America's most influential journalist and premier political cartoonist: the life, times and legacy of thomas nast - john adler

Adler, John: - After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1949 - with an MBA but without any history courses under his belt - Johns principal business experience was as a management consultant and entrepreneur.

As an amateur historian, his consulting expertise paved the way for this book, and his actual road led through advertising.

More than fifty years ago, he started AdTel, Ltd.

, a marketing research business, which used novel dual-cable television to break new ground in measuring television advertising effectiveness and testing new products.

By 1972, John had conducted several hundred meaningful tests, and became interested in the history of American advertising.

One day, he answered a New York Times ad for the sale of some duplicate annual volumes of Harpers Weekly - Americas de facto newspaper of record from 1857 to 1912 - and soon found himself the owner of a complete set of fifty-six volumes.

Their sixteen lineal feet languished, mostly untouched on their custom-built shelves, for about twenty years.

As a retirement hobby, John decided to have all 2,912 issues manually indexed.

That included 173,000 ads, but it was the 10,000 cartoons and 65,000 illustrations by artists like Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington that really caught his attention.

Johns new company, HarpWeek LLC, manually indexed, scanned and retyped all 73,000 pages of Harpers Weekly over twelve years, with a staff of as many as fourteen historians working on it.

HarpWeek, his proprietary digital database, has been licensed to more than 500 academic institutions and public libraries worldwide.

For this, and another database called Lincoln and the Civil War, John was awarded the 2003 e-Lincoln Prize in history.

When he delved deeper, the artistry and political impact of Thomas Nasts cartoons and illustrations totally captured his interest.

Consequently, John had the indexers prepare a chronological listing of all Nasts work, including their size and location within each issue.

With help from the late Draper Hill, a political cartoonist and Nast historian, John was able to identify 445 of the 450 people whom Nast drew and have them indexed by name, topic and literary source, if any (e.

Shakespeare by play and character).

These unique and exclusive compilations, along with relevant text, provided a complete visual record of Nasts quarter-century at Harpers Weekly.

With them and the contextual HarpWeek database for a backbone, reporting and fleshing out Nasts life and work.