The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker

Cartoons have been an essential feature of The New Yorker since the magazine's founding, in 1925, lovingly devoured by readers, clipped, collected, shared, and remembered. Viewed together — as they can be here, for the first time ever — they form a comic chronicle of our life and times, eight decades of vibrant, concise, and up-to-the-moment commentary on subjects ranging from the mundane to the magnificent. And let's face it — they're hilarious.

This collection, organized by decade and introduced by some of the magazine's most distinguished writers, showcases the work of the hundreds of talented artists who have contributed to the magazine during its eighty-year history. From the early cartoon of Peter Amo, George Price, and Charles Addams to the cutting edge work of Alex Gregory, Matthew Diffee, and Bruce Eric Kaplan (with stops along the way for the genius of Charles Barsotti, Roz Chast, Jack Ziegler, George Booth, and many, many others), the art collected here forms, as David Remnick puts it in his Foreword, "the longest-running popular comic genre in American life."

In the process of selecting cartoons for this book, Robert Mankoff discovered that various themes emerged in each decade. It may seem surprising that nudity was a popular subject in the nineteen-forties, but less surprising, perhaps, that the exploration of outer space stimulated the funny bones of cartoonists in the sixties, or that there was a strong focus on technology in the nineties. Throughout the book, brief overviews of each era's predominant themes highlight genres of cartoons and shed light on our pastimes and preoccupations.

There are also brief profiles and mini-portfolios of key cartoonists, one featured for each era. The first decade, 1925-35, includes a biographical sketch of Peter Arno; 1955-64 showcases William Steig; 1985-94 spotlights the work of Roz Chast.

The CDs included with the book are what really make the "Complete Cartoons" complete. In PDF form, the cartoons are easily browsable. The CDs contain a mind-boggling 68,647 cartoons, and are indexed in a variety of ways. Perhaps you want to find all the cartoons by your favorite artist. Or maybe you'd like to look up the cartoons that ran the week you were born. You can even select all the cartoons on a particular subject (anything from "art" to "zoology"). And you can always begin at the beginning, February 21, 1925, and experience the unprecedented pleasure of reading through every single cartoon ever published in The New Yorker.

Enjoy The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker — a one-of-a-kind portrait of American life over the past eighty years, as captured by the talented pens and singular outlooks of the masters of the cartoonist's art.

"What could be better than a gigantic 656-page collection of 2,004 (get it?) of the best cartoons published in the New Yorker over the last 80 years? Perhaps a double CD set with all 68,647 cartoons ever published in the magazine — complete with a nifty search function that allows readers to search for cartoons by year of publication or by cartoonist's name. This improbably large offering is a bonanza of wry Manhattan-centric comic commentary on urban life and much else in American culture over the years. There's Peter Arno's 1948 ink-and-wash cartoon of a mildly concerned matron, book in hand, asking her newspaper-reading husband, 'Is there a Mrs. Kinsey?' Or Peter Steiner's now famous cartoon drawing of two dogs chatting in front of a computer. 'On the Internet,' says one canine to the other, 'nobody knows you're a dog.' The book offers an introduction by New Yorker editor David Remnick and short essays introducing each decade — which readers may want to read after perusing the cartoons first — by such New Yorker luminaries as Roger Angell, Lillian Ross and John Updike. This is an absolutely fabulous collection of sophisticated silliness that will soon take its rightful place on coffee tables all over the country." Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

More than a book, this is a bona fide publishing event. The largest-ever collection of New Yorker cartoons features the best of every decade in book form, plus two easy-to-browse CDs--Windows and Macintosh compatible--with every cartoon ever published in the magazine--more than 68,000 of them!

Since its founding in the 1920s, The New Yorker has had a profound cultural impact on the country and the world, and has almost singlehandedly elevated the cartoon to an art form. For the first time ever, EVERY cartoon ever published in The New Yorker is collected in one place.

Accompanying the cartoons in the book, several thousand of them organized chronologically, are essays by eminent New Yorker writers reflecting on the life and times (and sense of humor) of each successive decade. Additionally, each decade includes profiles and mini-portfolios of the cartoonists who made their marks on the era, from Peter Arno and Charles Addams to Bruce Eric Kaplan and Roz Chast. "Theme" features cover such subjects as Drinking, The Depression, and Politics.

The two accompanying CDs feature every cartoon ever published in the magazine in a format that is accessible on any home computer and is browsable by date, cartoonist, subject, and more. This groundbreaking book, several years in the making, has been lovingly compiled by current New Yorker cartoon editor (and respected cartoonist and author) Robert Mankoff, and the foreword is by David Remnick, the magazine's esteemed editor.