About Saul Steinberg

I have a used copy of the first edition of "passport". The previous owner seemed to be a big fan of Saul Steinberg: between the book cover and the title page, I found a carefully folded 1999 New York Times obituary of Steinberg titled "Saul Steinberg, Who Transformed Epic Doodles Into Fine Art, Is Dead at 84". Thank this anonymous collector, I read this interesting article, which is no longer free on the New York Times website, and learned the following amusing facts of Saul Steinberg:


But Mr. Steinberg was known to most of people, as he lamented late in life, as “the man who did that poster”. That poster, one of the most famous American drawings, portrays a New Yorker’s shortsighted view of the rest of the world, in which everything in the landscape recedes according to its cultural distance from Manhattan. … which first appeared on The New Yorker cover of March 29, 1976. It was subsequently copied in knockoffs made for London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Kansa City, Durango, wherever. “I could have retired on this painting,” if royalties had been paid, he once mused. But they weren’t, and he didn’t.

... 1943, was momentous for Mr. Steinberg. … and on the same day that he became United States citizen he was given an ensign’s commission in the Navy. He was assigned to teach Chinese guerrillas how to blow up bridges, and for a year flew the mountainous route known as the Hump from China to India, making sure that the explosives reached their destinations (Is it why there is China in that famous drawing? - Albatross).

He was fond of diners, motels, kidney-shaped swimming pools and highways, and he thought the country was best seen from the height of a bus window. He was a European sophisticate posing as a regular American guy. Roger Angell of The New Yorker recalled that Mr. Steinberg became such a baseball fan that “he acquired a Milwaukee Braves uniform that he used to put on to watch the games on television”.

“Steinberg kept away from cartoonists,” Mr. Koren recalled. “Steinberg was not a warm man. He was chilly and Olympian with a somewhat hauteur tone.” Once, Mr. Koren said, the two were together at a dinner party. “I got somewhat in my cups, cheery, and I said, ‘you know, Saul, you’ve been a profound influence on me.’ He looked at me chillily and said, ‘I would be surprised if I wasn’t.’”