Rea Irvin, the magazine’s first art editor, is best known for creating Eustace Tilley, the monocled dandy whose upturned nose has graced our pages for a hundred years. Irvin established the stylish and refined look of The New Yorker, brought in countless new artists, and also penned many early covers that display his graphic mastery.

Next month, a new book edited by the New Yorker artist R. Kikuo Johnson and the cartoonist Dash Shaw reintroduces one of Irvin’s lesser-known pursuits: “The Smythes,” a Sunday comic page that ran in the New York Herald Tribune and a few other newspapers beginning in 1930. Irvin’s characters followed the form of “Bringing Up Father,” an immensely popular series about an overbearing wife and a put-upon husband written by the master cartoonist George McManus, whose style was itself a tour de force of elegant and well-designed storytelling. In McManus’s strip, much of the humor derives from the juxtaposition between the wife’s class striving and her husband’s contentment with corned beef and cabbage. In Irvin’s world, John and Margie Smythe are both driven by their aspirations to appear sophisticated (perhaps not unlike Eustace Tilley).

The strips, gorgeously composed, with characters dancing elegantly on the page, chronicle Margie’s misguided but ardent worship of her husband. They often deliver gentle punch lines displaying the cartoonist’s affection for the couple’s follies and foibles. Somewhat unsurprisingly, mocking the hapless rich during the Great Depression did not draw a large audience. After five years, Irvin redirected his attention to characters lower on the social ladder—but to no avail. Eventually, in 1936, he retired the strip. It has remained in obscurity until now. In the excerpt below, selected pages offer a playfully wry and tender portrait of married life among the social set.

Saul Steinberg, the Romanian American artist and longtime New Yorker contributor, is as celebrated for his elegant line as he is for his razor-sharp wit. His 1945 début American collection, “All in Line,” recently reissued by New York Review of Books, puts both characteristics on striking display. “I’m unfit to do anything not funny,” Steinberg confessed to Life magazine in 1951. But for him being funny was always a very serious business.

When I joined The New Yorker, in 1993, learning I’d be Steinberg’s editor felt like being told I’d be Einstein’s math tutor. He didn’t come to our office, so every month or two I would travel to his Upper East Side sanctuary to choose ideas for publication on the cover or in portfolios, helping him unearth the original concepts from among the thousands of drawings he had accumulated.

These visits followed a ritual as precise as Steinberg’s line work. The doorman would announce me, and, when the elevator doors parted, there stood Saul—freshly shaved, often wrapped in pastel cashmere. He’d whisk away my portfolio and guide me to his kitchen for an espresso. Then we’d settle in his living room where he’d educate me, a fellow-immigrant, on the peculiarities of America—the subtle poetry of baseball (“an allegorical play about America”), the architectural flourishes of the neighborhood post office, or the singular beauty of O. J. Simpson’s infamous glove as a plot device. Only when the afternoon light began to wane would we finally approach his flat files, where I’d sift through for something that felt fresh to him. Saul, by then in his early eighties, didn’t want to repeat himself.

Iain Topliss, the cultural historian who provides an afterword for the reissue, explains that curating his own work was always a serious and somewhat tortured endeavor for Steinberg, even in his early days in America. Steinberg, born in 1914, fled Romanian antisemitism for Italy, where, from 1933 to 1940, he trained as an architect while moonlighting, to some success, as a cartoonist. He graduated as a Dottore in Architettura in 1940. When he saw that his diploma was stamped with “di razza Ebraica” (“of the Jewish race”), he began to plan his escape from Europe. He managed to get on a ship leaving Portugal with a “slightly fake” Romanian passport (an early use of rubber stamps), but once he got to the harbor in New York City he was taken to Ellis Island and deported. He spent nearly a year in Santo Domingo awaiting a proper visa to the U.S. From there, he shipped regular packages of drawings to César Civita, a fellow-refugee from Milan who’d already planted his flag in New York’s illustration world. Civita became Steinberg’s artistic matchmaker, connecting his work with PM, Liberty, American Mercury, and, of course, The New Yorker.

