Cheap Novelties. The Pleasures of Urban Decay

Plot

Cheap Novelties is an early testament to Ben Katchor's extraordinary prescience as both a gifted cartoonist and an astute urban character. 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. Now presented as a deluxe anniversary edition, 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 a quarter century ago.