Tuesday Spill: Latest Addition To The Spill Library…”The New Yorker In Westport”

Latest Addition To The Spill Library…The New Yorker In Westport

On my “Want List” for a dozen years: The New Yorker In Westport by Andrew Bentley & Eve Potts; a companion piece to the terrific exhibit put on by the Westport Historical Society in 2014. Some years back, when I made the effort to buy a copy, it was already hard to find. Just last year I wrote the Westport Library after seeing they were holding a book sale. I asked if a copy of the book might be included in their sale. I received this reply:

Hello Mr. Maslin, As you no doubt know, The New Yorker in Westport by Andrew Bentley & Eve Potts is out-of-print, and copies of it available for sale are rare. In October 2023, at our first benefit event for the Book Sale’s nonprofit, we were fortunate to be able to include two copies of this book in our event’s live auction; they sold for $350 each. At our March 2025 benefit event, we were able to auction two more copies; they sold for $600 each.

Well, yikes. That really put a damper on my thoughts of ever finding a copy for a price I could handle without sweating. This past January, I entered a raffle for the book (the raffle was held by the Westport Library). No luck. Then last week, revisiting my “Want List” and plugging in the title on Ebay, a listing for the book popped up. The price: a no sweat $7.78.

The twelve year wait was worth it — it’s a charming book (hardcover, 9 1/4″ x 12 1/4″), filled with full page high quality reproductions of New Yorker covers by these artists: Charles Addams, Perry Barlow, Whitney Darrow, Jr., James “Jimmy The Ink” Daugherty, Edna Eicke, Arthur Getz, Alice Harvey, Helen Hokinson, Albert Hubbell, David Preston, Garrett Price, and Charles Saxon.

Each cover is accompanied by a short written piece tying the cover to a specific place in Westport, and/or giving us some local color/history. The book is a time capsule that’s meant to sit on a bookshelf rather than reside in a building’s cornerstone.

The timeframe of the work presented begins in 1925 and ends in 1988, a period in the magazine’s history that includes the chunk of years unofficially referred to as its golden era, presided over, Art Department-wise by James Geraghty. These were the years well before pre-Tina Brown showed up and mandated that the magazine trade in “buzz” and “cutting edge” content. The Westport New Yorker covers are not buzzy, unless perhaps one’s affection for, as Geraghty called them, “fleeting moments” gives you a bit of a buzz. Sixty percent of the covers, in those early years, were produced by the magazine’s cartoonists. Of the dozen contributors in this book, only two had never contributed a cartoon to the magazine (Edna Eicke and David Preston).

The book is a fine companion to two other must-have books focused on New Yorker cover art.

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Related Material:

From Attempted Bloggery, February 11, 2014, “Cover Story: The New Yorker In Westport”

From Ink Spill, January 28, 2014, “New Yorker’s Golden Age Celebrated In Westport, Connecticut”

From Ink Spill, February 24, 2014, “New Yorker Editors James Geraghty, Albert Hubbell, & Lee Lorenz”

From Ink Spill: Video, recorded June 21, 2014, of Maslin conversation with Lee Lorenz at the Westport Historical Society