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Filed under: The Squib Report Tagged: art, Complete New Yorker, covers, geography
Sumner is a town in Oklahoma.
Do you know how many New Yorker covers incorporate some sort of reference to Sumner? Take a guess.
I'll give you a hint. It's more than 37. It's a lot more than 37.
Don't believe me? Do a search in the Complete New Yorker archive on the term "SumnerOK" (that's right, no space).
It'll return 1,133 hits, every last one of them a cover.
These are the known facts about Sumner, Oklahoma, at least according to the citizens of Wikipedia.
Sumner is in Noble County, Oklahoma, ten miles east of Perry and two miles north of US highway 64.
The town was named for Henry T. Sumner, a businessman from Perry (ten miles to the west).
At its peak, Sumner had a bank, post office, two churches, a school, a grain elevator, and a train stop, but those days are long past. Currently, the only significant buildings still in use are the two churches and the school. The post office opened on May 23, 1894—and closed on July 27, 1957.
In 1905, according to the Oklahoma Territorial Census, Sumner had sixty-four residents, but it now has a population of approximately fifty, a precipitous plunge of 21 percent (est.) over more than a century—an attrition rate of one person about every seven years and three months.
Now, you might think that truly outlandish figure means that Sumner is (somehow or other) represented in every single cover of The New Yorker. But that would be entirely preposterous. 1,133 represents the slenderest fraction of the full 4,109 issues, a mere 27.6 percent of the whole. A mere bagatelle.
It remains unclear what quality this town possesses that has led the hardy toilers on 43rd Street to such heights of monomania over the decades.
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Comments
Woah! What was the last cover to feature Sumner? Recent enough to find online? I'm dying to see it, and Sumner itself! Sounds like a required field trip!
Update on that question: I did a search on cartoonbank.com, but it's unclear how the page of results actually relates to the query term "sumner". One cover actually seems to be in France, and others don't really seem to be featuring any particular place or region. I wonder what "sumner" is doing in their keyword assignments? Or is it just to early in the morning for me to see it?
Most recent Sumner cover was Decemeber 28, 1992. I confess that I haven't come across many (indeed, any) covers wherein the connection to picturesque Sumner is in any way evident.
Some people have suggested that "OK" here doesn't stand for Oklahoma, but I've asked those people to leave.