The classic graphic novel by the landmark cartoonist is back in print for its twenty-fifth anniversary 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 graphic novel golden age, and it set the stage for Katchor to become regarded as a modern-day cartooning genius. Drawn & Quarterly's twenty-fifth anniversary edition is a deluxe hardcover.

Julius Knipl, the rumpled antihero of Ben Katchor's cult cartoon strip, comes alive in this all-new collection of strange and strangely absorbing urban adventures. The Knipl stories collected here resurrect a lost metropolis and its residents, summoning up half-forgotten yesterdays and celebrating the surreal substrate of the quotidien.

Join Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, on a leisurely stroll past The Institute for Soup-Nut Research and The Municipal Birthmark Registry. Savor the smell of a phone booth, circa 1961. Sign up for a guided tour of the oldest continually vacant storefront in America. Attend a championship grave-digging competition, or, should you feel you've wasted yet another day, you can check in for help at a local Misspent Youth Center. In "The Beauty Supply District," a new twenty-four-page story, Knipl attends an evening concert and unwittingly enters the world of wholesale empathizers and chiaroscuro brokers who make the decisions critical to the production of aesthetic pleasure in all its forms—from the shape of an olive jar to the score of a string quartet. From the Hardcover edition.