An illustration by Nancy Stahl published in the New York Times
If you don't mind poor organization in a book Jerelle Kraus' All the Art That's Fit to Print (and some that wasn't) Inside the New York Times Op-Ed Page (released this Fall) isn't bad. I'm not offering a ringing endorsement — the fact that none of the chapters about specific illustrators name the artist in the header is too confusing not make an issue of it — but there's a fair number of good illustrations compiled in the book, and the stories are at least implicitly interesting even if they aren't told particularly well.
Probably the most relevant image to the interwebs and therefore of mild interest to the blog appears fairly early on: Nancy Stahl's light bulb with a copyright symbol on the front. The piece illustrated a text arguing against many Internet intellectual property claims, but was nearly rejected because an editor thought the image too closely resembled a breast. It's an amusing anecdote particularly now that the illustration is iconic, though Cathy Hull's rejected image illustrating a piece on historical meteorology holds far more interest, (yet receives an unfortunately small illustration space). Referencing the writer's observation that the mildest winter in 16 years preceded the fierce blizzard of 1886, Hull created an anthroporphized thermometer remarkably resembling an ejaculation. In this particular case the editors really did have a good point. We’re republishing it below as a noted highlight from All The Art That’s Fit to Print.
Image by Cathy Hull.
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