Yesterday’s mail included two large boxes of New Yorker materials, given to the Spill archives, courtesy of a donor who wishes to remain anonymous.
The gift included the entire run of The New Yorker pony editions, from September 1943 through December 1946. Up til yesterday the Spill archives had only the full run from 1945 (in one bound volume)* and some issues from other years. Looking through the run, from first issue to last I was struck (once again) by the beauty and graphic strength of the magazine’s covers in those years.
Over time I’ll post some of the rest of the pieces that have come this way. For now, here’s what you see up top of this post: Rebuque From Dubuque, a hard cover book produced by The New Yorker‘s business department in 1940. Until yesterday, I’d never seen a copy before (I always came up empty-handed searching for an image of the book’s cover online, and never saw one for sale). Rebuque is mentioned in several New Yorker-centric books (Kunkel’s must-read Genius In Disguise and Yagoda’s About Town); do an online search and you’ll find there’s a copy listed as part of Carl Sandburg’s library.
As someone once said (Sandburg?), “You don’t see many of these anymore.”
Size-wise, at 10 1/4″ x 14″, it’s similar, but slightly smaller than We’ll Show You The Town** (12″ x 18 1/2″), another book produced by The New Yorker business department.
Here are two spreads from the book, just to give you an idea of content.
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*
An entire year of New Yorker pony editions from 1945 in one bound volume.
The pony editions were smaller versions of the magazine, six by nine inches, given free to servicemen and servicewomen. The pony editions were not exact duplicates of the regular editions of the magazine — they carried no advertising and editorial content was juggled. One striking difference: the back cover was a full page cartoon. According to Thomas Kunkel in his Ross biography Genius In Disguise, these editions began appearing in September of 1943 and were discontinued shortly after the end of the war. I’ve never seen another bound volume. Has anyone?
**
We’ll Show You The Town
In 1934 The New Yorker produced this book to remind advertisers of the magazine’s ability to “reach 120,000 alert and active Metropolitans.” The book stands 18 1/4? high and a foot and a quarter inch wide, with 52 pages of text and black-and-white photographs depicting New Yorkers (mostly) at play.