Puck's Labor-Saving Suggestion for Cupid's Summer Work

C. J. Taylor's double-page color lithograph for Puck replaces the classical Cupid with the magazine's own cherub mascot, here operating what the caption calls an "electric arrow-shooting battery" — an industrial-age upgrade on mythology. Surrounding vignettes show well-dressed white middle-class couples struck by mechanized love arrows while bicycling, canoeing, swimming, playing tennis and golf, and riding in a carriage. The caption promises the device will pierce "the hearts of forty times as many victims, with neatness and despatch." The joke is Gilded Age efficiency culture applied to romance — courtship as a productivity problem. All figures depicted are prosperous and white, reflecting Puck's default audience and the era's routine exclusion of working-class and non-white subjects from leisure humor. Taylor's draftsmanship is fluid and the color printing ambitious for the period.