Joseph Pulitzer's NEW YORK WORLD flourished at the turn of the 20th century and out of it grew what we think of as the modern daily paper. It was famous for muckraking and sensationalism but to a contemporary eye what is most striking about the paper (and in particular its Sunday edition) is that it was filled with colourful art - caricatures, full-page cartoons, disaster drawings, fiction illustrations, hand-lettered typography, weird science, halftone photographs, maps and much more. In order to save them from destruction, author Nicholson Baker started buying up newspaper archives from libraries around the world, eventually forming the American Newspaper Repository. Now, with co- author Margaret Brentano he has 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 NEW YORK WORLD for reproduction in this oversized volume.
I've written thirteen books, plus an art book that I published with my wife, Margaret Brentano. The most recent one is a comic sex novel called House of Holes, which came out in August 2011. Before that, in 2009, there was The Anthologist, about a poet trying to write an introduction to an anthology of rhyming verse, and before that was Human Smoke, a book of nonfiction about the beginning of World War II. My first novel, The Mezzanine, about a man riding an escalator at the end of his lunch hour, came out in 1988. I'm a pacifist. Occasionally I write for magazines. I grew up in Rochester, New York and went to Haverford College, where I majored in English. I live in Maine with my family.
