Vanity Fair, Vol. 6, No. 138

Wood engraving cover from the American Vanity Fair, a New York weekly of political satire and humor published during the Civil War (1859–1863). The image depicts a caricatured military figure identified as "The Chevalier Henry Wikoff, / As the Political Paul Pry"—a contemporary personality rendered with exaggerated features and posed awkwardly holding a sword and spherical object. The masthead employs playful decorative lettering with small figures. This periodical combined comic verse, theatrical reviews, and partisan caricature aimed at Union readership, functioning as an ancestor to American comic weeklies. The paper's visual style relied on traditional wood-block printing techniques characteristic of mid-nineteenth-century American journalism.