Book Review: Private Eye a Cartoon History

For those of you who are not familiar with Private Eye look it up on Wikipedia and you'll find it's one of the leading news and humor magazines in the UK.

Excellent book and cut above the usual cartoon anthology. For a start this is printed on a decent bit of paper because color is used throughout the pages: for photos, cartoons and panels with several biogs of artists and a sampling of their work. Each decade gets a chapter with relevant jokes and also those regular strips that appeared over the years like Grocer Heath and his pals, Hom Sap, Yobs, Great bores of today, Celeb et cetera.

Book editor Nick Newman must have had a hard job selecting these few hundred from the 30,000 published in the Eye over the years but page after page shows he made a wise choice every time. Especially in the art from earlier years relating to a contemporary event back then which is still funny now.

The Index is a long listing of great British cartoonists with very generous helpings from Dave Austin, Michael Heath, Martin Honeyset, Tony Husband, Ed McLachlan (just brilliant) Nick Newman and Robert Thompson. The others get between one and twenty-five or so cartoons though my favourite Ray Lowry only has sixteen!

This is a nostalgic treat for PE readers, non-readers will enjoy it too.

Private Eye a Cartoon History is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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