with the same cover as the eighth edition now published. In the first issue, that illustration was inside the book: a misty street at night, with cyclists and walkers in dim outlines.

The city scene is a watercolor by Crone’s fellow townsman Cor Icke (1913-1996), the father of astronomy professor Vincent Icke, who inherited some of his father’s artistic talent: the covers of his books on cosmology (Travel agency Einstein, The Force of Symmetry) Vincent Icke designs himself.

‘Shortly after the war my father could hardly earn a living as a visual artist’, says Icke, ‘that is why he did commissioned work: football pictures, covers, brochures, you name it. In the 1950s he became fascinated by animation film, the technique of which he mastered himself. He was hired at the famous studio of Joop Geesink, where he later made the films of Loekie de Leeuw, the mascot of the Star advertisement, as a 3D animator.

‘From his illustration for The sliding trumpet I am still impressed. It is a watercolor in shades of gray, flawlessly done when you see the division of the surface and the fabric expression. I suspect that it was a commission for the book at the time, because it fits perfectly with the atmosphere of Crone’s prose.’