The Story of Puck: What Fools These Mortals Be! by Michael Alexander Kahn and Richard Samuel West (review)

The cartoons in The Story of PUCK: What Fools These Mortals Be!, a large compilation of work from the satirical magazine Puck, illustrate an important niche in the history of American cartooning. Puck’s years of publication (1877–1918) bridge the years between copper-engraved broadsides and newspaper woodcuts to more familiar twentieth- and twenty-first-century modern advertising copy and political cartoons. Lithography appeared in broadside cartoons and early magazines from the 1820s through the American Civil War; however, by coloring lithographic cartoons on its covers from its start, Puck broadened use of the technology. So Michael Alexander Kahn and Richard Samuel West’s 11- by 12-inch volume, handsomely produced with coated, heavy weight paper, should appeal to historians of graphic art and cartooning as well as political and social historians. After all, as Robert Secor notes, Puck gave “shape and vitality to comic journalism in America.”¹

The book’s value comes not from new scholarship but from making available what a bibliographical note in Kahn and West’s text refers to as “a generous sampling” of almost 300 illustrations, many in full color, from among the magazine’s forty-year run (324). As the first chapter suggests, books such as David E. E. Sloane’s edited volume American Humor Magazines (1987) and Stephen Hess and Milton Kaplan’s The Ungentlemanly Art (1975), situate Puck more thoroughly within the history of American cartooning (11). Furthermore, the Amon Carter Museum’s The Image of America in Caricature & Cartoon (1975) and David Dewey’s The Art of Ill Will (2007) amply illustrate the role of political cartooning in American history. Yet Kahn and West’s book shows how Puck’s cartoons presented its political stances in addition to social and cultural commentary. Some of this commentary was quite pungent. Thus, even people with hazy recollections of nineteenth-century political brouhahas are likely to remember caricatures of James G. Blaine’s pudgy torso tattooed with past scandals and repeated sketches of Benjamin Harrison dwarfed by his presidential grandfather William Henry Harrison’s outsized hat. An introductory first chapter on the history of Puck outlines the magazine’s history and brags for four pages about its success and factors contributing to that success, but the chapter then uses fifteen more pages to reprint full-page cartoons from the magazine. Following the same pattern, a shorter second introductory chapter, this one on the Puck building, tracks the physical growth of the business and also the physical plant as an enduring reflection of the business. Throughout Kahn and West’s book, the emphasis is on the visual. In addition to the introductory chapters, the text includes an adequate index and a short dictionary of artists whose work Puck featured.

As well as having solid business sense and sharp eyes to catch human foibles, the magazine’s founders cared about their graphics. Joseph Keppler, one of the magazine’s three founders, was himself a gifted cartoonist; in addition, the magazine hired talented cartoonists and acknowledged them, having them sign illustrations, especially those on Puck’s cover. Starting in the 1820s, an abundance of political cartoon magazines had sprung up in Europe and the United States; however, none of the American magazines thrived until Puck found the right formula. As the text’s cartoons demonstrate, that formula included strong opinions, scathing humor, and the best of then-current technology and popular graphic art. Although Puck began as a primarily political magazine, it also reacted to social and cultural trends. It supported Democratic candidates, but could also be as socially progressive as any American popular mass media outlet during the latter part of the nineteenth century. All of this is apparent in the pages of this text. Nonetheless, the volume’s illustrations, primarily full page and full color, demonstrate the magazine’s political biases, as well as its distrust of being too pro-labor, its harsh view...