From Jon Michaud, the magazine's unfailingly helpful Head of Library, the answer to the reader's query about trouble printing archive pages from the complete DVD, and to my own note about trying in vain to print Donald Antrim's matchless essay "I Bought a Bed":

I noticed your posting on printing problems with The Complete New Yorker. We have had no such problems here in the library, where we use the archive on a daily basis. I checked with other members of the team who worked on it and it seems that certain printer models do cut off the bottom of the page. One way to avoid this is to save the desired page(s) as a PDF and then print the PDF. This seems to work, though the print quality suffers slightly.

He adds:

The New Yorker's paper quality varied over the years, and was noticeably poorer from 1944-1955 or so. This may account for some fuzziness, since the images in the archive were scanned from original issues.... We really want to help users as much as possible and also are eager to learn about any problems with the archive so that they can be fixed in future updates. Anything you or your correspondent tell me will be shared with the group here with the aim of trying to find a solution.

I just tried to print the Antrim and saw that the date and page number were indeed cut off. Printing to PDF preserved the footer material but reduced the print quality a little. The New Yorker has changed its size over the years. The loss of this footer text may be a result of slight re-sizing of the page image to uniform dimensions.

Michaud is everything you would hope the New Yorker library chief would be, and I hope he's at Pastis right now savoring something appropriately literary-historical, though possibly less head-clouding than Pernod. Please email me any further comments about the technical side of using the archive (or, indeed, anything at all about it), and I'll print them here. Speaking of print, the current issue of Print includes my review of the DVDs. This is an expensive anniversary issue, but, as always, well worth it.

Also, much, much later: (also added to the original post) The Complete New Yorker troubleshooting page now has this Jon-echoing note.

I am a Mac user, and I can’t get the last 2 or 3 lines of each column on the page to print properly. I’ve already tried adjusting the page size and my printer is working fine. What should I do?
From the print dialog box, select "Save as PDF," and specify a location where you want to save it. The PDF file that is generated should open in Preview automatically. In the PDF, select Page Setup from the File Menu, and change the scale option from 100% to 95%. Click OK, and then print the PDF file. (You may need to change the scale % more or less, depending on your printer.)