Nicholson Baker's The World on Sunday - the colorful world of the turn of the century newspaper

Above: "The Bathing Girl of 1900" / Hy Mayer, "The Plunk Family at the Paris Exposition" New York World, Sunday June 3, 1900

The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer's Newspaper (1898-1911) by Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano, which is a goregous collection of charming, vibrant, and strange artwork from the oversized Sunday pages of the New York World ca. 1900. Author Nicholson Baker, known for novels like Vox and The Fermata, has been on a quest to save the rapidly decaying and disappearing remains of the original printed editions of newspapers, many of which featured fantastically illustrated, lavishly colored Sunday articles on such charming and arcane topics as "W.K. Vanderbilt Jr.'s 'Red Demon,' His New Automobile Weighing 1 Ton with 42 Horse Power, Running 70 Miles an Hour,"and Fun in the Year 2000,".

Many prominent libraries have either scandalously dumped their all their vintage newspaper archives into the trash, and kept no record of their contents, or disposed of them but kept a sadly inadequate memento of their existence. Besides being a visual treasure, hopefully "The World on Sunday" will help encourage overly zealous librarians to preserve this part of our shared cultural inheritance.