Here's the massive, weighty, takes two-to-lift-it book of -- New Yorker cartoons! the lightest, airiest, most fleeting of artforms, especially in the New Yorker, where you always need to be living in the culture to really get them, and culture changes fast, well, as I say, here is that meringue of an artform encapsulated in a tome which all but needs a forklift to maneuver it.
To me this is the best part of the joke! Second only to the solemn little essays inserted with a heavy hand throughout the text explaining it all to us...
The other is a deliberate art pun, a wonderful one. A book of mulberry paper, given to me by a friend, and which has yielded a lot of great paper for drawings.
The pages are mulberry paper, the back a collage of mulberry leaves, and the binding a stick one, a mulberry twig running through the twine. Light as a feather in every way. Great intelligence in this design, and a kindred spirit in humor, too! I bet the papermaker could never have got a job at the New Yorker. And vice versa.
i love it. a weighty tome of lightweight humor--heavily explained.
ReplyDeleteThe new yorker takes its humor very very seriously
Light as SILK, that second volume!
ReplyDeleteThank you for this fun in my morning! xo Mare
Cartoons are wonderful, most times it is the best part of the newspaper. ;)
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