The Labyrinth

A seminal work by an artist whose drawings in The New Yorker, LIFE, Harper's Bazaar, and many other publications influenced an entire generation of American artists and writers.

Throughout his career, the acclaimed artist Saul Steinberg created a series of unique, wondrous books. Far richer than simple catalogs or collections of drawings, these carefully arranged works formed a kind of continuous visual autobiography—a record, in drawings both simple and detailed, comic and beautiful, of an inimitable mind’s encounter with the world.

The Labyrinth, first published in 1960 and long out of print, may be the best of these. Here is Steinberg, as he put it at the time, “discovering and inventing a great variety of events: Illusion, talks, music, women, cats, dogs, birds, the cube, the crocodile, the museum, Moscow and Samarkand (winter, 1956), other Eastern countries, America, motels, baseball, horse racing, bullfights, art, frozen music, words, geometry, heroes, harpies, etc.” This edition, featuring all the original art along with new editorial material, will allow readers to discover (and invent) Steinberg’s world all over again.

Famed worldwide for giving graphic definition to the postwar age, Saul Steinberg (1914–1999) had one of the most remarkable careers in American art. While renowned for the covers and drawings that appeared in The New Yorker for nearly six decades, he was equally acclaimed for the drawings, paintings, prints, collages, and sculptures he exhibited internationally in galleries and museums. He published nineteen books in his lifetime, including The Art of Living, The New World, and The Discovery of America.

Nicholson Baker is the author of ten novels and six works of nonfiction, including A Box of Matches and The Anthologist, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and Double Fold, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books. He lives in Maine with his family.

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) was an art historian and critic who is remembered as one of the most incisive and supportive critics of abstract expressionism. He was a regular contributor to The Partisan Review and served as an art critic at The New Yorker.