OK, this one won't mind telling you: The New Yorker was first published on February 21, 1925. Wonder how that guy who bought the rare copy of the first-ever issue is doing? He'd better be reeeeally enjoying it.

By the way, I'm sad to see that my logo isn't appearing on every archive page. (Later: fixed!) I assume it's a problem with the host...hmmm. Soon I plan to move to emdashes.com for good; donations from .25 to $1.00 welcome! If you can afford more than that, give it to the MusiCares Hurricane Relief Fund—lots of displaced New Orleans musicians still don't have instruments to play, or houses to play them in.

In the meantime, why not revisit the story of Rea Irvin and Eustace Tilley? From a Whitney Lawson story on cover philosophies:

When Harold Ross put out the first issue of The New Yorker, in 1925, photography was commonplace in magazines. The second thing the magazine's readers ever saw in its pages, on the reverse side of the first, February 21, 1925, cover, was an advertisement for Parfums Caron which showed two gleaming French perfume bottles in all their photogenic splendor. The cover, on the other hand, opted for Rea Irvin's hand-drawn rendering of Eustace Tilley. "As compared to the newspaper, The New Yorker will be interpretive rather than stenographic," Harold Ross wrote in his mission statement, in 1924.