Steinberg first published work in The New Yorker in 1941, while he was still in Santo Domingo.

Eventually, in June, 1942, The New Yorker’s founding editor, Harold Ross, extended Steinberg the golden ticket to America, where he met Hedda Sterne, a fellow-artist and Romanian refugee—they married in 1944. After a year, with more help from Ross, he joined the U.S. Navy, and later was assigned to the U.S. Army’s propaganda division. They handed him citizenship papers and shipped him to China, Italy, and North Africa.

“All in Line” began as a collection of humor drawings gathered by Civita, who wanted to sell a book while Steinberg was overseas. But Steinberg was particular: he dismissed a drawing from the October 30, 1943, issue of The New Yorker as “an old drawing” made during his “transition from my European style to The New Yorker’s,” deeming it “a very stupid drawing” that did him “no favor.”

But when everyone—Hedda included—insisted that this fan favorite deserved inclusion, Steinberg relented with a classic artist’s compromise: he’d include it only after redrawing it in his “American” style.

The gag remains the same, but the execution makes all the difference—telling the same joke again, but with perfect timing. Steinberg adds another reading chart on the wall (removing any ambiguity about the setup) but his masterstroke is compositional: by increasing the distance between the patient and the giant letter, he has room to place the optometrist center stage. The doctor’s eyes are now turned to the subject, focussing our attention on the patient himself and his (now visible) expression—that quintessential Steinberg look of slight puzzlement.

It is these crystalline absurdities, constructed with watchmaker precision, hallmarks of Steinberg’s wit, that the first part of the collection showcases. In these early drawings, we see many Steinbergian themes emerge, including the connection between the hand and the line it draws. “I have always used pen and ink: it is a form of writing,” he’s quoted saying in a 1978 piece in Time magazine. “But unlike writing, drawing makes up its own syntax as it goes along. The line can’t be reasoned in the mind. It can only be reasoned on paper.”

Meanwhile, in 1943, while Civita’s version of the book was taking shape, Steinberg, posted overseas, discovered new and unexpected artistic territory. In Kunming, China, surrounded by “thousands of people looking behind the shoulder,” he created observational sketches of military and civilian life.

One of these drawings became Steinberg’s first cover for the magazine, but most appeared in portfolios inside, providing a nuanced and vivid alternative to the war coverage of photo-heavy weeklies like Life.

These drawings—direct yet distinctively Steinbergian in style—solved a crucial problem for The New Yorker’s Harold Ross, who had refused to publish photographs but needed authentic visual war reporting. Ross celebrated them as “the strongest pieces of art we have run in a long time,” noting that they even impressed officials in the Air Force.

Their success led Steinberg to consider dropping the book of humorous images to publish a separate book of war drawings. But, after returning to the U.S., in October, 1944, he dismissed Civita’s vacillating plans and took firm command of his book’s final form. He kept the two beats, adding “war” sections for the second half, and refined the working title, “Everybody in Line,” to a more concise “All in Line,” with its whiff of military order.

In this reissue, we witness the full arc of Steinberg’s early mastery—from his precise architectural eye to his philosophical wit, from European émigré to American observer. The collection reveals how his seemingly simple line evolved into a profound artistic language capable of expressing both the gravity and the absurdity of peacetime and war. What endures most powerfully is Steinberg’s uncompromising artistic integrity. Steinberg’s work remains timeless—because he understood that a drawing, rendered with absolute precision, could capture truths about human experience that no other medium could reach. “All in Line” isn’t just a collection of cartoons; it’s the blueprint of a singular artistic mind learning to navigate between many worlds. ♦

These images are drawn from “All in Line.”

