Artifiction: Rin-Tin-Tintin

By the time the original Rin Tin Tin passed away in 1932, the world's most famous German Shepherd had already starred in dozens of Hollywood movies, thereby contributing greatly to the financial success of the Warner Bros film studio that employed him. Meanwhile in Europe the popularity of Belgian cartoonist Herge's most recent graphic creation, a teen-age newspaper reporter mononymously dubbed Tintin, was rapidly increasing in popularity. With the publication the year before of a book treatment of the youngster's latest escapades, Tintin in America, the adventures of the comic sleuth had attracted the attention of a whole new family of fans in the United States. Meanwhile, Hollywood child actor Ninnian J. Yule, Jr., a recent transplant from New York who had that same year appeared in his first, though uncredited, film role, was giving thought to a costume he might wear to a Tinseltown Halloween party, finally deciding on a mashup of the Wonder Dog and the Boy Reporter. With the aid of a low-level MGM makeup artist, young Yule attached a pair of cloth canine ears and a prosthetic nose to a real-human-hair fabrication of Tintin's signature quiff -- the entire ensemble held together with a web of rubber bands. To don his disquise, the young Ninnian first placed the artificial nose over his own pug, adjusting the false nostrils so as to allow optimal breathing. He then positioned the ears on the top of his head, leaving space for the golden tuft between the two. Thought lost until 2022, this one-of-a-kind object, though in less-than-pristine condition, sold at auction the following March for just short of 185,000 dollars.       

Artifiction: Grimm/Shaw

Measuring just under 6.2 inches (16 centimeters) in length, this walrus tusk, yellowed by weather and distressed by passage through many hands, is engraved with an array of finely etched images portraying heroines drawn from the literary works of Germany's most famous folklorists as well as those of the equally renowned Anglo-Irish playwright often referred to by his initials GBS. The object comes to be known among maritime museum curators as The Grimm/Shaw Scrimshaw. Carved across its surface, probably with a sharp needle, are an array of fine incisions which are then filled in with an ink made of candle black and tobacco juice, among which are the figured heads of Clever Gretel, Eliza Doolittle, Little Red Riding Hood and Major Barbara Undershaft. The identity of the artist or, more likely, of the artists (the graphic style employed to portray Shaw's heroines is completely distinct in character from that used in picturing the Grimm brothers' females) are unknown. Probably these men -- and they would most certainly have been men -- doubtless worked as crew members aboard one of the armada of early 20th-century whaling vessels shipping out of the UK to fish off the coasts of Greenland. Carved no earlier than 1912, the year Pygmalion is first staged, the piece is currently in the hands of a private collector of nautical paraphernalia residing in  Stonington, Connecticut, USA.