Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District

Join Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, on a leisurely stroll past The Institute for Soup-Nut Research and The Municipal Birthmark Registry. Savor the smell of a phone booth, circa 1961. Sign up for a guided tour of the oldest continually vacant storefront in America. Attend a championship grave-digging competition, or, should you feel you've wasted yet another day, you can check in for help at a local Misspent Youth Center. In "The Beauty Supply District," a new twenty-four-page story, Knipl attends an evening concert and unwittingly enters the world of wholesale empathizers and chiaroscuro brokers who make the decisions critical to the production of aesthetic pleasure in all its forms -- from the shape of an olive jar to the score of a string quartet. From the Hardcover edition.

Ben Katchor is the author of <b>The Jew of New York</b>. His weekly comic strips, <i>Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer</i> and <i>The Cardboard Valise,</i> have been appearing since 1988 in <i>The Forward,</i> among other newspapers. Katchor also produces a monthly strip for <i>Metropolis</i> magazine. He lives in New York City.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>