The Pick of Punch

This anthology selects comic prose sketches and cartoons from Punch, the London satirical weekly that from 1841 mocked politicians, social fashion, sport, and the theatre. The pieces are independent: short dialogues, burlesques of public life, and drawings whose captions turn on a single social embarrassment. The selection favors items still readable without a key to vanished news. There is no frame story and no continuous cast. The book is a sampler of magazine humor, not a history of the paper and not a single author's collected jokes.

Bound in gold plasticised cloth printed in black on all sides with cartoons. Gold endpapers. Gold or pale brown slipcase.