My favorite image-based site on the web alongside If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats is this terrific blog, which compiles amazing images across time and cultures. To give you an example of what the site offers, there have been recent posts on Year of the Monkey postcards, vintage souvenir magician programs, Tibetan anatomical paintings, and so much more, all in luscious hi-res. But like If Charlie Parker…, Ephemera Assemblyman is really a triumph of curation, an education in photos and drawings.
I’ve posted on one of Robert Lambry’s charming drawing books here once before, and here’s a Flickr set of another — Les Animaux tels qu’ils sont (Animals as They Are), a how-to book that offers children step-by-step instruction for the notoriously difficult process of drawing animals. Lambry’s work originally appeared in the French Catholic paper l’Echo du Noel in the 1920s and 30s, but the craft and care of his meticulous artwork still shines 80 years later.
Erik Hilgerdt is, for my money, one of the most distinctive New Yorker cartoonists to have emerged in the last several years. His bone-dry, head-scratching, almost Dadaist sense of humor feels galaxies away from some of the magazine’s more gag-heavy artists.
