Little, Brown signs Gerald Scarfe memoir

Little, Brown has signed the first memoir by cartoonist and illustrator Gerald Scarfe alongside a lavish fully-illustrated retrospective of his six decades in the business.

Publisher Tim Whiting acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to Long Drawn Out Trip and world rights to Scarfe: Sixty Years of Being Rude from Jonny Geller at Curtis Brown.

In Long Drawn Out Trip, published in hardback, e-book and audiobook on 26th September, Scarfe, who has worked for the Sunday Times and the New Yorker, tells his life story for the first time.

The synopsis explains: “With captivating, often thrilling stories, he recalls his wartime childhood and the terrible curse of asthma, through his days as an advertising draughtsman, to his field reporting in Vietnam and the giddy highs of rock ’n’ roll. He also reveals the process of cartooning – and the ways that certain subjects have reacted to his visions of them.

“Along the way he has been car-jacked in Derry, dined with royals, and thoroughly upset Mrs Mary Whitehouse. It is a very personal, wickedly funny and caustically insightful account of an artist's life at the forefront of contemporary culture and society.”

Scarfe: Sixty Years of Being Rude, published on 7th November, is the largest physical book Little, Brown has ever produced. The full-colour, 576-page tome is packed with images “that have defined not only one artist's career, but also twentieth and twenty-first century British life”. Curated by Scarfe himself, it presents drawings, sculptures and photographs alongside captions and stories.

As well as a trade edition in a slipcase designed by Scarfe, it will be available in an artist’s edition limited to 200 signed and numbered copies plus another 26 copies containing original artwork.