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The
R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book.
Soft cover Edition
This is a hefty oversize book (11 inches
x 13 inches), 250 pages, with color throughout. It's a concise
and beautifully designed overview of Robert Crumb's remarkable
career in chronological order. If you think "you've seen
it all" with regard to Crumb, you couldn't be more wrong.
Each of 15 chapters is introduced in Crumb's own words, in characteristic
handwritten text. (back pictured at right)
Among too many things to list here is the
following material...
1. Color! Many of Crumb's best underground
comix stories (like "That's Life" and "My Troubles
With Women"), his most famous ("Keep on Truckin'"
and "Mr. Natural") and most controversial ("A
Bitchin' Bod'!") are colored here for the first and only
time!!
2. Juvenalia. See the collaboration
between Robert and his late brother Charles Crumb through
side-by-side comparison of Charles' roughs for "Fuzzy the
Bunny" and Robert's final art (newly colored).
3. Influences. See the Jack Davis/Will
Elder cover of Humbug #2 that changed Robert's life,
reproduced as never before, along with Crumb's comic-style "Ode"
to and other recollections about his idol, cartoonist/editor
Harvey Kurtzman.
4. Earliest professional work. See
Crumb's seminal 1964-65 drawings of Harlem and Bulgaria and Fritz
the Cat done for Kurtzman's Help! magazine (some never
before published!)
5. Unpublished comix covers intended
for Zap, Snoid, Home Grown #2 and Despair plus
stillborn titles like Freak, Pathetic Stories and Fuck:
A Comic Book of the Beat Generation.
6. Rare photographs, including an
amazing photo of Crumb in Harlem in the early '60s, taken by
Harvey Kurtzman's then-assistant Terry Gilliam (later
a member of Monty Python and an acclaimed film director).
his cartoonist wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb, his band (the
"Keep-on-Truckin' Orchestra"), and numerous self-portraits,
sketches and preliminary drawings.
7. Rarely seen non-comix art. See
Crumb's seldom viewed oil paintings and his amazing life-size
wood contortionist scultpture of Devil Girl.
Meticulously edited, designed and colored
by Kitchen Sink's long-time art director Peter Poplaski and
packaged by lomgtime Crumb publisher Denis Kitchen, all with
the full cooperation of Crumb himself. The R. Crumb Coffee
Table Art Book was co-published by Kitchen Sink Press and
Little, Brown. Each edition has the respective publisher's imprint
on the spine and title page and there are different back covers.
The Kitchen Sink edition (about 5,000 copies) is much scarcer
than the Little, Brown edition (about 40,000 copies). We stock
only the scarcer out-of-print Kitchen Sink edition. (11 inches
x 13 inches), 250 pages
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