“A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning,” E.B. White wrote in his timeless love letter to New York, adding: “The city is like poetry.” In 2008, illustrator Jason Polan set out to capture the enormous human poetics compressed in Gotham’s geographic smallness by drawing every person in the city. The first seven years of this ongoing project, totaling drawings of 30,000 people, are now collected in Every Person in New York (public library) — a marvelous tome of Polan’s black-and-white line drawings, colored in with the intense aliveness of a city where, as White wrote more than half a century earlier, “wonderful events that are taking place every minute.” What emerges is itself a kind of poetry — fragmentary glimpses of ideas and images, commanded by an internal rhythm to paint a complete whole of this human hive.

Alongside the lively jumble of faces at Grand Central and the staple of sleeping strangers on just about every train line and the taxi drivers and the subway cellists and the many, many Taco Bell patrons (a recurring locale that tells us something about Polan’s own habitual affections) are some of the city’s most beloved public figures — there’s Marina Abramović performing her now-legendary The Artist Is Present show at the Museum of Modern art, Nick Cave at the Armory, Don DeLillo at Grand Central, Marc Jacobs in Soho, and Joan Didion walking, allotted an entire page in a subtle act of reverence.

Here and there, snippets of overheard conversation invite us to cast these anonymous citizens as characters in imaginary dramas that, however fanciful, might just be true — this, after all, is New York.

The seed for the project was planted many years earlier: While still in art school in Ann Arbor, Polan did a project titled I Want to Know All of You, in which he drew every single person in the school, offered the portraits for $10 each at a local gallery, and gave the $10 to the schoolmate whose likeness the drawing depicted. Eventually, Polan took to a canvas decidedly larger than the 800-person college and approached the whole of New York City with the same creative curiosity, openheartedness, and generosity of spirit.

Polan describes the aliveness of his process:

I try to be as authentic with the drawings as I can. I only draw the person while I can see them. The majority of the drawings are done (mostly) while looking at the person, not at the paper. If they are moving fast, the drawing is often very simple. If they move or get up from a pose, I cannot cheat at all by filling in a leg that has been folded or an arm pointing. This is why some of the people in the drawings might have an extra arm or leg — it had moved while I was drawing them. I think, hope, this makes the drawings better.

His selection criteria are just as organic and wholehearted:

I do not usually plan to make a drawing for this project. Sometimes I’ll go to an event to see a particular person and will know then that I want to draw them, but often the drawings happen completely randomly… I’m not looking for anything in particular, but as I think about it, I usually draw people if they: have an interesting haircut; are leaning a certain way; are a little kid who is doing something funny while wandering down the street with their mom; are playing an accordion; have a certain curve to their arm; are holding something interesting; have an interesting jaw line or lines in their neck; are particularly tall; were in the television show The West Wing; look like a nice person; are sleeping, eating, or focused on something; remind me of someone; or if I like the lines in their hands. These (and other traits that pop up every day) are certain things I find that I’m so excited to see and draw and share.

At the end of his introduction, Polan adds: “I hope you are in this book.” And, lo and behold:

Complement the wholly delightful Every Person in New York, a labor of love seven years in the making, with a similarly spirited yet decidedly different portrait of another city’s humanity, Wendy MacNaughton’s Meanwhile, in San Francisco, then revisit this charming illustrated tour of Gotham from a dog’s point of view.