The World on Sunday : Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer's Newspaper (1898 - 1911) (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Margaret Brentano (Author)

Editorial Reviews

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.)
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From The New Yorker

In 1898, as part of a larger strategy to transform his New York World newspaper, Joseph Pulitzer bought a high-speed color printing press—seventy tons, with forty thousand moving parts. Appearing in the paper's Sunday edition, color pictures leavened the news with wonder: a pioneering night photographer captured the glorious electrification of St. Louis during the World's Fair; an illustrator charged with covering the Great Airship Race of 1904 before anyone had seen the ships resourcefully drew the imagined perspective of an airborne competitor. As Baker notes in his introduction, Pulitzer was near-blind when color illustrations were introduced: "The more his own sight dimmed, the more imploringly colorful his paper became."
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Bulfinch; First Edition edition (September 29, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0821261932
• ISBN-13: 978-0821261934
• Product Dimensions: 13.7 x 12.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #569,147 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dazzling rescue of the colorful World, January 15, 2006

By	Paul Sas "Paul Whitmore Sas" (Berkeley) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

An amazing peek into the vivid (and not infrequently lurid) images and text purveyed by Pulitzer's Sunday World newspaper at the turn of the 20th century. Paging through this volume shows the ambitiously crafty ends toward which the paper used their 4-color miracle machine. Of course there are photographs and line drawings, crazy cartoons and ads; but there's also waterpaint-boxes (enabling readers to wet the page and paint for a contest), easter egg patterns that transfer from the vinegared newsprint page, cut out dolls, boxing puppets whose clobbering fists deploy the fingers of the hand that holds them, and even a tachistoscopic thread that encouraged readers to cut out the image on a tape and make a movie at home. Brentano and Baker deserve the applause of all future generations; this book demonstrates a slice of the feast they saved from the chop shops. These rainbow images contrast starkly with the wallpaper at Subway sandwich shops, which use the bleary black and white microfiche reproductions of the same newsprint. The authors raised $150K to buy the British Library's last extant volumes archiving the golden age of America's yellow journalism, and they eventually found a hospitable archive at Duke. Nicholson Baker has written a book that describes their fight to save this trove. If you are a fan of his noodling, endlessly discursive writing, that's the one item that's not included here: the captions for each page are written by his wife and partner, Margaret Brentano, in clear descriptive terms that let the astounding pages do all the dazzling.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thank you NIcholson and Margaret!!, January 29, 2006

By	Eric Schenk (Mill Valley, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book celebrates one of the high points in American popular culture. In the late 1800's, Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, purchased the first great high quality color printer for newspapers. He then used it to publish beautiful color graphics every Sunday. This is both great art and great entertainment. But the story of how the author Nicholson Baker and his wife, Margaret Brentano, tracked down the last surviving complete collection of this work just before it was to be lost forever is just as thrilling. This is an exquisite book that is the product of great work by great people. Get ready to enjoy a true treasure.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow! Mere words cannot do justice to these graphics..., January 24, 2006

By	Mr. Chips (Columbia, MO USA) - See all my reviews

Amazingly, there almost no collections of Pulitzer's ground-breaking newspaper in existence. At considerable personal expense, authors Baker and Brentano rescued a trove of New York World papers from a library in Britain. Here they reproduce a selection of the Sunday pages, mostly covers. Included are covers by comic artists like Outcault, Herriman, and McManus, but also by "fine" artists like George Luks -- and a fabulous graphic artist named Biedermann, among many others.

Words just cannot do justice to this wonderful volume. The use of color separation here is just incredible, and is something that anyone who loves printmaking or beautiful graphics will treasure. Comics afficianados who love Winsor McCay and Lionel Fenninger will find much to appreciate here, as will those who love Chris Ware. But it is also a great coffee table book with historical interest that everyone will love. Just great.