List Price: 59.99*

* Individual store prices may vary.

A lavish coffee table book devoted to the most important political satire and cartoon magazine in American history. Published from 1877 to 1918, Puck was an American original—the country’s first and most successful humor magazine, the first magazine to publish color lithographs on a weekly basis, and for nearly forty years, a training ground and showcase for some of the country’s most talented cartoonists, led by its co-founder, Joseph Keppler.

The weekly journal’s deft caricatures and pointed commentary made it a political force to be reckoned with. It is credited with single-handedly thwarting the third-term ambitions of Ulysses S. Grant in 1880 and electing Grover Cleveland to the presidency in 1884—or at least, by its devastating “Tattooed Man” series, denying it to James G. Blaine.

And Puck did it with art—lavish color full-page and two-page centerspread cartoons. With nearly 300 color plates in an oversized 12″ x 11″ format, What Fools These Mortals Be is the first opportunity for many readers to see so many cartoons from Puck reproduced in color and at a large size.

Written and selected by Michael Alexander Kahn and Richard Samuel West with reproductions made from their unique collections and supplemented by the Library of Congress, this book is organized by subject matter, reflecting the most important issues of the day. Each cartoon is accompanied by an explanatory caption, placing the work in historical perspective. Many of the issues that dominated Puck’s pages more than one hundred years ago continue to dominate the political debate today.

During its illustrious career Puck published more than two thousand numbered issues. When, after four decades, it ceased publication, The Literary Digest printed an appropriate epitaph: “Puck had no real rival in its best days. Fallen from its fine estate, it has left no successor.”

"Richly illustrated, edifying and expertly curated...[a] mesmerizing compendium of full-color political caricature." -The Wall Street Journal

"Many of Puck's issues remain bang up to date, if sometimes mutated." -The Daily Beast

"What Fools These Mortals Be!," is a glorious compilation of some of the magazine's best cartoons of a distinctly (wait for it) puckish nature. IDW Publishing, along with Dean Mullaney's Library of American Comics, have produced yet another brilliant volume that deserves to be lovingly displayed on bookshelves and coffee tables." -The Washington Times

“One of the outstanding books of the year” -Print Magazine

“It is hard to overestimate the political influence of Puck…during the last two decades of the 19th Century. It was greater than all newspapers combined.” —Stephen Hess, The Ungentlemanly Art

“[Puck] created a genre and established a tradition.” — David Sloane, American Humor Magazine and Comic Periodicals

Michael Alexander Kahn is the co-author of May it Amuse the Court: a political cartoon history of the Supreme Court and the Constitution and more than a dozen scholarly articles on the Presidency and the Supreme Court. He has assembled one of the country’s leading collections of political cartoons, which has been featured in numerous magazine articles and in an exhibit at the Grolier Club in New York in 2007. He is a frequent lecturer on the significance of political cartoon art and has developed educational materials based on the art for teaching on the university and high school levels and in museum programs.

Richard Samuel West is the author of several books on American political cartooning, the most recent being Iconoclast in Ink: The Political Cartoons of J. N. "Ding" Darling (2012), and the editor of four collections of political cartoons. He was the founder and editor of ,em>Target: The Political Cartoon Quarterly (1981-1987), and the political cartoon editor of Inks, the Magazine of Cartooning, published by Ohio State University (1994-1997). He is the owner of Periodyssey, located in Easthampton, Massachusetts, which buys and sells significant and unusual American periodicals.