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Rea Irvin's Birthday Today

Filed under: Looked Into Tagged: birthdays, celebrations, Eustace Tilley, Pollux, Rea Irvin, Thomas Edison, Wikipedia

Pollux writes:

On this day, a hundred and twenty-eight years ago, Rea Irvin was born in a Californian town named San Francisco. A hundred and three years ago, Irvin traveled to the East Coast to assist in a birth that occurred eighty-four years ago--the founding of The New Yorker.

Thomas Edison invented the Kinetoscope as well as the lightbulb, and Rea Irvin did more than simply create the Eustace Tilley cover portrait.

Irvin lent his good taste and good sense towards the creation of The New Yorker's page design, headings, spot illustrations, as well as the archetype of the typical New Yorker single-panel cartoon.

As Emily writes in her important and much-needed article on him, "it was Irvin's own intimacy with classic form and craft, and his genial willingness to share that expertise, that allowed him to create a complete device: a design, a typeface, a style, and a mood that would be instantly recognizable, and eminently effective, almost a century later."

Emily and I have worked to pull Rea Irvin out of the shadows that seem to enshroud his life and his work. I wrote the initial Wikipedia article on him, and, in the true spirit of Wikipedia, others have contributed to it, the latest contribution being a series of Irvin drawings.

Rea Irvin is one of our heroes, and one of the patron saints of this publication that we love so much.

In his honor, we declare August 26 to be Rea Irvin Day. Celebrate accordingly.

1 comments

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Long live the Rea Irvin Institute for Research!

Emily GordonAugust 26, 2009

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Who we?

Emdashes, founded in 2004 by Emily Gordon, 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.

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Some writing by Emily Gordon

Review: A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore (for Newsday)
Annotated slide show: a wet, festive 2009 Coney Island Mermaid Parade (for nycgo.com)
Proposal: A better-looking MetroCard (for A Brief Message)
Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands, and an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (for Print)
Review: Does a redesign of The New Republic mean a change of tune? (for Print)
Interview: four online obsessives and visual cataloguers, Kate Bingaman, Nicholas Felton, Ellie Harrison, and John D. Freyer (for Print)
Review: King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
Interviews: winning New Visual Artists Eleanor Grosch, Zigmunds Lapsa, Christian Cervantes, and Kate & Camilla (for Print)
Profile: lindy hop legend Frankie Manning (for Newsday, with Robert Fouch)
Feature: Rea Irvin, illustrator, bon vivant, and The New Yorker's first art director (for Print)
Profile: screenwriter and novelist Joe Keenan (for Newsday)
Review: My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World by Julian Dibbell (for Newsday)
Review: Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley (for Newsday)
Review: Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry (for Print)
Report: Learning to read with comic books edited by Françoise Mouly (for Print)
Report: The New Yorker's redesigned website (for Print)
Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
Review: The Complete New Yorker (for Print)
Interview: Matthew Diffee on the appropriately inappropriate cartoons of the The Rejection Collection (for Print)
Interview: Roz Chast on Brooklyn, pysanky eggs, and animation (for Newsday)
Review: books about various New Yorker cartoonists by Liza Donnelly and Iain Topliss (for Newsday)
Review: Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis (for Newsday)
Interview: Edward Gorey (for Newsday)

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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.

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Founded by Emily Gordon, edited by Martin Schneider, designed by House of 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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