The news that Al Ross passed away last week got me to thinking about his start at The New Yorker, way way back in the issue of November 27, 1937, when he was twenty-five years old. This morning I went to our cabinet full of bound New Yorkers, brought out the volume from late 1937 and began paging through
Read moreTag: Rea Irvin
Tilley loading
Above: a glimpse of the first New Yorker cover. Ever since Tina Brown broke the sixty-nine year string of unbroken appearances by Rea Irvin’s Eustace Tilley on the anniversary issue in 1994 by running R. Crumb’s Eustace Elvis, there’s always been, for me, some nail biting in early February about whether the real Eustace will show up on
Read moreThe New Yorker’s Art Meeting: A Potted History
It’s tempting to believe that the structure of The New Yorker’s Art Department arrived fully formed in 1924 when Harold Ross, with his wife Jane Grant began pulling together his dream magazine. But of course, such was not the case. What we know for certain is that once the first issue was out, Ross and several of
Read moreWolcott Gibbs and New Yorker Cartoons
Of all the duties Wolcott Gibbs attended to during his thirty-one years at The New Yorker (and his duties were many: editor, writer, theater critic), his relationship to the magazine’s cartoonists (or “artists” as the magazine calls them) is probably the least examined. When Gibbs began at The New Yorker, working under Katharine Angell (later, after marrying E.B. White,
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