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Never Ask a Magazine Its Age

Filed under: Eds. Tagged: Eustace Tilley, Francoise Mouly, Harold Ross, Rea Irvin

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.

Here's Francoise Mouly on the subject. And here, the blogger Literary Kicks reprints a long bit from a Talk of the Town from the inaugural issue. Between the Squibs, what do you make of Issue One? Like it or loathe it, I Hate The New Yorker? I love that blog name, by the way. It still makes me grin.

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Who we?

Emdashes, founded December 2004, is a place where keen and dedicated readers of The New Yorker, past and present, can find related news and commentary: about people, subjects, and ideas within the magazine, and events and conversations outside its pages. Learn more about us and our contributors.

Affinities | Blurbs

We welcome tips, questions, and comments about The New Yorker past and present, plus related events, links, typeface sightings, &c. To contact the magazine or send a submission, click here.

No fear: Everything you say or send is off the record unless we ask for your permission to use it.

This site is neither owned nor operated by The New Yorker magazine or Condé Nast Publications.

A few clips

Report: Learning to read with comic books edited by Françoise Mouly (for Print)
Interview: Designer Eleanor Grosch (for Print)
Review: Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis (for Newsday)
Review: The King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
Review: Does The New Republic's recent redesign mean a change of tune? (for Print)
Proposal: A more attractive MetroCard (for A Brief Message)
Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
Report: Eustace Tilley spruces up for The New Yorker's website redesign (for Print)
Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands (for Print)
Review: books about various New Yorker cartoonists by Liza Donnelly and Iain Topliss (for Newsday)
Profile: screenwriter and novelist Joe Keenan (for Newsday)
Review: The Complete New Yorker (for Print)

More clips.

Tell me more

They say that dashes “are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex.” Emdashes—like em dashes—emphasizes what’s between: in particular, between the lines, covers, and issues of a magazine close to my heart.

Primary sources

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Founded by Emily Gordon, edited by Martin Schneider, designed by Pretty, and illustrated by Inkleaf. Additional drawings by Carolita Johnson. Kissable pencil girl by Jennifer Hadley, based on a 1943 Dorothy Gray ad.

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