Puck Christmas Number

The cover of Puck's 1897 Christmas issue presents the magazine's cherubic imp-mascot—drawn here as a barefoot boy in a pink toga—stoking a roaring hearth with a long iron poker. From the flames rises a dense smoke column populated by the caricatured faces of the year's political figures, their exaggerated features (large noses, jutting jaws, bulging eyes) reflecting the ethnic and racial shorthand cartoonists of the Gilded Age routinely deployed to identify and mock public men. A log labeled 1897 burns away beneath them, while a stars-and-stripes stocking hangs from the mantel and an American flag leans against the brick chimney. The allegory is direct: Puck incinerates the old year and its cast of rogues, clearing the hearth for 1898. Price: 25 cents.