In 1952, a book appeared that redefined children’s literature. “A lap is so you don’t get crumbs on the floor,” it proclaimed. “A mustache is to wear on Halloween. A hat is to wear on a train.” The book didn’t even try to tell a story. Instead, it spoke in associative logic and whimsical spot illustrations, leapfrogging from definition to definition, explaining how the world works. Its author, Ruth Krauss, had gathered many of the definitions from actual children—including the book’s title, “A Hole Is to Dig”—and worked with a little-known twenty-three-year-old artist named Maurice Sendak to draw the squirmy, cheeky kids on each page. As Krauss told her editor, the Harper & Row legend Ursula Nordstrom, “I’m afraid I’ll have a good book in spite of myself.”

In the past two months, New York Review Books reissued “The Backward Day” (1950) and“Everything Under a Mushroom” (1973), two works that frame Krauss’s career. “The Backward Day,” with spare line drawings by Marc Simont, tells the story of a boy who wakes up one morning, declares that “Today is backward day,” and goes about his morning in reverse. “Everything Under a Mushroom” is even more formally strange: each of the book’s two-page spreads features a simple, hypnotic poem and, underneath it, a richly panoramic scene by Margot Tomes. Taken together, the books showcase how Krauss pioneered a method that now seems intuitive: portraying the world from the perspective of a child’s imagination.

Krauss was born in Baltimore in 1901. Her paternal grandfather, Leopold, had emigrated from Hungary in the eighteen-sixties and started a successful furrier business, which her father, Julius, joined. Julius, who harbored artistic dreams, made sure that young Ruth was encouraged creatively. She was a sickly child—“I nearly died a lot,” she later recalled—but was nevertheless filled with energy, merrily lifting her dress in front of the neighbors or walking on her hands in the back yard. In 1904, the Great Baltimore Fire ravaged the city, destroying more than fifteen hundred buildings. Though the family’s home and business were spared, Krauss developed a lifelong pyrophobia that compelled her to store her manuscripts in the freezer.

In her teens, Krauss dropped out of high school and enrolled in a costume-design program at the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts. Summers at Camp Walden, in Maine, solidified her love of both mischief and writing. (The camp’s “Backward Party” of 1920, in which campers wore their uniforms the wrong way around, stuck with her for decades.) She had a flirtation with the violin, briefly spending time in a conservatory, but she didn’t get a college degree until 1929, when she graduated from the Parsons School, in New York City. The Great Depression came into full force, and Krauss struggled to find work as an illustrator. In 1939, she joined a friend on an anthropology trip to Montana to live with the Blackfeet Nation, sparking an interest in language and how children absorb culture. Deciding that she would write books for young people, she soon marched into Ursula Nordstrom’s office and slapped a manuscript down on her desk. Nordstrom became Krauss’s primary editor for the next several years.

It’s impossible to discuss Krauss without mentioning her partner, the equally renowned children’s-book author Crockett Johnson. They met at a party in 1939, possibly in Greenwich Village; Johnson was tall and reserved, Krauss small and ebullient. (“We met and that was it!” she later declared.) As Philip Nel observes in “Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss,” his richly detailed 2012 biography, the couple completely reshaped the arc of children’s literature. Johnson, a cartoonist and a political activist who created classic works such as “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” championed the power of children’s imagination over the lure of bourgeois rationalism. Though husband and wife mostly published independently, in 1945 they collaborated to produce “The Carrot Seed,” which portrays one boy’s unwillingness to conform to the logic of others. In the book, the protagonist’s parents are afraid that a carrot seed won’t grow. His older brother declares, “It won’t come up.” But the boy, clad in coveralls and a cap, remains steadfast, watering and weeding with determination. Is his care an act of defiance? Optimism? His perspective carries an almost existential force: if you plant a carrot seed, he believes, a carrot must come up. And so it does.

“The Backward Day,” from a few years later, shows Krauss further immersing the reader in a child’s world view. In a riff on Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” in which a man wakes up as a giant insect, without understanding the principles under which this transformation has occurred, a little boy wakes one morning and declares that the day is “backward.” He pulls his underwear over his clothes and parades backward down the stairs. At the breakfast table, he doesn’t just sit backward but does so in his father’s chair; in backward logic, the boy is his own parent.

