Easter Puck

A boy in a blue tunic and red trousers holds up an oval mirror while a young woman settles a flowered bonnet onto her hair, testing the angle. Around them hatboxes spill open, and a bowl of tinted eggs sits near her feet; white iris and narcissus climb both margins in a band of green. The masthead reads PUCK in shaded capitals, and EASTER runs across the foot in pale violet blocks edged with gold. Charles Jay Taylor gives the sprite an errand any reader knew by heart: vanity, indulged. Easter numbers let Puck's pressmen work the softest end of the palette, the lavenders and lily-whites that cheaper weeklies could not hold in register. The joke is gentle. The color does the selling.