So, how many editorial cartoonists are there?  Even the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists is not sure of the exact numbers. 

The difficulty involves defining what you are trying to count. Sometimes a newspaper has a graphic artist who also does editorial cartoons. Occasionally, it hires a freelancer to do a visual commentary on local issues. And you can't just count membership in AAEC, as not all cartoonists belong and some are part-time or retired. As of June 2003, AAEC had 196 "regular" members in the U.S. and Canada.  These are members who regularly draw cartoons for publication.

Cullum Rogers, a cartoonist at The Independent Weekly (Durham, N.C.) and AAEC secretary-treasurer, has been trying to get an accurate count for a decade.

"Almost all figures on the number of staff cartoonists past or present are very rough estimates," he said in an e-mail interview. "There's no way to tell, except by contacting newspapers individually, whether a cartoon in a given paper was drawn by a full-time staffer whose only job is editorial cartooning, an art-department staffer for whom editorial cartooning is only one part of the job (or even just a hobby the paper indulges as long as it doesn't interfere with 'real' work), or a freelancer who might draw one picture a week, if that."

Here are some interesting tidbits that Rogers has uncovered:

• "In his 1956 anthology The People's Choice, Pierce Fredericks of The New York Times said that there were 'something like' 275 political cartoonists in the country, a claim he repeated in a Saturday Review article the next year (November 23, 1957). But, like everyone else who's written on the subject, he didn't say where his number came from."
• "In a July 21, 1961, cover story on Bill Mauldin, Time magazine said that 'only 119 men now work at the art.'
• "In 1962, cartoonist John Chase of the New Orleans States-Item edited an anthology, Today's Cartoon, that devoted two pages to every full-time U.S. editorial cartoonist he could persuade to participate. It featured work by 140 artists, and I haven't noticed any significant omissions."
• "In an October 11, 1980, cover story on Jeff MacNelly, Newsweek said that the number of cartoonists had 'increased by nearly half in the last decade, to an estimated population of 170.' Again, no source was cited."
• "In 1997, I set out to determine exactly how many editorial-cartoon positions there were at U.S. newspapers by asking folks on the AAEC online chat line to list all the jobs they knew of in their own states, and checking the results through the E&P Yearbook, Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year volumes, and, in a few cases, phone calls to the papers themselves ... The survey found that there were about 150 newspapers in the United States that had a full-time staffer who regularly drew editorial cartoons."

Counting the cartoonists is one of the projects AAEC hopes to accomplish in the future, said Bruce Plante, outgoing AAEC president.

This first-ever census will be a welcome benchmark.