The New Yorker Album of Drawings: 1925-1975

The New Yorker Album

by The New Yorker

Five hundred cartoons and humorous drawings from the magazine's past fifty years include satire, fantasy, and social comment by the likes of Arno, Day, Thurber, Price, Addams, Steig, and Steinberg

Genres: Humor, Art, Comics, Cartoon, Politics, Nonfiction, Anthologies

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry published by Condé Nast Publications. Starting as a weekly in the mid-1920s, the magazine is now published forty-seven times per year, with five of these issues covering two-week spans.

Reviews

[Calvin]

Kind of fascinating to not how political cartoons changed over the decades.

[Patrícia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is really good, it's just a shame I don't understand some of them.

[George Siehl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very good collection of cartoons from the New Yorker. It was great to see some of the famous names of cartoonists from the 1925 to 1975 era: Thurber, Addams, Arno, for instance.
What I particularly enjoy is that these are from the time when New Yorker cartoons were funny. I was disappointed in the 1980s and 1990s when the driving motivation of the cartoons there seemed to become irony, snark, or whatever the new zeitgeist became.

The four stars are for a great job of selecting examples actually, for that role, five stars would be in order. However, an introduction and brief review of the material would have garnered the final star. But, the book does provide what the title describes. There wasn't a lot of reading involved, but the combination of art and language provided a very entertaining book. What more can one ask for?

Recommended especially for those with a nostalgic sense of humor, and for those with questions about how things used to be.

[Redwan Orittro · Rating 3 out of 5]

A neat compilation of comic strips

[sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

wish these were dated so I could go back and research the ones I don’t get :(

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book I got from grandparents' collection. Could have used dates/years on each of the drawings and possibly even a blurb explaining some of the context behind the joke. Doesn't even have page numbers which seems odd. Still, some funny ones, some illustrations with amazing art, and even a few that are sadly still relevant today after all these years.

[Cathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a grab-bag of comics, some hilarious, some that didn't age well, some offensive. I'm not obsessive about political correctness, but some of this was just unfeeling.

Some of the cartoons that I thought were funniest would have political undertones today that would not have been forseeable when they were written. I won't comment on those or people would think I'm making political statements I'm not making, and neither were the original cartoonists.

On the other hand, some of their political cartoons are still true today.

Other than some of the political ones, I found the blessing of the lawnmowers and the man whose yard were overtaking him funniest. I also like the introvert New Year's party, the library one, and the stocking hung by the chimney with care.

I could envision rereading this for the better ones. Usually that earns a book 5 stars, but I'm knocking it down two stars for various racist themes, which while not frequent, were still bad enough. If only they'd been omitted...

I like the review that said this is for people "with a nostalgic sense of humor."

Several reviewers said they didn't understand these, which makes me sad. I'm not really old enough to remember any illuminating historical context, but I understood almost all of cartoons. Some of them, I'm not going to explain however.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ummm, I don't get it...

[Inggita · Rating 3 out of 5]

it's quite a collector item if you like The New Yorker's cartoons.