We are sure you will be relieved to learn that we have finally received our copy of the 80th anniversary New Yorker. We have not had much chance to crack it, beyond the usual elements—the table of contents and Talk of the Town, although we noticed a long memoir by Roger Angell about his stepfather, E.B. White, for which we have secretly and selfishly prayed for years now. (We’ll get to it when our own gala anniversary issue is finished, today or tomorrow—with any luck.)
We have several initial impressions which we wish to dash off right now before we get back to the coal mine. First, has anyone ever done a study about who gets their issue of the New Yorker first among we the rustics here in subscriber country? We are convinced that the tonier neighborhoods of the Twin Cities get their copies before we do. In fact, we feel like we are among the last to hear that particular plop on the porch, just before the dog goes ballistic for the mail carrier.
It is probably not so much a conspiracy as a broad-ranging effort to “platform” the circulation, first to the people who matter: the tastemakers, the buyers of diamonds, jaguars, and durable goods, the poet-philosophers, the small-engine repair shops, the dental hygienists, the art students, the barristas at national coffee chains, the city impound lot, the outhouses of non-winterized cabins, and finally—The Rake’s front porch.
One other quick point—coming! We’re coming, hold your horses—we enjoy it when The New Yorker dwells self-consciously on its own history. In recent years, this has typically been expressed as a trip into the archives to dig up great old covers and to assign art essays to contemporary staff writers. When these sorts of things get published as separate stand-alones, we really get enthused; here, they’ve salted the issue with this material.
There are not very many periodicals that can get away with publishing art covers—even the New Yorker must bow to the marketplace and wear an explanatory wrap on its newstand copies, a kind of terry cloth robe bearing like initials the most prestigious bylines in the present issue—Harold Ross would be appalled, of course. The Stranger (great) and Chronogram (so so—boy would we have loved the chance to edit this high-potential placeholder, in a parallel lifetime) are the only others that come immediately to mind—but neither of these offer pure art covers either, being slightly tainted by the irresistible urge to constantly bait readers with words, banners, and suchlike crumbs of bread leading into the wilderness of words within.
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