I had a great-aunt, sort of an Auntie Mame kind of woman. Sophisticated, funny, etc. I still remember visiting her in Warren,PA, and spending afternoons curled up in her library by the fireplace reading New Yorker cartoons. I felt very sophisticated. This book of New Yorker cartoons takes me back about 50 years and still makes me feel sophisticated. ( )

What's not to like about this great book which can be looked on as a social history book? The cartoons themselves carry great commentary as to the times in which they were created. ( )

Though this book is widely available now at a bargain price, it was worth its original price tag too. 2004 cartoons in excellent print quality on 650 pages plus, on two CDs, almost 70,000 cartoons in PDF format, comprising every cartoon The New Yorker ever ran from 1925–2004. The cartoons on the CDs, though, are not in the best quality; you have to zoom in rather often and should have a large screen for that, but some details are still hard to recognize or lost altogether. (And, you can’t copy/paste the cartoons.) On the upside, the CDs are browsable by date, subject, and artist.

For me, three aspects of these cartoons stand out. First, they’re practically all absolutely brilliant, even if you have to have loads of “cultural knowledge” to either appreciate them at all or to appreciate them even more. The second aspect is that these cartoons convey a sense of historical and social change in a medium that is anything but dry and wearisome! And the third aspect is that you can get a sense of how many different possibilities there are to “think out of the box” with techniques like combining seemingly incompatible topics, by juxtaposition, understatement, and so on, both in text and artwork. If you’re a writer and/or copywriter, this gives you an idea about what you can achieve if you try hard enough.

A sumptuous book, collecting 2004 of the best cartoons from "The New Yorker", from 1925 to 2004, arranged by decade. Even better, though, are the 2 CD's that come with the book, collecting all 68,647 cartoons from the magazine's history, arranged in any number of searchable ways. Page 15, by the way, has one of the most famous cartoon lines, with the little girl saying to her mother, "Well, I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it." Other memorable cartoons are on pg. 12, 62 (Peter Arno), 76 (top), 94 (bottom), 100 (Thurber), 104 (Arno), 140 (Carl Rose), 175 (Arno), 179 (Arno again - what can I say?), 553 (the inimitable S. Gross), 590 (rat suicide). Actually, 90% of the cartoons are really quite good; The New Yorker deserves its reputation as a premier magazine for witty and erudite cartoons. And there's even room for the occasional dumb chuckle. ( )