The New Yorker Is 100 Years Old!… “We Long To Be Something Else”; The Monday Tilley Watch…The Issue of February 17 & 24, 2025
On this happy occasion of the 100th anniversary of The New Yorker, it’s instructive to look at the second issue of the magazine, dated February 28, 1925. Was it perhaps too soon for Harold Ross to look back (one week!) critically on his debut issue? From everything I’ve read about Ross, the answer is no. It has been said that week after week, Ross sought to publish the perfect magazine, and there’s no chance of that if you ignore imperfection. And so, in the Of All Things column, Ross publicly analyzed Issue #1, running the following (I’m only showing the portions directly related to the first issue):
And now to the 100th anniversary issue of the magazine…
The Cover:
Rea Irvin’s original is back!…with a caveat: “100” has been added just below the magazine’s name. Fair enough, I suppose.
The Cartoonists and Cartoons:
Twenty cartoons, twenty-one cartoonists (Barry Blitt has an illustration). This tally doesn’t, of course, include drawings appearing in ads. One duo, that we know of. No newbies.
It’s great seeing the late great Jack Ziegler‘s name above, and see his drawing within the magazine. In my long friendship with Jack, it always made me smile when he’d refer to anniversary issues as the “anny” issues. So here he is in the big anny issue. I know he’d be pleased.
The longest active contributing cartoonist in the issue is this cartoonist.
Some stray thoughts on the “centennial number” after a quick run through:
There are shout-outs to several cartoonists sprinkled throughout the content (without actually keeping score, I feel as if Thurber is mentioned most). Editor David Remnick’s “Onward and Upward” Comment piece and Jill Lepore’s long “American Chronicles” piece, “War Of Words,” will surely satisfy readers wanting some sort of capsule history of the magazine’s famed editors and writers. Roz Chast weighs in on George Booth (within the piece is a Booth drawing); Seth graphically honors Rea Irvin. I like the use of archived photos set into certain pieces (as in Rachel Aviv’s take on a 1983 Janet Malcolm piece, “Trouble In The Archives” where you’ll see a Bob Mankoff drawing alongside one of mine). Look closely at the Kevin Young take on a James Baldwin piece from 1962, “Letter From A Region In My Mind” and you’ll see a James Stevenson drawing alongside an Abe Birnbaum spot).
Publishers came out big-time ((with their pocketbooks) for the magazine’s centennial. Nice to see so many book ads, some including books by New Yorker contributors. I spotted books with familiar names such as J.D. Salinger, Edward Koren, Mary Norris, and Ludwig Bemelmans.
The Rea Irvin Talk Watch:
It makes me somewhat uneasy to once again note that Rea Irvin’s classic Talk design (below) is nowhere to be found in this centennial issue. “Uneasy” because Mr. Irvin is so well represented otherwise, from his debut cover to Seth’s multi-page Irvin piece. Still, I do hope for Mr. Irvin’s Talk design to return. In a Spill piece the other day I mentioned the Thurber drawings that were removed from the magazine’s 25 West 43rd Street offices and brought along as The New Yorker moved south to various addresses on the island of Manhattan. Retaining the Irvin Talk design is, to me, a version of that: taking along some of the magazine’s DNA, in this case in the form of a classic graphic marker, as The New Yorker heads into its next hundred years.
