The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper, 1898-1911

Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World flourished at the turn of the twentieth century, and out of it grew what we think of as the modern daily paper. The World was famous for muckraking and sensationalism, but to a contemporary eye what is most striking about the paper (and in particular its Sunday edition) is that it was filled with colorful art — caricatures, full-page cartoons, disaster drawings, fiction illustrations, hand-lettered typography, weird science, halftone photographs, maps, and more.

Author Nicholson Baker, dubbed the “Erin Brockovich of the library world” by the New York Times Book Review for his dedication to saving early American newspaper collections, started buying up archives from public libraries around the country and around the world, forming the American Newspaper Repository. Baker’s research was published as Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, which won the National Book Critics’ Circle award for non-fiction in 2002.

Now Baker and co-author Margaret Brentano have selected 85 of the finest examples of period reporting, bold and playful graphic design, long-lost comic strips, and society pieces from the heyday of the New York World for reproduction in this delightful, oversized volume. Baker’s introductory essay argues the significance and beauty of Pulitzer’s paper, and Brentano’s detailed captions and notes accompany the colorful reproductions throughout.