Product Description

A visual smorgasbord from a legendary newspaper and its illustrious illustrators, this oversized book taps into the current craze for graphic novels and vintage comics. Joseph Pulitzers New York World flourished at the turn of the twentieth century, and out of it grew what we think of as the modern daily paper. The World was famous for muckracking and sensationalism, but to a contemporary eye what is most striking about the paper (and in particular the Sunday edition) is that it was filled with colorful artcaricatures, full-page cartoons, disaster drawings, fiction illustrations, hand-lettered typography, weird science, halftone photographs, maps, and more. For The World on Sunday, Baker and coauthor Margaret Brentano have selected 85 of the finest examples of period reporting, bold and playful graphic design, long-lost comic strips, and society pieces from the heyday of The World for reproduction in this delightful oversized volume. Bakers introductory essay argues the significance and beauty of Pulitzers paper, and Brentanos detailed captions and notes accompany the colorful reproductions throughout. The World on Sunday is a visual treasure trove that will appeal to newspaper and history buffs as well as graphic designers, artists, and writers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #518455 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-29
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 13.88" h x .75" w x 12.75" l, 4.11 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 144 pages

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 Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Nicholson Baker has published seven novels and three works of nonfiction, including Double Fold, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001. He regularly contributes to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.
Margaret Brentano has worked in publishing and as a reporter. This is her first book. Baker and Brentano are married and live with their two children in Maine. Together they founded the American Newspaper Repository, a collection of 19th- and 20th-century newspapers. In 2004, the collection moved to Duke University.