What Fools These Mortals Be! ─ The Story of Puck

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 regularly a major political battleground and is credited with single-handedly thwarting the third-term ambitions of Ulysses Grant in 1880 and electing Grover Cleveland to the presidency in 1884. Puck did it with art - lavish, color, full-page and two-page centerspread cartoons. It was the first American magazine to publish color lithographs on a weekly basis and, for nearly forty years, was a training ground and showcase for some of the country's most talented cartoonists, led by its co-founder, Joseph Keppler. This retrospective contains nearly 300 full-color plates.

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.