It snowed yet again here this morning in the Hudson Valley. A good opportunity to (once again) take a stab at organizing one of the Spill’s archive rooms. It’s been a long and semi-fruitful quest to arrange things so I know where to find them. Yesterday I dealt with piles of loose copies of The New Yorker, arranging them by their respective years.
Funny to me that there seems to be nearly a full year from 1971, and hardly anything from 1972 (I’ve only put them in piles by year — the next step is putting each pile in chronological order).
I don’t recall where all these issues came from — there are too many sources to remember (friends, Ebay, colleagues, used book stores, yard sales, junk shops. Then there was the time, decades ago when a Hudson, NY bookseller invited me to his home after I asked about loose copies of The New Yorker. He opened his overhead garage door, revealing what looked to be thousands of loose copies stored in plastic milk crates. I packed every inch of my Ford Escort with boxes of Harold Ross’s comic weekly (I’ve yet to completely organize them).
What’s really fun about all this sorting is seeing the covers again. Occasionally I’d come across a cover that I had to put aside in a “special” pile — it was too wonderful to bury in a large stack. Below are three of those issues put aside… (l-r, Arthur Getz, Jack Ziegler, Saul Steinberg). Three very different sensibilities, all welcomed by the then art editors. Back then the art editor edited all of the magazine’s art: covers, cartoons, spots, illustrations (James Geraghty was art editor for the Getz cover, Lee Lorenz for the Steinberg cover and Jack Ziegler’s one-and-only cover). Three different sensibilities, and, more or as important (to me anyway): all three were also cartoonists. The magazine’s cartoonists provided the majority of covers in the pre-Tina Brown age (her roughly six year reign began in the Fall of 1992).
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Bonus blurry photo…
Here’s a photo I posted years ago showing an organizing day for much older New Yorkers.
