Out of print. A selection of all of the drawings from two Kley art books published in Germany: Leut' und Viecher (1912) and Sammel-Album (1923) except those which duplicate illustrations in Skizzenbuch (1909) and Skizzenbuch II (1910) which are published in Dover's Drawings of Heinrich Kley.

From the publisher:

This is Dover's second collection of the vivid sketches of Heinrich Kley, one of the most diabolically talented cartoonists of our century. This collection includes all the sketches from Kley's Leut' und Viecher (1912) and Sammel-Album (1923) except those which have already appeared in The Drawings of Heinrich Kley (Dover).

Kley's best drawings appeared during the first quarter of this century. Bizarre, mercilessly iconoclastic, they tore apart the fabric of life in the new century, emphasizing the untenability of time-honored assumptions. Many people were shocked by Kley's drawings, many laughed at them--but not many were able to ignore them.

The sketches take in every aspect of human life: nothing is too sacred for Kley's ridicule, no one too eminent to satirize. Kley's jibes were aimed at the church, at marriage, at fashionable ladies and pompous gentlemen, at clothes and customs and character traits. The overall subject, as with most outstanding satirists, is the ungodly absurdity of the human condition. Hence the repeated occurrence of elephants, apes, horses, in human poses, or the spectacle of humans caught in ridiculous situations and grotesque positions. Some of the drawings have no apparent humorous satiric purpose. Here and there one is surprised by old man leading a horse and cart, an attractive young girl in summer gown, a sorrowful man with his face buried in his hands. Such sketches strike one by the incisiveness and individuality with which they are done.

Kley's combination of masterful draftsmanship and an eccentric sort of imagination produced pictures that cannot be easily forgotten. A'love-smitten pig holding hands with a young an alligator ice-skating with a lady, a man pulling a woman seated in a large spoon, a liquor bottle chasing a wine bottle-images like these will stick in the viewer's memory long after he has laid the book aside.

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