THE
WORLD ON SUNDAY
Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper
(1898-1911)
By
Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano
Bulfinch Press. 134 pp. $50.
We think that we advance. Instead, we merely abandon the beauty
of the past. Nothing could make this more clear than Nicholson
Baker and Margaret Brentano’s magnificent, coffee-table
collection, The World on Sunday.
The “World” was Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World,
which once a week became “THE GREAT SUNDAY WORLD,”
a supplement-stuffed extravaganza that, as Baker puts it, “weighed
as much as a small roast beef,” and brought the worthy,
bourgeois custom of lounging over the Sunday papers into its own.
Baker and Brentano have included pages from nearly every section
of the paper, including the classifieds and the department-store
ads, but most of their selections focus—and rightly so—on
the magazine and humor sections. From them pour forth one sumptuous,
antic, multi-colored spread after another; not only a slew of
very eccentric, very funny editorial cartoons and comic strips,
but also breathless features that celebrate nearly every marvels
of the age—from robber barons to Arctic explorers, bathing
beauties to new immigrants; and bridges, and world’s fairs,
and subways, and skyscrapers, and airships, and the most amazing
new phenomenon of them all, Teddy Roosevelt.
Above all, these pages show how great a newspaper can be when
it doesn’t take itself too seriously. The World
was the “paper of record” for its time, at least in
this country; its Sunday edition read by over half-a-million Americans.
Yet its editors never let their ambition overwhelm their sense
of awe, or giddy wonder at the dizzying new world around them.
There were slides into the sensationalist—a spread on “spirit
pictures”; one that states “Scientists Now Know Positively
That There Are Thirsty People on Mars”; a lurid, war-mongering
cartoon on Spanish atrocities in Cuba. Yet in this era of yellow
journalism, a surprising amount of space was dedicated to very
intelligent efforts to help the World’s readers
grasp the fantastic, constantly changing city and country they
lived in. Here are articles on “The Busiest Hour on Earth”—a
Manhattan rush hour—or the “12 New Americans Every
Minute” then pouring in through Ellis Island, or how electricity
was making Broadway “The Street That Knows No Night,”
that immediately absorb even the modern reader.
All
of this raises the question of why the papers, and all other news
media, are so drab by comparison today. One might argue that the
period Brentano and Baker have chosen for their selection—from
the installation of the World’s “marvellous”
color printing press in 1898, to the death of the paper’s
publisher and animating genius, Joseph Pulitzer, in 1911—marked
a last, pre-World War I age of innocence and incredulity. But
this only begs the question. Surely marvels still abound today;
why are we so bad at celebrating them?
The
key, like all the heady energy of the World, is to be
found in its graphics. The battalion of brilliant artists and
designers that Pulitzer assembled epitomized all that has been
lost in American popular culture, the idiosyncratic, the nuanced;
the personal, subjective vision. Consider just one illustration
here (and far from the best one), Dan W. Smith’s 1908 magazine
cover on an upcoming “auto carnival” in New York,
celebrating “the Tenth Birthday of the Automobile.”
Smith has placed his automobiles in a luminous night scene at
Columbus Circle, with his cars festooned with glowing, Japanese
lanterns, and besieged by a crowd of eager swells. It is a picture
almost comparable to a Toulouse-Latrec poster as a cultural artifact,
creating a palpable desire to be there. Contrast it with
what would be served up in its place, under the mindless, sterile
design ideology of today: One more shapeless modern car, set against
some vast, desolate landscape, perhaps with a skinny model in
a long gown standing next to it. Gee.
All
that one could have asked from Baker and Brentano is for a more
extensive version of Brentano’s always intelligent and insightful
captions. But as Baker makes clear in his introduction, a large
part of their goal in publishing The World On Sunday
was to further their ongoing crusade to save original periodicals
and newspapers from librarian, space-saving fanatics, bent on
mutilation and monochromatic microforming. To this end, they have
mostly let the World speak for itself, and it has made
their argument brilliantly for them.
Kevin
Baker is the author of the forthcoming novel, Strivers Row, to
be published by HarperCollins in March, 2006.