But the most striking part of the book comes when the rest of the family enters. “Goodnight, Pa,” the boy says. Without missing a beat, the father says, “Goodnight.” The exchange continues: the boy says, “Goodnight, Ma,” to his mother and “Goodnight, Baby,” to his sister. Each replies, “Goodnight.” The father sits backward in the boy’s chair, and the mother and sister swap seats. The whole family accepts the rule. There’s no argument, no questioning. Backward day is backward day.

This practical magic is revived in “A Hole Is to Dig,” which appeared two years later. The psychologist Arnold Gesell observed that children are, essentially, pragmatists, and Krauss’s great achievement was to take this logic to its extreme, conjuring a concrete vision of the world using the child’s imagination: “Toes are to dance on; eyebrows are to go over your eyes.” She collected the phrases from kindergartners in Rowayton, Connecticut, where she lived, and from four- and five-year-olds at the Bank Street School, in New York City. The resulting book discarded both narrative and the single-perspective technique that had energized “The Backward Day.” In a mode that melded Wittgenstein and Merriam-Webster, Krauss was evoking consciousness itself, as found in the way a specific group of people deployed language.

“A Hole Is to Dig” received glowing reviews. Krauss continued to work, producing at least one book every year of the fifties, even as she and Crockett found themselves under F.B.I. surveillance. (According to Nel, the surveillance began in 1950 and lasted for five years; the F.B.I. cared more about Crockett’s leftist activism than about the couple’s books for young people.) Krauss began experimenting with other forms, including poetry for adults, but she was also frequently ill, suffering from the kinds of infections she was prone to as a child.

In 1973, she hadn’t written a children’s book in three years. “Everything Under a Mushroom” pulled her out of the funk. Like “A Hole Is to Dig,” the book does away with narrative and the notion of a central protagonist. Instead, we get an illustrated poem, which proceeds via associative chaining at the top of each spread. The poem is a series of phrases—four on each page—that begin with “little,” such as “little street little sign little moon little shine.” Krauss builds a simplified version of a pantoum: rather than the second and fourth lines of each quatrain becoming the first and third of the following, the third phrase in the sequence becomes the first phrase in the subsequent set.

The real excitement of “Everything Under a Mushroom” flows from Margot Tomes’s illustrations: delicate, subtly shaded tableaux of kids playing under a giant mushroom cap, their actions echoing the poem but taking on a life of their own. Under “little street little sign little moon little shine,” for example, a child bearing a moon-shaped sign on a stick announces, “Here comes a spare moon.” Later in the book, a bear peeps out of a hole. “Holer-bear is a word in case you are a bear and live in a hole,” one child instructs another, converting what might have been a malapropism (“holer bear” for “polar bear”) into a sensible equation. Some of the pages even suggest Krauss’s politics: “Little spaghetti little sauce little worker little boss / little worker little wages little book little pages,” a section of the poem reads, revealing a deeper exploration of workers’ rights than the book’s lullaby rhythms might let on.

The pantoum could keep ballooning ad infinitum, but Krauss concludes by handing it over to the children. The final two quatrains are in much smaller type than the rest: “Little bee little honey little cook little macaroni / little tail little puppy little coffee little cuppy.” The words appear under the mushroom cap, instead of governing the world from above. The children have captured the rhyme scheme, but they haven’t caught on to the logic—“little cook” should begin the second set, not “little tail.” It’s a gentle, fitting imperfection; Krauss’s books were never didactic, and her interest was less in moralistic instruction than in the texture of imagination. She explored the world from the bottom up, tending to seeds that are still bearing fruit. ♦

