The register
Twenty-five plates, listed
Every piece on the site in one place, by section, with what each one is about. The sections themselves are laid out properly; this is the flat list.
| Plate | Title | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Hogarth Sold It by Subscription | How a copyright act and a direct sale changed who controlled the satirical print. Hogarth's 1735 Act gave engravers fourteen years of protection. |
| 02 | The Most-Quoted Political Cartoon in English | James Gillray's The Plumb-pudding in Danger (1805) — its composition, its targets, and the two-century reproduction chain that made it ubiquitous |
| 03 | Six Months in Sainte-Pélagie for Drawing the King as Gargantua | The lithograph that made the charge easy to write |
| 04 | How a Cartoonist Brought Down a Machine | Thomas Nast's Cartoons Destroyed the Tweed Ring — and Tweed Said So Himself |
| 05 | Tenniel's Forty Years on the Punch Block | The man who drew Alice also drew the British Empire's conscience — for five decades, on end-grain boxwood, without missing a week. |
| 06 | Colonel Blimp Was Never Meant to Be Affectionate | David Low drew a blustering, walrus-moustached general to embarrass the British establishment — and accidentally gave English a new word for it. |
| 07 | Willie and Joe Never Saluted Anyone | Bill Mauldin's two-war career, his scruffy infantrymen, and the general who tried to shut them down |
| 08 | Herblock's Brush and What It Cost Three Presidents | The Cartoonist Who Named an Era and Shook Three Administrations |
| 09 | The Last Great Syndicated Cartoonist | Pat Oliphant turned a craft learnt in Adelaide into a franchise that reached six hundred newspapers — and nobody has matched the numbers since. |
| 10 | When the Cartoon Started Moving | A Drawn Argument That Won't Sit Still |
| Plate | Title | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Punch Called It a Cartoon in 1843, and the Word Never Went Back | How a cheap London comic weekly coined the modern meaning of its medium, ran for a century and a half, and left its archive at the British Library. |
| 02 | Harper's Weekly Ran the War and the Cartoons Together | From its 1857 launch through the Civil War and Gilded Age, Harper's Weekly shaped what American readers expected a political cartoon to look like — and what it could accomplish. |
| 03 | Puck Was the Only Thing Funnier Than Congress | The American magazine that weaponised colour lithography against the Gilded Age, and how Joseph Keppler's Puck out-mocked its rivals. |
| 04 | Private Eye Has Been Courting Libel Writs Since 1961 | Britain's most sued satirical magazine has never missed a fortnight |
| Plate | Title | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | What Gillray's Printer Did Before the Ink Hit Paper | The copper plate as the cartoonist's battlefield |
| 02 | Senefelder's Stone and What Daumier Did With It | A Bavarian Invention and the Line It Set Free |
| 03 | The Punch Block Was Cut by Six Men at Once | One drawing, many hands |
| 04 | Zinc Killed the Wood Engraver and Nobody Mourned | How a photomechanical plate ended a craft and changed the drawn line |
| Plate | Title | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Two Hundred Thousand Originals, and a Reading Room in Kent | The archive that preserved what newspapers threw away |
| 02 | Ohio State Keeps the American Record | The largest archive of cartoon art in the world has a reading room in Columbus, holding hundreds of thousands of original drawings. |
| 03 | What the Original Drawing Is Actually Worth | From Press Room to Auction Room |
| Plate | Title | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | The Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, 1922 to the Present | America's most visible cartooning honour has rewarded pen-and-ink giants and sparked recurring arguments about what the form actually is |
| 02 | The Stamp Act Was a Tax on Knowing Things | How Britain's century-and-a-half of press duties shaped the economics — and the art — of the political cartoon |
| Plate | Title | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Cartoon: How a Preparatory Drawing Became an Insult | A single issue of Punch in 1843 hijacked a technical term from the fine arts and gave it to political satire permanently. |
| 02 | Caricature Is What the Face Does; Cartoon Is What the Argument Does | Two words that have circled each other for two centuries without quite merging — and why the distinction still matters. |