A bimonthly column in which Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey, The New Yorker’s head librarians, answer your questions about the magazine’s past and present. Click here to e-mail your own questions for Jon and Erin’s consideration. Illustration by Lara Tomlin.

Previously in Ask the Librarians: V: E. B. White’s newsbreaks, Garrison Keillor and the Grand Ole Opry, Harold Ross remembrances, whimsical pseudonyms, the classic boardroom cartoon; IV: Terrence Malick, Pierre Le-Tan, TV criticism, the magazine’s indexes, tiny drawings, Fantasticks follies; III: Early editors, short-story rankings, Audax Minor, Talk’s political stance; II: Robert Day cartoons, where New Yorker readers are, obscure departments, The Complete New Yorker, the birth of the TOC, the World War II “pony edition”; I: A. J. Liebling, Spots, office typewriters, Trillin on food, the magazine’s first movie review, cartoon fact checking.

Q. When did The New Yorker start publishing letters to the editor? Did it publish letters in any form before that?

Erin writes: The Letters to the Editor department has had several incarnations at the magazine. In the twenties and thirties, the magazine published occasional letters to the editor, but no consistent weekly column from readers. These early letters were usually quite brief and appeared under headings like “The Amateur Reporter” or “Our Captious Readers.” Some of them were actually parodies written by New Yorker staffers under pseudonyms; a typical example is this excerpt from a letter, written by “Rye Face,” in the March 13, 1926, issue:

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A bimonthly column in which Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey, The New Yorker’s head librarians, answer your questions about the magazine’s past and present. Click here to e-mail your own questions for Jon and Erin’s consideration. Illustration by Lara Tomlin.

Previously in Ask the Librarians: IV: Terrence Malick, Pierre Le-Tan, TV criticism, the magazine’s indexes, tiny drawings, Fantasticks follies; III: Early editors, short-story rankings, Audax Minor, Talk’s political stance; II: Robert Day cartoons, where New Yorker readers are, obscure departments, The Complete New Yorker, the birth of the TOC, the World War II “pony edition”; I: A.J. Liebling, Spots, office typewriters, Trillin on food, the magazine’s first movie review, cartoon fact checking.

Q. How does The New Yorker collect the newspaper clippings with the funny typos and malapropisms?

Jon writes: The clippings, which have been appearing in the magazine since its first year of publication, are called newsbreaks. They are submitted to The New Yorker by its readers and also gathered by members of the magazine’s staff. They were originally used to fill up leftover column inches at the end of stories, but quickly became a popular department in their own right. By the early 1930s, readers were sending in as many as a thousand newsbreaks a week; at that time, the magazine also employed staff members whose duties included scanning the daily newspapers for potential breaks.

The writer most closely associated with newsbreaks is E.B. White. Harold Ross gave White a batch of newsbreaks as a test before hiring him,

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A bimonthly column in which The New Yorker’s head librarians, Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey, answer your questions about the magazine’s past and present. Read the third, second and first columns here; e-mail your own questions for Jon and Erin’s consideration. Illustration by Lara Tomlin.

Q. I’ve read that the filmmaker Terrence Malick’s first occupation, along with teaching philosophy at M.I.T., was writing for The New Yorker. Did he write under a pseudonym, and what kinds of articles did he write?

Erin writes: Terrence Malick (who directed The New World and Badlands, among others) did indeed write for The New Yorker, but his byline never appeared in the magazine. His only article for us was a “Notes and Comment” piece on the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., co-written with Jacob Brackman and published in the April 13, 1968, issue. Neither the Comment nor the Talk of the Town section were signed by the writers in those days, so it is easy to see how this piece might have escaped the notice of Malick fans.

Malick and Brackman’s Comment offers a poignant first-person account of the immediate days after the assassination:

[B]y Sunday—Palm Sunday—things had changed. As marchers gathered,
twenty abreast and eventually seven dense blocks long, at 145th Street and Seventh Avenue, and as they marched…black and white, arms linked, down Seventh Avenue, there was a sense that the non-violent, freed ever so slightly by the President’s speech of last week from the dividing pressure of Vietnam, were returning in force to civil rights…. The march was informal—no marshals and no leaders…. Little boys standing at the entrance to [Central] Park put their feet in the line of march, as though testing the water, and then joined in…. The Mall, by the time the marchers got to it, was filled with a crowd several times the size of the march itself…. We stood on the hill in back of the Mall and watched the two crowds merge. They did so almost silently, and totally, in great waves…and [from the distance] it was hard to tell who was black and who was white.

After his brief stint at The New Yorker, Malick earned his MFA from the AFI Conservatory, and, in 1973, Warner Bros. released Badlands, which was widely admired. The following year, The New Yorker’s movie critic, Pauline Kael, panned the film in the magazine. (“The movie can be summed up: mass-culture banality is killing our souls and making everybody affectless. ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ said the same thing without all this draggy art.”) According to Ben Yagoda’s About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (2000), William Shawn was unhappy with Kael’s review, protesting that Malick was “like a son” to him. Her response? “Tough shit, Bill.” (continued)

A bimonthly column by The New Yorker’s head librarians, Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey. Illustration by Lara Tomlin. Read the August and July columns here, and e-mail your own questions for Jon and Erin’s consideration.
  

Q. For the very first years of the magazine, how did the editors solicit pieces? Did they advertise anywhere?
 
Jon writes: Ben Yagoda notes in his book About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made that no fewer than 282 writers contributed at least one piece to The New Yorker in 1925, its first year of publication. This number illustrates how unsettled the magazine’s editorial staff was in its early life, but it may also be a little misleading.

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A bimonthly column by The New Yorker's head librarians, Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey. Illustration by Lara Tomlin; all other images courtesy of The New Yorker. Read last month's column here; submit new questions for consideration via email to Emdashes.


Q. When did Robert Day start drawing for The New Yorker? For how long? How many drawings were published, and do you have a favorite?

Erin writes: Robert Day, a longtime cartoonist and cover artist at the magazine, began contributing to The New Yorker in September of 1931. Prior to joining the magazine, Day had been a freelance cartoonist at the New York Herald Tribune. In a career at the magazine that spanned forty-five years, from 1931 to 1976, he published nearly eighteen hundred cartoons and eight covers.

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