Emil Ferris’s début graphic novel, “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters,” published when she was fifty-five, was a breakout hit, garnering praise from critics and peers for its intricately cross-hatched drawings, its gripping plot, and its marriage of gothic-pulp aesthetics and sharp social commentary. The story is presented as the diary of Karen Reyes, a ten-year-old girl growing up in the politically volatile Chicago of the nineteen-sixties. On four hundred and sixteen pages of lined paper, Karen investigates the murder of her neighbor Anka, a beautiful and mysterious Holocaust survivor. With masterly ballpoint drawings, Ferris weaves together history, comic books, and horror to echo Karen’s sense of herself as a monster. When the book hit the shelves in 2017, shortly after Donald Trump’s Inauguration, many readers embraced its graphic representations of the ways we perceive monstrosity and became fans overnight. “In a time when spiritual ugliness is being promoted as a social norm, the artist is more responsible than ever to tease out complex and difficult truths,” Ferris told us.

“My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two,” will be released by Fantagraphics in late spring, seven years after the sequel was first announced. (After a drawn-out dispute between the author and publisher, an agreement was reached last year.) The more-than-four-hundred-page-long second volume is well worth the wait. Karen continues to dig deeper into the tragic death of Anka, worries about her charismatic yet flawed big brother Deeze, and puzzles over her own identity with a new friend, Shelley. In the excerpt below, Karen tells Deeze about an incident that she witnessed on the city bus, probing her own evolving sensibilities about the inhuman and the obscene.

—Françoise Mouly & Genevieve Bormes

In an essay that accompanied the 2021 exhibit “Speechless: The Art of Wordless Picture Books,” at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, the children’s-book author David Wiesner laid down milestones for the genre to which “Bunny & Tree” belongs. Wiesner started with “What Whiskers Did,” by Ruth Carroll, from 1932, a joyous work of black-crayon pointillism that was, according to Wiesner, “the first completely wordless picture book published in the United States”—and, oddly, the only one for some thirty years. Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” from 1963, was a second inflection point, owing to its “three consecutive wordless double-page spreads that encompass the Wild Rumpus and that exposed millions of readers to the idea of ‘wordlessness.’ ” A third, Wiesner wrote, was Peter Spier’s “Noah’s Ark,” from 1978, the first wordless picture book to win the Caldecott Medal, the highest American honor for a children’s-book illustrator.

“Bunny & Tree” is a wordless milestone, too, for its sheer length—it’s a grandly capacious, generous book about grand and capacious generosity. And as a title from Enchanted Lion Books, the independent children’s publisher, it’s part of a rich lineage. Enchanted Lion is a champion of the wordless format, dating back to its Stories Without Words series, from a decade ago, which includes Gaëtan Dorémus’s “Bear Despair” (2012), about a bear who will eat anyone who dares to steal his lovey, and “Fox’s Garden” (2014), by Camille Garoche (working under her enviable pen name, Princesse Camcam), about a boy who finds a surprise family in his back yard. Although based in Brooklyn, Enchanted Lion happens to have a deep bench of wordless books by French illustrators—none of which, of course, require much translation—such as Blexbolex’s tapestry-like “Vacation” (2017) and Olivier Tallec’s “Waterloo & Trafalgar” (2012), about a pair of stout, obstinate sentries who are able to resolve their differences with the intervention of a budgie. Whereas the soldiers in “Waterloo & Trafalgar” are named for two sites of French defeat, my daughter used to act out extended arguments between them in an English-ish accent she apparently picked up from repeat viewings of “A Hard Day’s Night.”

