Cheap novelties: the pleasures of urban decay, hardcover/ben katchor

Twenty-five years on, Cheap Novelties ] observations of what is lost as cityscapes evolve and shift due to gentrification and changing demographics are still fresh and relevant.

--The Guardian Cheap Novelties is an early testament to Ben Katchors extraordinary prescience as both a gifted cartoonist and an astute urban chronicler.

Rumpled, middle-aged Julius Knipl photographs a vanishing city--an urban landscape of low-rent apartment buildings, obsolete industries, monuments to forgotten people and events, and countless sources of inexpensive food.

In Katchors signature pen and ink wash style, Cheap Novelties is a portrait of what we have lost to gentrification, globalization, and the malling of America that is as moving today as it was twenty-five years ago.

In 1991, the original Cheap Novelties appeared in an unassuming paperback from the RAW contributor; it would become one of the first books of the contemporary graphic novel golden age, and it set the stage for Katchor to become regarded as a modern-day cartooning genius.

Drawn & Quarterlys twenty-fifth anniversary edition is a deluxe hardcover.