All in Line

It's not difficult to find drawings from World War II, but among the pithiest are those that Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) made for the New Yorker and other publications in 1943 and 1944. In 1945, he collected those works, along with earlier humorous pieces, in All in Line, a book that New York Review Books has reissued with an introduction by New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck and an afterword on the book's development by Australian scholar Iain Topliss. Steinberg, Finck writes, "disowned his native Romanian," attended architecture school in Milan, Italy, and adopted English when he came to the United States in his 20s. When Steinberg was drafted, writes Topliss, New Yorker editor-in-chief Harold Ross used his influence to get Steinberg "assigned to the propaganda arm of the Office of Strategic Services." During his 15-month stint, Steinberg made many of the drawings that appear here.

The first third of this handsome volume contains deceptively simple charmers unrelated to wartime, such as a little girl in her playroom with her trussed father lying on a toy railroad track as a tiny train approaches. The remainder is devoted to cartoons Steinberg made while stationed in China, India, Algeria, and Italy. Most of those drawings involve soldiers interacting with locals, as when servicemen eat Chinese food at a restaurant also patronized by a Chinese contingent or crouch to inspect goods for sale at an Indian curio shop. This reissue is a fitting tribute to the reportage of one of the more significant cartoonists of the 20th century. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer

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