The death of the great caricaturist David Levine reminded me of another great artist, political cartoonist Herb Block (better known as Herblock).

Herblock, whose career spanned 70 years and four Pulitzer Prizes, began at the Chicago Daily News and then moved on to the Washington Post (he was also syndicated across the country) where he was still working when he died in 2001. There is a new monograph celebrating his work, Herblock: The Life and Works of the Great Political Cartoonist (WW Norton), edited by Harry Katz and introduced by political pundit Haynes Johnson, which was published to accompany a Library of Congress exhibition on Herblock. This tome contains over 250 editorial cartoons and explicates Block’s influences and the significance of political cartooning in his life and times. Also included is a DVD with—are you ready?—18,000 drawings spanning Herbock’s unique career.

Keep in mind that Herblock plied his craft, lampooning the powerful and skewering the hypocritical, when newspapers were newspapers and before there was The Daily Show or The Onion. Perhaps it is unnecessary to say, but there was indeed no one like him.