Albert Parry

Archive Note

Albert Parry was born Abram Paretsky on 24 February 1901 in Rostov-on-Don, in the Russian Empire, to a Russian-Jewish family. He grew up through the Russian Revolution and Civil War, emigrated to the United States in 1921 at twenty, and was naturalized in 1926. By the late 1920s he was working as a journalist in New York and Chicago. That working-reporter network of waterfront, theater, and circus sources is what fed the book that fixed his name in tattoo history.

The field research ran around 1931 to 1932, in the Bowery, Chatham Square, Coney Island, and the South Street and Brooklyn waterfront parlors. That cluster was the densest tattoo trade in the United States. Parry sat down with the working tattooers there and recorded their accounts of clientele, technique, business, and the meanings their customers carried. As a Russian-Jewish immigrant interviewing Eastern European Jewish immigrants and first-generation Americans, he shared a register with his subjects, and that cultural intelligibility runs through the interviews.

The book is Tattoo: Secrets of a Strange Art as Practised among the Natives of the United States, published by Simon and Schuster, New York, in 1933. The first edition runs xii plus 171 pages, with a color frontispiece, 26 black-and-white illustrations, and green cloth bound with a snake-tattoo spine label. Simon and Schuster was a major trade house by 1933, and its imprint is a load-bearing fact. It placed a serious social history of the American tattoo trade alongside major nonfiction of the period rather than consigning it to a novelty shelf.

The lasting work is the naming. Parry's chapters are the principal pre-WWII printed source through which the founding-generation American tattooers entered the record for a general and academic readership. Charlie Wagner at his Chatham Square shop, Lew Alberts, William Moskowitz, and Mildred Hull, the most prominent woman tattooing the Bowery in the period, are all cited. By one account Parry also listed Brooklyn Joe Lieber as a San Francisco tattooist among the best in the United States, which is the load-bearing pre-1953 anchor for Lieber's West Coast career. Wagner's own Tattoo Archive biography records that he was interviewed by Parry for the 1933 book.

Parry read the trade through a Freudian frame, treating tattooing as subconsciously driven and erotically charged. The reading has been argued with ever since, and contemporary tattoo studies treats it as dated. It still did the work that mattered. It carried the subject into serious-press reception, won a 1934 review in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and made tattooing a thing scholars could interpret rather than merely gawk at. The same year, 1933, Parry published a parallel social history, Garrets and Pretenders, on American bohemianism, in the same method.

The book never really went out of reach. Simon and Schuster issued it in 1933, a Collier Books paperback is reported for 1971, and Dover Publications reissued it on 17 February 2006. An Internet Archive scan keeps the first edition open. That continuous availability across more than nine decades is itself a reason the book shaped the modern American Traditional revival, and its combination of working-tattooer interviews, historical framing, and flash-sheet illustration became the template later English-language tattoo monographs built on.

Parry himself moved on. After the war he joined Colgate University in 1947 and taught Russian civilization there until 1969, founding the first undergraduate Russian studies program in the United States, the work he is mainly remembered for in the academic press. He died on 4 March 1992. Outside the Russian field, though, the 1933 tattoo book stays his most-cited publication, and the founding generation it named is still measured against it.

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