Comparing The 2023 Thurber New Yorker Cover & The 1936 New Yorker Cover
The recent big Thurber news was of course the republication of The New Yorker Thurber cover from February 29, 1936, for the The New Yorker issue of September 4, 2023. I thought it would be fun to place an original 1936 issue side-by-side with a 2023 issue to see what we might see:
Besides the size, dates and prices (and even the color) the biggest difference is that we can see the right side of the tree trunk on the 2023 cover. Is this some modern day trickery? No, it’s likely the cut (i.e., the trim) of this particular 1936 cover in the Spill library.
I looked up two other sources to make sure I wasn’t just makin’ stuff up. The copy shown on The New Yorker‘s online digital archive (shown left) is also trimmed.
When I dug out The Complete Book Of Covers From The New Yorker, I found that the image used (it’s given a full page) shows the right side of the tree trunk.
Digging a little deeper into the disappearing side of the tree trunk, I asked Sara Sauers, James Thurber’s granddaughter, if The New Yorker had shot this 2023 cover using the original art…or?
She replied that the Thurber family does not have the original cover. She also sent along a photo of her copy of the “new” cover side-by-side with her 1936 copy. As you see below, she also has a trimmed 1936 issue (it’s not quite as trimmed as the one I have). She also wondered about the pink used in ’23 vs the pink of ’36 (that will be addressed below).
Wanting to know how The New Yorker ended up showing the fuller art for the 2023 cover I asked Francoise Mouly, The New Yorker art editor (she’s in charge of the magazine’s covers), what the magazine’s source was for the 2023 cover. She replied:
“The scan of the 1936 cover that’s in the TNY archives crops the tree (and the height,) but we had a copy of the original cover in our library, so with Genevieve Bormes’s help, we recreated the original. Genevieve also used old letters (and her photoshop skills) to create a hand lettered date and price for the new printing. We also matched the colors more closely to what it was originally.”
Just to be clear, I followed up with a question to Ms. Mouly about “a copy of the original cover in our library” to which she responded:
“What we shot from was of course a printed copy; as a matter of fact, from the Library’s black binders…”
Now about those “black binders”:
This is a photo (by Liza Donnelly) of some of the “black binders” (taken in The New Yorker‘s library in its previous headquarters in Times Square). Every contribution by the magazine’s artists and writers is clipped and pasted in their own binder. If an artist has not contributed many pieces, their work is placed in A-Z binders, you see an example on the bottom shelf: “Writers: A-AT”).
If you contributed a lot, ala the artist and writer James Stevenson, you would have a stack of black binders (this image is a screenshot from the terrif documentary film by Sally Williams,
James Stevenson: Lost and Found).
Now back to Thurber…
I’m going to go out on a (very short) limb and suggest that the image used in The Complete Book Of Covers From The New Yorker — like the Sept, 4th, 2023 image — came from Thurber’s black binder in The New Yorker library. Actually, I can’t imagine where else it would’ve come from, unless there was a mad scramble by the publisher to gather 3,000+ single issue covers that appear in the book (from February 21, 1925 through February 20,1989). Possible, but likely?
Here’s Thurber’s 1936 cover from The Complete Book Of Covers From The New Yorker:
Placing it side-by-side with the 2023 cover (below), it is not an exact match. There is still just a bit more line on the 2023 cover (see the tree root heading to the right, as well as the underside of the branch heading to the right, and the horizon line to the right of the tree trunk).
I’m hoping to get hold of a scan of the actual cover copy in Thurber’s black binder for further comparison (it will appear here when/if I get it). My thinking, until then, is that what we see and what we get is due to production cropping.
Another dangling question:
where is the original art for the Thurber 1936 co
ver? If anyone knows, please contact me through the
Ink Spill Contact button (it looks exactly like this).
— Many many thanks to Sara Sauers and Francoise Mouly for their assistance throughout this adventure.
__________________________________________________________________________
James Thurber’s A-Z Spill Entry:
James Thurber Born, Columbus, Ohio, December 8, 1894. Died 1961, New York City. New Yorker work: 1927 -1961, with several pieces run posthumously. According to the New Yorker’s legendary editor, William Shawn, “In the early days, a small company of writers, artists, and editors — E.B. White, James Thurber, Peter Arno, and Katharine White among them — did more to make the magazine what it is than can be measured.”
Key cartoon collection: The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments (Harper & Bros., 1932). Key anthology (writings & drawings): The Thurber Carnival (Harper & Row, 1945). There have been a number of Thurber biographies. Burton Bernstein’s Thurber (Dodd, Mead, 1975) and Harrison Kinney’s James Thurber: His Life and Times (Henry Holt & Co., 1995) are essential. Website
