The golden age of newspaper and magazine graphic art is long gone. Colour photography has reduced it to marginal "spot illustration." Today, the immediacy and instant dissemination of digital photography has even put that shrunken art form on life support, just as the immediacy of blogs and social networking sites now threaten the survival of the dailies themselves.
As an artist, I believe that drawing is a primal human impulse, prior to and above market considerations. It's been a huge part of the human experience, from the caves of Lascaux to the corkboards of kindergartens. So I felt a bit nostalgic for a world I never knew when I flipped through a copy of The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer's Newspaper, 1898-1911. In the foreword to this colourful slab of a book, author Nicholson Baker tells how, starting back in the 1950s, North American libraries began a crusade to scan their caches of old newspapers into microfilm. There were two primary motivations: storage space and the pseudoscience prophesying the imminent doom of acid-treated newsprint. Libraries sold off or destroyed the originals. Baker claims the only public vestige of Pulitzer's publication are reproductions from a microfilm copy used as wallpaper in many Subway sandwich shops.
Library editions of the New York-published, nationally distributed Sunday World, "which weighed as much as small roast beef" in Baker's words, joined the nation-wide bonfire of newsprint. Luckily, the British Library had the foresight to buy up some of the last remaining bound volumes of the publication, thinking them of historical importance rather than ephemera. Baker tracked down the volumes, and set up a nonprofit organization to negotiate a price for their return to the U.S. Eventually the immense library of volumes found a home at Duke University, five tractor-trailer loads in all. The pages photographed for Baker's book conjure up a vanished world of Edison-era inventions and post-Victorian optimism. Pulitzer, the Hungarian-born inventor of the modern newspaper, understood that his readers wanted more than straight news on a Sunday morning. Thanks to him, Baker writes, they could also read about "romance, awe, a close scrape, a prophecy, advice on how to tip or gamble, new fashions from Paris, a song to sing, a scissors project for the children, theories about Martians or advanced weaponry, maybe a new job." Pulitzer's stable of artists decorated the pages with outstanding, full-colour illustrations, making the paper into something halfway between a delirium and department store. Not the sort of thing that translates well into microfilm.
The Sunday World featured huge, realistic pen-and-ink drawings and etchings, overlaid with multiple layers of transparent inks. Birds of paradise from the Bronx Zoo leap out from one page, and a few pages over, an article describes how members of the New York Technology Club planned to prove the safety of atomic radiation by drinking cocktails made with radium. The banner, "Liquid Sunshine as a Banquet Appetizer," is accompanied by a duotone illustration of tuxedoed men surrounding a banquet table, preparing for a toast. Through a clever use of black and green ink, their goblets seem to glow from the hundred-year-old, yellowed pages.
The comics of the Sunday World were given full broadsheet exposure, allowing free reign for the imagination of artists such as Krazy Kat creator Art Herriman. Over the second half of the 20th century, surviving dailies shrank the comic strips to dinky, black and white strips, with colour relegated to the ghetto of Sunday supplements.
Dailies have been dying off like dinosaurs south of the border, but I'm not so sure we're looking at an extinction-level event as a chrysalis-like transformation. I'm hoping that digital technology merges the best of both print-based newspapers and electronic readers. I'm not talking about the iPads or Kindles-those are just the first evolutionary forms-but rather a foldable sheet that's broadsheet or tabloid-sized. This newspaper doppelganger has the texture and reflectivity of paper, and can wirelessly display news and entertainment onto one changeable page. That would be a win for publishers, readers, and "content providers" alike.
Perhaps with such "noosphere papers" we'll even see a renaissance of newspaper illustration and editorial cartoons. Not that I have a stake in any of this, of course.
www.geoffolson.com
