Tattoo: Secrets of a Strange Art as Practised among the Natives of the United States, published by Simon and Schuster in 1933 and written by the Russian-American journalist and historian Albert Parry, is the canonical pre-war English-language book on American tattooing. Researched in the Bowery, Coney Island, and waterfront tattoo parlors of New York around 1931 and 1932, it was the first major American trade-press book to treat the tattoo trade as a serious subject of social history, and it remains the principal early printed source for the names of the founding generation of American tattooers.

What is Albert Parry's Tattoo?

Tattoo: Secrets of a Strange Art as Practised among the Natives of the United States is a book-length social history of American tattooing published in New York by Simon and Schuster in 1933. Its author, Albert Parry, was born Abram Paretsky in Rostov-on-Don in the Russian Empire in 1901, emigrated to the United States in 1921, and was naturalized in 1926; in the late 1920s and early 1930s he worked as a journalist in New York and Chicago before a long postwar academic career. The first edition runs to twelve preliminary pages plus 171 pages, with a color frontispiece, twenty-six black-and-white illustrations, and a green cloth binding with a snake-tattoo-decorated spine label. The title spelling Practised is the British and older American form used on the 1933 edition; the modern American spelling Practiced appears on some later citations and on the 2006 Dover reprint.

Why does Tattoo (1933) matter?

The book matters on four counts. First, it is the earliest serious American monograph on the tattoo trade, published within fifteen years of the First World War armistice and based on direct interviews with the working tattooers of the Bowery, Chatham Square, Coney Island, and the New York waterfront. It is therefore the principal near-contemporary record of the trade as it was actually practiced between the two World Wars. Second, it is the principal early printed source through which the names of the founding generation of American tattooers entered the academic and general record, the source that turned an undocumented oral tradition into a recognizable institutional one. Third, it advances a psychoanalytic interpretive framework for tattooing that established the subject as a legitimate field of social-scientific inquiry, even as that framework is now treated as dated. Fourth, it has remained in print or near-continuous availability across nine decades, which is itself a major reason for its outsized influence on the modern field.

Background and the author

Albert Parry grew up amid the Russian Revolution and Civil War and emigrated to the United States at the age of twenty. The Russian-Jewish émigré background is relevant to the project, because his principal Bowery interview subjects, most prominently Charlie Wagner, born in what is now Slovakia, and Lew Alberts, known as Lew the Jew, were themselves Eastern European or Eastern European-descended Jewish immigrants or first-generation Americans, and the cultural intelligibility between author and subject is a notable feature of the interview register.

The field-research phase ran around 1931 and 1932 in the densest tattoo-trade cluster in the United States. Parry sat down with the working tattooers of the trade, including Charlie Wagner at his Chatham Square shop, Lew Alberts, William Moskowitz, and Mildred Hull, the most prominent woman tattooist of the Bowery in the period, and recorded their accounts of clientele, technique, business practice, and the meanings their customers attached to the work. That interview corpus is the documentary core of the book.

The decision by Simon and Schuster, by 1933 an established major New York trade-press house, to publish the work as serious nonfiction rather than as a sideshow novelty gave it editorial polish, marketing reach, and institutional credibility. The book reportedly drew reviews and excerpts in Esquire, the American Mercury, Modern Mechanix, and Scientific American, and was reviewed in 1934 in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly.

The named-tattooer citations

Parry's chapters are the principal pre-war printed record of the early twentieth-century American trade. The named subjects most consequential to the present archive are Charlie Wagner, the Chatham Square figure whose interview is one of the book's documentary cores; Lew Alberts, the flash designer later the subject of a major Hardy Marks reissue and a museum exhibition; the San Francisco tattooer Brooklyn Joe Lieber, whom Parry listed among the best tattooists in the United States; William Moskowitz of the Bowery Moskowitz dynasty; and Mildred Hull, treated at length in the modern literature on women in tattoo history. The Lieber citation in particular is a load-bearing dating anchor: Parry's 1933 identification of Lieber as a San Francisco tattooist is the principal early external record establishing that by 1933 Lieber had been working in San Francisco prominently enough to be identified there by an outside observer.

Significance and afterlife

Parry's method, combining direct interviews with working tattooers, historical and comparative framing, primary photographs and flash reproductions, and an academic-register synthesis, is the founding template for the English-language tattoo monograph. Later works in the lineage, from George Burchett's Memoirs of a Tattooist (1958) through the Hardy Marks American Tattoo Master series, Margo DeMello's Bodies of Inscription (2000), and Margot Mifflin's Bodies of Subversion (1997), have continuously refined that template. The book has remained accessible across nine decades: the 1933 Simon and Schuster first edition, a Collier Books paperback reported for 1971, and a Dover Publications softcover reissue in February 2006, alongside an open scan of the first edition on the Internet Archive. That continuity of access is the principal mechanism by which a 1931 to 1932 interview corpus has remained a live citation source more than ninety years later.

Parry himself went on to a long career at Colgate University from 1947 to 1969 as a professor of Russian civilization, where he founded the first undergraduate Russian studies program in the United States. He died in 1992. Within the tattoo field, however, the 1933 monograph remains by a wide margin his most cited and longest-lived work.

Cross-references

Sources

  • Parry, Albert. Tattoo: Secrets of a Strange Art as Practised among the Natives of the United States. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1933. xii + 171 pp.; color frontispiece; 26 black-and-white illustrations; bibliography pp. 152 to 164. Internet Archive scan: archive.org/details/tattoosecretsofs0000parr.
  • Parry, Albert. Tattoo: Secrets of a Strange Art. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 17 February 2006 (ISBN 9780486447926; 171 pp.). The principal in-print modern reissue.
  • Colgate University Office of Communications. "The Many Lives of Colgate Professor Albert Parry." Colgate Magazine, 10 November 2023. University-press biographical source establishing Parry's Rostov-on-Don birth, Russian-Jewish family, 1921 emigration, 1926 naturalization, and 1947 to 1969 Colgate professorship.
  • Eldridge, Chuck. "Charlie Wagner" and "Albert Parry." Tattoo Archive practitioner pages, Winston-Salem, NC. Documents the Wagner interview and the book's standing as the canonical pre-war American tattoo monograph.
  • Mifflin, Margot. Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo. 1st ed. Juno, 1997; 3rd ed. powerHouse, 2013. Principal academic treatment of Mildred Hull; cites Parry's 1933 book as a primary record.
  • DeMello, Margo. Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Treats Tattoo as the canonical pre-war reference.

Editorial

Researched and written by John J. Mayo III, Editor, Tattoo History Atlas. Confidence is held at VERIFIED tier. The 1933 Simon and Schuster first edition, its physical description, Parry's authorship and biography, and the named-tattooer citation core are corroborated across non-overlapping sources, including the Internet Archive scan, rare-book trade and auction records, the Open Library and library catalog records, the Colgate University feature, and the tattoo-history trade press. Two caveats are noted: the exact wording and page numbers of each named citation have not been extracted in the open-web source pass, and the 1971 Collier Books paperback is trade-press reported rather than primary-verified. The 1934 Psychoanalytic Quarterly review's attribution of the publisher as "Scribners" is a typographic error; every other source confirms Simon and Schuster. The softer claim, that this is the first major American trade-press book to treat the tattoo trade as a serious social-historical subject, is robustly supported; the stricter claim that it is the first American book on tattooing of any kind is not asserted here.

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