An illustration from “Vacation.”Art work by Blexbolex / Courtesy Enchanted Lion Books

The Stories Without Words series also includes two books featuring Arthur Geisert’s industrious, mechanically ingenious pigs, “Ice” (2011) and “The Giant Seed” (2012), which take the same pleasures in how things work as some of Richard Scarry’s most intricate illustrations—as if you stripped the text out of “What Do People Do All Day?” and put the pigs in charge. The casts of “Ice” and “The Giant Seed” represent an anthropomorphized evolution of the pigs in one of Geisert’s earlier books, “Oink” (1991), whose title contains an entire language in a single syllable—depending on the context, “oink” can mean “good morning” or “follow me” or “yum.” “Oink” also demonstrates that not all wordless books are literally so. Tomie dePaola’s “Pancakes for Breakfast” (1978), for another example, writes out its pancake recipe and clearly labels its bags of flour and jugs of syrup. Other authors make exceptions, as Geisert does, for animal onomatopoeia, as in Jerry Pinkney’s “The Lion & the Mouse” (2009), wherein an owl “Screeeeches,” the lion “GRRRs,” and the mice “Squeak Squeak Squeaks”; or Matthew Cordell’s “Wolf in the Snow” (2017), which is replete with “barks,” “whines,” and “HOOWWWLLs.”

By excluding what readers might otherwise assume to be a main ingredient, the wordless picture book heightens the flavors of what remains. Whenever I’ve read these books with my kids, I’ve noticed how they (and I) become more attuned to all the other decisions an artist is making about shapes and color palettes, panels and negative space. In Suzy Lee’s “Wave” (2008), about a little girl at a beach who is trying to reach détente with the tide, there’s a key moment (about two-thirds through) when the backdrop flips from white to blue; when my daughter read the book for the first time, the color swap delivered the same jolt as a climactic plot twist. In many of these books, wordlessness seems to grant a freedom of movement to the artist, as in the bold, slashing blacks and drip-painting explosions of ocean in “Wave,” or in the scrawly and snow-blind vistas of Cordell’s “Wolf in the Snow.” Shrugging off language seems to nudge some artists into Impressionist realms; their images vibrate with bodies and emotions on the go. This kinetic energy hums along in Chris Raschka’s “A Ball for Daisy” (2011), in which thick, squiggly lines of ink, watercolor, and gouache keep Daisy, an expressive little dog, in constant wagging motion, while her beloved red ball takes on the gravitas of Wilson in “Cast Away.”

Many of the best wordless picture books pursue an idea of the purest simplicity: the wave is big, the ball is lost, the wolf is scary (or lost). But Wiesner and another of the format’s greatest practitioners, Barbara Lehman, eschew text even while chasing conceptual feats that might seem to require verbal explication. In Lehman’s “The Red Book” (2004), perhaps the only Caldecott winner to share DNA with the music video for a-ha’s “Take On Me,” a girl in a city finds a book about a boy on a beach, and the boy on the beach finds a book about the girl in the city; they are reading each other, and the red book continues to write itself even after one of the kids parachutes out of one narrative framework and into the other. Wiesner’s “Flotsam” (2006), a spiritual cousin to “The Red Book,” achieves a similar infinite-mirror virtuosity through more elaborate means. A boy finds a camera, washed up on a beach, containing a roll of film that opens two portals: one that unlocks a secret undersea world (gigantic robot fish, island-size starfish), another that rewinds through time (with pictures of all the children who have found the camera, for the past century or more).

Wordless picture books are more mutable than their written-out peers; you can edit and polish the narrative over repeat readings, which are never the same twice. Even when they are not attempting anything like the imaginative gymnastics of “Flotsam,” these books demand more of adults as readers and as caregivers—more collaboration and improvisation, more engagement. Lighting up a kid’s circuit boards in these ways is objectively good, but, by evening story time, parents might just want to zone out with a familiar text; as Matthew Cordell has said, “It’s bedtime, and it’s late, and a grownup doesn’t want to be creative.” It’s embarrassing to admit that, when my daughter was little, I sometimes felt unequal to the task of her favorite wordless picture books, such as Peggy Rathmann’s “Good Night, Gorilla” (1994), in which the title character steals an oblivious zookeeper’s keys and unlocks the cages of all his animal neighbors. But, almost invariably, after a couple of pages, my tired and aged brain would lock into gear with the project; instead of pressing the Autopilot button, the book would activate something like a beginner-level flow state, as my daughter and I moseyed through the illustrations and constructed the story together.