Cast of Characters Cover: Thurber, St. Clair McKelway, Gibbs, Maloney & Parker; More from A Case For Pencils

It being The New Yorker’s 90th anniversary, how fitting that the cover has been revealed for Thomas Vinciguerra’s Cast of Characters: Wolcott Gibbs, E.B. White, James Thurber, and The Golden Age of The New Yorker. Quite a crew gathered for a book party at the Algonquin Hotel in 1938: seated, left to right, Fritz Foord (who ran Foord’s Sanitarium in

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Eustace Tilley Bids Adieu, Again

Eustace Tilley (via Bruce McCall) bids adieu to Times Square on the cover of this week’s New Yorker.  The magazine begins work in its new headquarters at 1 World Trade this week.               The New Yorker’s top-hatted mascot bid goodbye once before, back in August of 1937, when Otto Soglow gave us Tilley, not

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Books of Interest

 _______________________________________________________________________________ Following in the footsteps of The 40s: The Story of a Decade comes The 50s: The Story of a Decade (Both edited by Henry Finder, both published by Random House). No cover image available. The book will be out in September.   If the 50s is anything like the 40s, we can expect classic New Yorker fiction, nonfiction and

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Did Arno Write Thurber?

  A lot of material accumulates when you’ve been researching a subject for fifteen years. In my case, much of it was placed in a ramshackle assortment of black binders pictured here.  There was also a binder [not pictured] labeled “Next” that contained a very very  long checklist of things that needed looking into. The more I uncovered about Arno,

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