Pardon this weedsy excursion. I was looking through the newyorker.com archive of back issues when I spied a beautiful Alajalov cover (below) for the issue of October 19, 1946. It made me want to look through the entire issue.
Leafing through entire issues always produces something of interest: an ad, a “spot” drawing, a cartoon, a written piece — well, you get the idea. But this issue — as it appears using the online archive — has something I’d never seen before:
A Perry Barlow drawing that appears on page 23…
…also appears on page 25:
My first instinct was to grab the bound New Yorker volume containing that issue so I could page through the real deal (an actual copy of the magazine).
Well, surprise, surprise…page 23 the issue in this bound volume does not show the Barlow drawing — page 23 contains The Talk Of The Town (!). The Perry Barlow drawing appears on page 25. A further puzzlement: on page 27 of the online issue there’s a John O’Hara story (“Ellie”). No cartoon appears on the page. In the bound issue, there’s a Helen Hokinson drawing (“Ellie” begins on page 29).
I could go on and on noting discrepancies (within the layout), but I’ll cut to the chase and say that the online issue has 116 pages. The actual issue, 136. The good news, cartoon-wise, is that other than the missing Hokinson drawing in the online archive issue, all the other cartoons in the issues match.
To end on less anxious note, I mentioned up front how there was always something of interest in every issue…this issue contains a classic Sam Cobean cartoon:
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Sam Cobean’s A-Z Entry:
Sam Cobean Born, December 28, 1913, Gettysburg, Penn. Died, July 2, 1951, Watkins Glen, New York. NYer work: 1944 -1951. Collections: Cobean’s Naked Eye (Harper Bros.,1950), the Cartoons of Cobean (Harper & Bros.,1952).
The online archive’s scan of the issue of October 19, 1946 is evidently a hybrid, containing pages from both the shorter national edition sent far and wide and the longer metropolitan edition that included some additional editorial content and advertising of interest only to the five boroughs and environs. You have pointed out such discrepancies in the past, for example in your post of March 1, 2020. The New Yorker’s file copies of this issue must contain both the metropolitan and national editions or fragments thereof, and whoever performed the scan inadvertently included duplicate pages with different page numbers. I would guess that the missing Hokinson drawing might have been sacrificed so the rest of the editorial content could fit into the allotted 116 pages, although one would have to examine an intact copy of the national edition to verify this.