Everybody’s Looking for Something
I remember my first big “wow!” book discovery: a copy of The New Yorker Album (its first cartoon collection, published in 1928) sitting on a shelf in a used bookstore in Georgetown, D.C.. After finding that Album I returned to the very same store, whenever I was in D.C., hoping for lightning to strike twice (i.e., finding another hard-to-find title) but no such luck. Over the years, haunting used bookstores has almost always resulted in finding something to add to the library, but several titles remain elusive. So here are the top two books in the No Such Luck (Yet) Club. Both of these are available online, but at a high price. It’s always been more fun (and far far less expensive) for me to discover books at what I’d like to think of as a “reasonable” price, sitting on a shelf in a used bookstore than to break the piggy bank. I’m keeping the faith that one day I’ll intersect with at least one of these titles.
As you can see, both books are from the earliest days of The New Yorker. Something Different is one of the select few hardcovers produced by The New Yorker for advertisers (the magazine produced way more paperbacks). The other book collects Corey Fords series “The Making Of A Magazine.” It ran in the magazine’s earliest (and leanest) years as sort of a placeholder for much needed advertising.
Left: Something Different. “An Exhibit of 80 Advertisements Which Have Appeared From Time to Time in The New Yorker.” 1927.
Below: The Making Of A Magazine. 1926.
Bizarrely, lightning struck twice for me. There was once a used bookstore in very downtown Brooklyn where there should not have been a bookstore. Sometime in the late 70s I found the first New Yorker collection there. I returned several months later and found a second copy of that same collection along with a run of the first several subsequent collections. The next time I went back, the store was closed.
There’s a copy of Something Different at By Books Alone in Woodstock. $155!
Only $130 more than I’d be willing to pay (I do love a bargain, and I can be annoyingly patient).