Box of junk’ reveals rare treasures of James Castle
Antique-shop owner Pat Coey says he’s been “junking” for 30 years, collecting, buying, selling and trading. But none of it prepared him for what he found in a box of old magazines and catalogs he picked up for $10 at a Caldwell, Idaho, estate sale last fall.
Coey thought the magazines and catalogs, circa 1918 to 1921, could yield some vintage advertisements suitable for mounting or framing. But when he and Patti Bowyer, co-owner of the Early Attic antique shop in Idaho City, began thumbing through the box that night, they were disappointed.
“Some little monster had tore up these pages and drew in ‘em,” Coey recalled. “But something about ‘em just kind of struck. There was just something weird about ‘em.”
The sewn-together, drawn-over catalogs and books stashed among the old mining magazines and vintage ads were four rare early works by autistic Idaho artist James Castle, whose odd creations have become hot items in the art world more than two decades after his death.
“They are selling for thousands of dollars,” said Tom Trusky, a Boise State University professor and Castle expert. “A book of his sold recently for over $70,000.”
“When (Trusky) told us how much they were worth, our jaws just fell to the floor,” said Coey, a retired Boise firefighter whose antique store is “just kind of a paying hobby.”
Castle, who was born in 1899 in Garden Valley, Idaho, was thought to be deaf, mute, mentally challenged and illiterate, but Trusky’s study of his work and life suggests he was nothing of the sort. Trusky is the director of the Idaho Center for the Book, and he has a new biography of Castle in the works that suggests the prolific artist was autistic. In his books, drawings and creations, Castle re-creates the world around him, Trusky said, and tells the story of his life.
As a child, Castle was sent from his Garden Valley home to the Idaho State School for the Deaf and Blind at Gooding. His art portrays the general store and post office his family operated in Garden Valley, the wagon that took him off to school, and intricate, semi-abstract scenes of the classrooms, schoolmates, teachers and experiences that Castle encountered there.
In a book that Trusky describes as Castle’s autobiography, Castle as a youngster drew scenes of all of those, plus his return home to Garden Valley after the school deemed him “uneducable.” A final scene declares in pictures that he’s found his calling: Artist and bookmaker. “And he stays with it for 60 or so years on,” Trusky said.
Most of Castle’s surviving work is from after his family moved to Boise in 1924, but the destruction of an old outbuilding in Garden Valley in 1974 turned up a stash from Castle’s “Ice House” period, when the young artist hid in an ice house on the family’s property and made his art with scrounged and re-used paper, ink he mixed himself from soot and saliva, and pens made from twigs and sharp sticks.
The rare finds that turned up in the box from the estate sale are from that period. “These are Ice House era books,” Trusky said. “They show the same scenes.”
Among the distinctive features of the drawings are “book heads,” or oddly shaped heads on characters that often contain clues about who they are. The headmaster of the Gooding school, for example, is shown as an imposing figure in a suit, whose book-shaped head contains a woman holding a pointer and two children. That likely refers to his wife, a teacher at the school, and their two children, Trusky said.
After Castle’s family moved from Garden Valley to Boise, Castle continued to live with family members and make art.
“He stayed with his art – that’s all he did, endlessly, ceaselessly, quietly, forever,” Trusky said. “He did nothing but make art his entire life. There are over 25,000 pieces that survive. He was just totally dedicated, a little factory of strange art.”
In the 1960s, a nephew who was in art school in Portland took some of his odd uncle’s works back to show his teachers, and they “went crazy for it,” Trusky said.
Castle’s family began selling some of his art. They also noticed that for 10 or 15 years, Castle had been making pictures of little houses. Family members decided that was his way of saying he wanted a little house of his own – rather than the dirt-floored shed he’d been using as a studio on the family property in Boise. They bought him a trailer, and he made it his new studio.
Trusky is the director of the Idaho Center for the Book at BSU, and for the center’s opening in 1994, he went to the Boise Art Museum looking for a piece of Idaho art that had to do with books. The museum, which has 82 of Castle’s art works, had a drawing called “Man Reading a Book” that was ideal.
“They said, ‘Have you ever seen any of Castle’s books?’ ” Trusky recalled. “Well, I knew his reputation. I thought he was deaf, I thought he was illiterate, I thought he was mentally challenged. I said, ‘He made books?’ ”
Some of Castle’s books have covers made from cigar boxes or old pieces of cardboard. Some are books or magazines that he’s taken apart and put back together, sometimes in different orders, and with the pages now covered with drawings.
“All his stuff is on found paper, stuff that he scrounged,” Trusky said.
The first Castle book that Trusky saw, inside a Prince Albert Tobacco box cover, had a piece of sheet music hand-sewn in sideways as its first page.
“It looks like these black notes are sort of cascading down the page vertically,” Trusky said. “Right in the center he had drawn a little box, and a person in the box with no ears, and the musical notes are going outside the box.
“I still get goose bumps when I remember that first picture. I thought, ‘This is a deaf person telling us what it’s like to be deaf and not be able to hear music. This guy is no quote-unquote retard, he is trying to communicate visually.’ ”
The four Ice House-era books that the antiquarians from Idaho City found are now called the “Early Attic Collection.” They’re still for sale, but have been loaned to Trusky and the Center for the Book for a series of book tours and presentations, including one in August in Coeur d’Alene.
“We might just keep ‘em on loan until we do find somebody that wants to buy ‘em,” said Coey.
When the shop owners first surmised the books might be Castle’s works, they put them up on display in their shop with an off-the-cuff price of $3,500. Some of Trusky’s students saw the display this spring, and let their professor know.
“I was on the phone immediately,” Trusky said.
Later in his life, Castle, who died in 1977, made drawings and constructions, including painted and sewn-together cardboard figures of everything from family members to chairs, birds and bowls.
As Trusky researched Castle’s life and work for an upcoming new biography, he concluded that Castle was likely autistic, rather than mentally challenged or even deaf as had been thought.
“Autistics sometimes cannot process sounds or words,” Trusky said. “They will hear little staccato bits, or distorted frequencies. It’s just a strange problem with audio wiring in the brain. So many are frequently diagnosed when children as being deaf.”
Castle’s work shows that he taught himself about drawing and perspective, and his later works are sophisticated artistically, Trusky said. He also had a photographic memory, and could recall details of, for example, the Gooding school many years later for new drawings.
After Trusky put together an exhibit about Castle’s books at the American Institute of Graphic Arts called, “Reputedly Illiterate,” Castle’s works were featured prominently at galleries in Boise and New York.
“He’s just taken the New York art world by storm,” Trusky said. “He truly is a sensation.”
Coey, who grew up near the Castle family property in Boise, said he’d heard of the eccentric artist, but never came across his work before finding the four books.
“We aren’t art critics, we have absolutely no idea what they are worth,” Coey said. “We just hope somebody will see ‘em that likes ‘em and wants to buy ‘em.”
Coey’s next-best find in the antiquing business was probably a kitchen cupboard he found at a county dump that he sold for $250, he said. Or maybe it was the Navajo blanket he bought for $17.50, just to cover his table at a flea market, and then sold for $400 – only to find out later it was worth as much as $2,000. “I kind of goofed up on that, but I was still happy with the 400 bucks that I made off it,” Coey said.
The Early Attic’s slogan is, “Fun, funky and sometimes fine.”
Coey said he never expected to find a treasure in the box of old magazines. “I just bought it because it went cheap,” he said.
Said Trusky, “It’s certainly the find of the century.”