Description: From 1904 through the late 1960s, Rube Goldberg's cartoons appeared in more than 1,000 daily and Sunday newspapers and in national magazines like Collier's. But while his comic strips were the subject of Smithsonian exhibits and his editorial cartoons were awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the artist is best known for his "inventions" -- more than 2,000 schematics on everything from multi-handed pickpocket extenders for politicians to suicide machines for stock market speculators. As a result of his imaginary con-traptions, Goldberg inspired wacky machine contests that exist to this day, and even earned his own entry in Webster's New World Dictionary ("Used for describing any very complicated invention, machine, scheme, etc. laboriously contrived to perform a seemingly simple operation").

In Rube Goldberg: Inventions!, Maynard Frank Wolfe gathers the best of Goldberg's ludicrous inventions and other works and knits them together with a charming biography of a man who counted Will Rogers, Charlie Chaplin, Grantland Rice, and Jack Dempsey among his friends. Beautifully presented by award-winning designer David Kaestle, Rube Goldberg: Inventions! is an irresistible gift book for cartoon aficionados and anyone who has ever done anything the hard way.

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