Like Lardner, too, he is never completely disengaged from his characters’ lives. Feiffer started out, some years ago, as the Ring Lardner of the urban, sub-intellectual inner life. Feffier has become more frankly political in his concerns, but he has also involved himself more in history-in the relation of the world he depicts to its own past, and even in the genesis of his own, slightly bleary view of things, a kind of nostalgia for the present moment, even as it plods by. His latest collection, Hold Me!, differs from his previous volumes in its wider range and increased subtlety.

The splendid Gothic Victorianism of Edward Gorey is one of these, I think, and the collections of what are by no means really cartoon-strips by Jules Feiffer are surely another. And yet, it has been almost redeemed by the few cases in which a really unique imagination has found form there. There are often non-books on the best-seller lists, and lately they have been appearing for children as well. It may have originated in the bound volumes of cartoonists’ work and the “grown-up” comic strip collections (Barnaby, Pogo, Peanuts), but it does not contain cartoons. Picture prevails over text in the non-book, and yet the result is not a book of pictures.

The class of non-books includes the whole range of coloring books, photographs of infants, animals, or Famous Paintings being forced to say things by means of captions or balloons, the doctored news photographs, etc.

It now appears to have become a genre as well. The “non-book” has been a successful commodity for a long time.

Moon Missing by Edward Sorel