Cheap Novelties - The Pleasures of Urban Decay

"Twenty-five years on, [Cheap Novelties''] observations of what is lost as cityscapes evolve and shift due to gentrification and changing demographics are still fresh and relevant."-The Guardian

Cheap Novelties is an early testament to Ben Katchor''s extraordinary prescience as both a gifted cartoonist and an astute urban chronicler. Rumpled, middle-aged Julius Knipl photographs a vanishing city--an urban landscape of low-rent apartment buildings, obsolete industries, monuments to forgotten people and events, and countless sources of inexpensive food. 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.

In 1991, the original Cheap Novelties appeared in an unassuming paperback from the RAW contributor; it would become one of the first books of the contemporary