A Weighty and Whimsical Century of The New Yorker's Archives

New York Times

05-03-2025

The archives of The New Yorker, housed at the New York Public Library, consist of more than 2,500 boxes of manuscripts, letters, page proofs, cartoons, art, photographs and memos. They are studded with the celebrated names — E.B. White, J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Rachel Carson — that filled this most mythologized of magazines, and helped transform American literary life.
And then there are the 'Distasteful Ads.'
A folder with that label holds examples like one for 'wonderfully expensive children's knits from Italy,' or another for men's socks, with a mildly racy illustration and the tagline 'Go to Any Length.'
That one struck William Shawn, the magazine's famously fastidious longtime editor, as inappropriate innuendo, and it never appeared. But it's now on view at the library as part of a new exhibition, 'A Century of The New Yorker.'
The show, which runs until February 2026, fills two upstairs galleries at the library's flagship building on Fifth Avenue. It mixes the weighty and the whimsical and is designed to appeal to New Yorker devotees and casual browsers alike.
'The magazine's own style and ethos became an inspiration to us in the way we laid out the show,' Julie Golia, one of the curators, said during a recent tour. 'We really wanted the walls to feel like a page of the magazine.'
To prepare the show, Golia, the library's associate director of manuscripts, archives and rare books, and Julie Carlsen, an assistant curator, spent nearly two years going through the archive and dozens of related collections. They also interviewed past and current New Yorker staff members.
'I was stunned by how much they knew about the magazine's history,' David Remnick, the magazine's editor since 1998, said in an interview. 'I thought I was one of the only lunatics who had read all the books.'
Remnick said he was particularly delighted by surprises like the marked-up sock ad, which he called 'a whisper from a distant past.' So he doesn't similarly pore over such details, rooting out the Not Safe for The New Yorker?
He laughed. 'Not as much as you might think.'
From its founding in 1925, the magazine aimed to be something fresh, irreverent, experimental — 'a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life,' as its first editor, Harold Ross, declared in a prospectus.
'It will be what is commonly called sophisticated,' Ross continued. And 'it will hate bunk.'
The show includes a generous sampling of covers, starting with Rea Irvin's original artwork for the now-famous first cover, with the dandy Eustace Tilley peering at a butterfly through his monocle. (Look closely, and you'll notice that the hand-drawn version of the now-familiar typeface he created is a bit wobbly.)
The curators also dug deep into the archive's 48 boxes of 'spots' (those tiny drawings that have leavened the pages since the magazine's founding), researching some of their uncredited creators. Many, they note, were women and people of color, like E. Simms Campbell, the first known Black artist to contribute to the magazine.
Today, the magazine is an institution, but its early years were precarious. In 1928, when E.B. White expressed reluctance at continuing to contribute, Ross sent him a stern telegram: 'This thing is a movement and you can't resign from movement.'
During World War II, when many staff members were overseas, it had to fight for manpower and even paper. But it was in those years, the exhibition argues, that the magazine established itself as a cultural force, with wartime reportage that flowered most indelibly in John Hershey's 30,000-word story on Hiroshima, which filled an entire issue in August 1946.
The show includes the only known surviving copy with the original white cover band, warning readers about the content behind the seemingly pastoral cover illustration. It's displayed along with a photograph of an early atomic bomb test and a 19th-century woodcut print of Nagasaki.
'This isn't just a story that changed journalism,' Golia said. 'It's a story about a bomb that killed hundreds of thousands of people.'
There are artifacts relating to the magazine's most celebrated contributors and articles: a poster inspired by Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring'; the complete manuscript for Hannah Arendt's 'Eichmann in Jerusalem'; reader mail responding (sometimes angrily) to James Baldwin's 'Letter From a Region of My Mind'; a page of Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood,' marked up by Shawn.
But there are also items bearing traces of the often anonymous clerks, typists, page designers, illustrators and fact-checkers who kept the enterprise humming.
'It makes the magazine so much more relatable when you understand how it's put together,' Carlsen said.
Over the years, some unsung heroes have gotten their flowers, including Eleanor Gould, the magazine's longtime copy editor and grammarian, who once claimed to have identified four grammatical errors in a single three-word sentence. (Some writers took the ministrations of 'Miss Gould' in stride. 'Overruled (and schooled!)/ by Gould!' Cynthia Ozick wrote in a poem mailed back to the magazine. 'In the annals of Disgrace / I take my chastened place.')
But the curators also hail the nameless 'office girls' of 1944, who were overwhelmed by a requirement that they log and describe each of the thousands of manuscripts passing through the mailroom every year.
'Something will have to be done about it immediately, today, or we will lose two of our best girls who are threatening to quit,' Katharine White (the first — and for decades only — female editor on staff) wrote to Ross.
The exhibition includes plenty of amusing evidence of the eternal trench warfare between editors and writers.
'The average contributor to this magazine is semiliterate,' the editor Wolcott Gibbs wrote around 1937, in a tongue-in-cheek memo titled 'Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles.' (Among their failings: 'too damn many adverbs.')
The writers could give as good as they got. In a riposte to Ross's voluminous queries on one article, Margaret Case Harriman defended the word 'brooding' from the charge that it was a mannered 'New Yorker word.' 'Think Abe Lincoln brooded before New Yorker invented the word,' she quipped.
Vladimir Nabokov, writing to Katharine White in 1947, was more absolute. 'It is the principle itself of editing that distresses me,' he wrote. But some writers were less high-minded.
'I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money…,' the fiction writer John O'Hara wrote to Ross in 1939. (O'Hara, Ross noted in pencil at the bottom, 'is the highest paid author on a word basis.')
Alongside the actual journalism, the exhibition also digs into another of the magazine's contributions to literary culture: New Yorker drama.
In 1987, after Shawn was forced out as editor by S.I. Newhouse Jr., the magazine's owner, more than 150 of the magazine's writers and cartoonists signed a letter imploring his replacement, Robert Gottlieb, not to take the job.
The copy in the exhibition came from the papers of Joseph Mitchell, which are also at the library. 'This is not something you find in the magazine's own archives,' Golia noted dryly.
Tina Brown, who succeeded Gottlieb in 1992, appears in a Saul Steinberg caricature (power suit, giant shoulder pads), which hangs above one of her old Rolodexes — open to a contact for the Beastie Boys.
At the time, some of the old guard saw her arrival as the second coming of Genghis Khan. But 'it's fair to say that Tina Brown saved the magazine,' Golia said.
The 'Tina Revolution,' as the show puts it, brought a pop-savvy spirit, cheeky covers, regular photography, new voices (including Remnick, whom Brown hired as a staff writer in 1992) and new themes, including some the magazine had only fitfully engaged.
The show includes the cover for her 1996 'Black in America' issue, produced with the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., and featuring writers like Stanley Crouch, Anna Deavere Smith, Rita Dove and Sapphire. Directly opposite: a marked-up draft from 'Brokeback Mountain,' E. Annie Proulx's 1997 story about two closeted gay cowboys.
In the 21st century, The New Yorker has grown beyond just a print magazine to include a website, a radio show, a festival, podcasts and an Oscar-winning video department. It has also diversified its staff, the show notes, and 'grappled with its own questions of equity.'
The final item is the original art for 'Say Their Names,' Kadir Nelson's cover from June 2020, featuring a silhouette of George Floyd. That may seem a long way from Eustace Tilley. But the show, Golia noted, ends where it started: with a man on a magazine cover.
'We want to leave visitors with a question,' she said. 'What is a New Yorker? Is it still the same?'