Books I'm Reading: The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker

I've wanted The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc., 2004) since it appeared, but never got over the hurdle of the $60.00 price tag (although the book is doubtless worth that much). With the collapse of Borders, I was able to pick up a copy cheaply at that company's going-out-of-business-sale. I read the book in virtually one sitting--all 655 pages of it (although there isn't a lot of text). Like so many other people, I love the wry, somewhat surreal feel of so many of the cartoons that appear in The New Yorker, even if I get to see them only occasionally. Now I own them all.

The cartoons are presented by decade, from the magazine's start in 1925, each section preceded by an essay about the cartoons of the era. In addition to introductory information about the magazine and the cartoons, there are short essays about individual cartoonists important in the magazine's history--Arno, Thurber, Addams, Stein, Steinberg, Booth, Ziegler, Chast--and essays about some of the themes recurring in the cartoons over the years, such as drinking, nudity, television, the space program, business culture, slipper dogs, politics, and the Internet.

I say smugly that I finished the book in short order, but I initially misunderstood the meaning of the note on the cover saying the book "includes two CDs with all 68,647 cartoons ever published in the magazine." I thought that meant the cartoons were also on the disks, as a convenience. I failed to think about the sheer volume of work here. As one of the introductory pieces in the book points out, printing all 68,647 cartoons on paper would require an impossibly fat book (or multiple volumes)--nearly 23,000 pages--even putting three cartoons on a page. The printed portion of The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker presents only about 3,000 selected cartoons. The bulk of the material is on the two CDs, and I haven't even freed the disks from their packaging yet. While my mouth waters at the thought of the hours of entertainment latent there, I'm afraid to start looking at the disks, knowing it will be hard to stop. I'll want to read and enjoy every one of the remaining 65,000-odd cartoons without a break. I'll miss meals, neglect family, work will suffer....

Recommended at just about any price.