Those of you hoping for Goldberg's drawings of intricate contraptions designed to perform simple tasks will be disappointed -- Goldberg did not start drawing those until two years later in his comic strip The Inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorganzola Butts.
Those of you hoping for witty, pithy, knee-slapping cartoons will also be disappointed. The cartoons are there, along with a few poems and some humorous articles, but they sadly did not weather the march of time into the 21st century. For the modern reader. these are weak tea, pure and simple; although I'm sure that they set a lot knees a-slapping in 1912. Time change. Tastes change. The reading public has changed over the past 113 years...
So why post a copy of this book now? The cartoons are full of universals -- sometimes cute, sometimes whimsical -- that point out that human nature has not really changed, although our sense of humor has. Here are examples from some of Goldberg's earliest newspaper strips: Foolish Questions, Telephonies, and What Are You Kicking About?, among others...simple observations about everyday situations. All of these cartoons were extremely popular in their day and helped built Goldberg's reputation.
Goldberg went on to create some 50,000 cartoons over his lifetime. He won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. The adjective "Goldbergian" entered the lexicon in 1915, and his name itself became an accepted adjective by 1928, and even today if you mention a "Rube Goldberg machine," most people would know what you are referring to. Few cartoonists, other than Thomas Nast, Bill Mauldin, and Walt Disney, a have had such a lasting effect.
So, enjoy this early book by Rube Goldberg. You may well find it warm and witty. It may bring an occasional smile to your face. Juist don't expect a knee--slapper.
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=96492&comicpage=&b=i
I've been a fan of cartoons forever. Love Rube Goldberg! But the guy I found both profound and funny over the decades was the late great Gahan Wilson.
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