This book is based upon a suggestion by Terry Zwigoff, the producer-director of the academy award winning documentary film, "Crumb," to aid in understanding this unique and complex artistic family. The first section comprises a biography of the Crumb family. Later sections deal with selections from the works of Robert, Charles, Maxon, Jesse and Sophie Crumb. The major part of the book is the work of Robert Crumb, including his sketches, comics, fictions, portraits, paintings and drawings. The front and back endpapers are photographic reproductions from an unpublished journal by Charles Crumb that is held by the Sackner Archive. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Maxon Crumb made graphite drawings to illustrate Edgar Allan Poe's seven stories and poems including "The Raven." Robert Crumb contributed a brief preface written in calligraphic printed letters. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

The composition books of Charles Crumb are described as "books with hundreds of pages of inscrutable pen marks, in series of wiggly lines, m's of n's, or just dots. These 'secret writings' may have been decipherable to him, but they remain a mystery to those he left behind." The Sackner Archive holds one of these composition notebooks. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.