ARF: Notes and Comments: SHIP ARRIVING TOO LATE TO SAVE A DROWNING WITCH: Introduction: The cover art explained (original) (raw)

About front cover

From: pshirley@whale.st.usm.edu (Phil Shirley)

That's right, you heard right, the ship arriving too late picture is from a book called _Droodles_ which is by Roger Price. My copy was published by Price/Stern/Sloan (Los Angeles); 15th printing, November 1978; several copyright dates, 1953 through 1966; ISBN 0-8431-0009-5. "Ship" is the very first droodle in the book (p.3). In addition to the caption "A Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch," the book says "This, of course, appears to be 'A Mother Pyramid Feeding Its Child,' but it isn't."

From: richts@cs.uni-sb.de (Joern Richts)

For me "A Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch" has always been "a detail of Frank's name in capital letters where the lower part is hided". You can only see the upper part of the 'Z' and the 'A'. The 'PPA' is missing (perhaps because the CD package is too small:-).

Could this be the reason why Frank has chosen this Droodle for the cover and the title of the album?

From: Denis Griffin dgriffin@videotron.ca

Also, from Record Review, June 1982:

FZ: I haven't decided what stuff will be on the next disc which will only be a single record. I know that one side of it is going to contain a song called "Drowning Witch," "Envelopes" and "Teenage Prostitute" but what the other side is going to be I haven't figured out yet. And the title of the album is going to be Drowning Witch. A long time ago there was this guy called Roger Price who did this cartoon called "Droodles" and one of the pictures in the book was called "Drowning Witch." Right now we're in the process of trying to locate this guy to get permission to use the picture because this book came out in the '50s. I want to use the original picture.

From: Charles Ulrich ulrich@sfu.ca

When they did locate him, it turned out that he lived about half a mile from FZ.