Inscribed to His Shrek! Editor
The Lonely Ones
Publication: New York: Windmill Books, 1970. Second Edition.
Notes: An exceptional association copy of the second edition of this collection of “symbolic drawings,” inscribed to his editor.
This book belongs to a more experimental body of work than Steig's usual drawings and cartoons for the New Yorker. Roger Angell called them "symbolic, heavily inked depictions of the human condition." This new edition adds twenty-five images not included in the original.
Harold Ross, the New Yorker's founder, rejected these for the magazine as “too personal and not funny enough.” So Steig published them as a book in 1942.
While the general public remembers Steig best as the author of Shrek!, his influence on cartoonists was immense. He began contributing to The New Yorker in 1930, and during the next seven decades he helped to define the magazine’s visual character. The magazine credits him with 121 covers and 1,676 drawings (with 100 cartoons still unpublished when Steig died in 2003).
88 pages (including preliminaries). Foreword by Wolcott Gibbs; new introduction by William Saroyan. See The New Yorker, October 13, 2003 and Time, January 13, 2016.
Edition + Condition: Second edition (first printing, with no indication of later printings). A fine copy, with minor wear to the jacket. This copy is inscribed, "For Michael Di Capua, my new editor. I'm happy today. Bill Steig."
In the 1960s, Steig began publishing children's titles through Windmill Books, the publisher of this reissue of The Lonely Ones. In the 1970s, Di Capua convinced him to switch to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where Di Capua edited books like Abel's Island and Shrek! Di Capua was not initially enamored with Steig's ogre, telling the New York Times recently (May 20, 2026), "I was horrified." And not in a good way.
The remarkable inscription in this copy marks the precise moment Steig's career as a children's book author took off. At FSG he produced his most enduring work.
Item No: #366398
Price: $600