Ben Katchor Books

From one of the most poetic and gifted comic-strip artists working today--andauthor of "The Jew of New York"--comes the first collection about his belovedprotagonist, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer.

In Katchor's 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

Set in the whimsical nation of Outer Canthus, the narrative follows three unique individuals whose lives intertwine in unexpected ways. This imaginative tale showcases Ben Katchor's signature blend of humor and surrealism, inviting readers into a richly crafted world that reflects on the nature of existence and human connection. With this book, Katchor returns after a decade, offering a fresh perspective on his distinctive storytelling style.

"For The Dairy Restaurant, Ben Katchor retells the history of where we choose to eat--a history that starts with the first man allowed to enter a walled garden and encouraged by the garden's owner to enjoy it's fruits.In this brilliant, sui generis book, Ben Katchor illuminates the unique historical confluence of events and ideas that led to the proliferation of the dairy restaurant in New York City. In words and his inimitable drawings, he begins with Adam, entering Eden and eating the fruits therein. He examines ancient protocols for offerings to the gods and the kosher milk-meat taboo. He describes the first vegetarian practice, the development of inns offering food to travelers, the invention of the restaurant, the rise of various food fads, and the intersection between culinary practice and radical politics. Here, too, is an encyclopedic directory of dairy restaurants that once thrived in New York City and its environs, evoked by Katchor's illustrations of classified advertisements, matchbooks, menus, and phone directory listings. And he ends on an elegiac note as he recollects his own experience in one of these unique restaurants just before it disappeared--as have all the dairy restaurants in the New York metropolitan area"-- Provided by publisher

In 1825, a New York politician and amateur playwright possessed of a utopian vision, summoned all the lost tribes of Israel to an island near Buffalo in the hope of establishing a Jewish state. His failed plan is the starting point for this brilliantly imagined epic.A disgraced kosher slaughterer, an importer of religious articles and women's hosiery, a pilgrim peddling soil from the Holy Land, a latter-day Kabbalist, a man with plans to carbonate Lake Erie—these are just some of the characters who move through Katchor's universe, their lives interwoven in a common struggle to settle into the New World even as it erupts into a financial frenzy that could as easily leave them bankrupt as carry them into the future.

Exploring the interplay between property and cultural values, Ben Katchor transforms ordinary commodities into surreal representations of social significance. Through his unique lens, he reveals how our possessions shape and mirror societal beliefs, offering a thought-provoking commentary on the relationship between materialism and culture.