Photo: Stephanie Kotsikonas

Andy Warhol is known for his print screens of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup cans, but the 1960s pop artist actually started his career illustrating novel covers and books of poetry.

The Morgan Library & Museum’s exhibition, Warhol By the Book — which wrapped up this weekend — chronicled the artist’s early career as an art student in the 1950s through the 1980s by presenting a collection of all different kinds of books associated with him, from a high school psychology textbook filled with sloppy scribbles, to books that he himself authored like The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, POPism, and The Andy Warhol Diaries, along with everything in between.

The pieces on view not only served as examples of his early style which used quirky pink angels, but it also presented Warhol as an artist with a sense of humor. Illustrations from the artist’s privately printed 1954 book 25 Cats Name Sam give us insight into Warhol’s amusing quirks, like the fact that he actually owned 25 cats that were all named Sam.

One page of Warhol’s book Horoscopes for the Cocktail Hour, featuring his mother’s calligraphy. Photo: http://blog.warhol.org/

Along with these early drawings, viewers also had a chance to see rejection letters addressed to “Miss Andie Warhol,” his mother’s calligraphy that appears on his work, and even two silkscreens of his infamous Marilyn Monroe portraits.

But what made the exhibition so intriguing was the depiction of an artist’s continual return to a format that he so often publicly dismissed. He even once claimed that he didn’t own any books, but after his death, it was found that he owned a pretty sizable book collection. Warhol By the Book not only showed Warhol as he was before his commercial success, but it shows us that Warhol, the master of pseudo superficiality and anti intellectualism, was indebted to the medium that he tried so hard to publicly discount.