From Publishers Weekly
Husband and wife team Baker (
Double Fold) and Brentano rescued one of the last surviving sets of the
New York World from the British Library and, in a labor of love, sorted through a decade's worth of its issues. They present reproductions of comics, advertisements, portraits, political cartoons, caricatures and other illustrations from the turn-of-the-20th-century mass-circulation daily paper. These images, they say, celebrate a "vaudeville revue of urban urges and preoccupations." To take a sampling of these fascinating illustrations (all elucidated by Brentano's historically illuminating captions): an 1899 two-page real estate spread features delicate black-and-white drawings of the Astor holdings, "like bars of music in a hymnal of real estate." From the same year, a green and red portrait of Mark Twain accompanies his piece, "My First Lie and How I Got Out of It." For a 1909 story headlined "New York Has Seven Levels of Transit," a cutaway illustration highlight's the city's transportation, from tunnels under the river to the Brooklyn Bridge. This quirky volume brings to life an era and makes an almost lost art form widely available again. 144 four-color illus.
(Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Baker has stirred controversy both as a novelist and the author of
Double Fold (2001), the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning manifesto on the importance of preserving old newspapers as both historical documents and works of art. No mere theorist, Baker purchased the only surviving complete set of the Sunday
World, Joseph Pulitzer's phenomenally popular New York City newspaper, and now he and his wife, reporter Brentano, present some of the jewels of their precious collection in a beautifully produced and endlessly fascinating volume that celebrates the ingenuity and verve of the
World and turn-of-the-twentieth-century popular graphic art. Judiciously selected pages feature intriguing headlines, articles, and advertisements, and, most spectacularly, showcase clever, zany, marvelously kinetic, even elegant illustrations, political cartoons, and comics. Seeking to seduce and secure readers, the
World offers exclusives by Mark Twain and Arctic explorer Robert Peary; colorful tributes to such technological wonders as electric lights on Broadway, the subway, skyscrapers, and battleships; and striking images of the great tide of immigrants arriving on Ellis Island. Baker and Brentano are to be commended for rescuing these invaluable and scintillating treasures, vivid artifacts of the rapidly metamorphosing society that generated our own.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
