The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker (2004)

I'm just not a New Yorker. I don't appreciate Seinfield or Woody Allen either. ( )

Book Description: New York, New York, U.S.A.: Black Dog & Leventhal Pub, 2004. Fine in Archival Plastic Cover. Folio - over 12" - 15" tall. A handsome First Edition, First Printing

I had a great-aunt, sort of an Auntie Mame kind of woman. Sophisticated, funny, etc. I still remember visiting her in Warren,PA, and spending afternoons curled up in her library by the fireplace reading New Yorker cartoons. I felt very sophisticated. This book of New Yorker cartoons takes me back about 50 years and still makes me feel sophisticated. ( )

What's not to like about this great book which can be looked on as a social history book? The cartoons themselves carry great commentary as to the times in which they were created. ( )

This review was also published, in a slightly enhanced & more comfortable format, at my blog between drafts.

While this book is widely available now at a bargain price, it was worth its original price tag too. 2004 cartoons in excellent print quality on 650 pages plus, on two CDs, almost 70,000 cartoons in PDF format, comprising every cartoon The New Yorker ever ran from 1925–2004. The cartoons on the CDs, though, are not in the best quality; one has to zoom in rather often and should have a large-ish screen to do so. Still, some details will be hard to recognize or lost altogether. (Plus, you can’t copy/paste the cartoons.) On the upside, the CDs are browsable by date, subject, and artist.

Three key aspects stand out with regard to these cartoons.

First, they’re practically all absolutely brilliant, even if you have to have loads of “cultural knowledge” to be able to appreciate them at all, or to appreciate them even more. The second aspect is that these cartoons convey a sense of historical and social change in a medium that’s anything but dry and wearisome, to say the least. And the third aspect is that you can develop a sense for how many different possibilities there are to “think out of the box”—with techniques like combining seemingly incompatible topics by juxtaposition, understatement, and so on, both in text and artwork. If you’re a writer and/or copywriter, this gives you an idea about what you can achieve if you try hard.