Pickings from Puck

This pencil cover drawing for Pickings from Puck—a reprint anthology of Puck magazine's humor—shows a domestic interior where an aproned mother leans forward to scold or instruct two boys; a small girl sits on the floor between them, and toy animals, an open book, and a pitcher lie scattered at their feet. Glackens renders the children in the round-faced, slightly exaggerated style typical of late-Victorian juvenile illustration, without the ethnic or racial caricature that marked much of Puck's political pages. The anthology format, priced at 25¢ per the box visible at lower right, aimed the magazine's comedy at a middle-class family audience rather than the immigrant-lampooning readership of its weekly satirical cartoons.