Gathering Up The Tilleys
Some years back, I fanned out the Spill‘s collection of Rea Irvin Eustace Tilley New Yorker anniversary issues on the floor, then stood on a chair, looked down at them and took the above photo. I’ve always loved how the photo turned out. Now thanks to the magazine’s 100th anniversary year, there are three more Tilley covers to add to the arrangement (there were four special centenary issues published in 2025 but only three included Mr. Irvin’s famous cover; the issue of May 12 & 19 for some reason did not. Below are the three:
Here’s the original cover:
Below: “Tilley Over Time,” a piece I wrote for The New Yorker that appeared in 2008 as part of a month-long online stint I did for the magazine:
With The New Yorker’s eighty-third anniversary upon us, I decided that it was a good time to get out my anniversary-issue collection and take a look at how Rea Irvin’s Eustace Tilley cover has and hasn’t changed over the years. Keeping in mind that I’m missing a few original issues (1926 through 1931, to be precise), that still leaves seventy-seven issues to peruse.
Other than a subtle tightening up of the New Yorker typeface over time, with the edges first smoothing out in 1964 and finally becoming razor-sharp in 1981, the first thing I noticed, after laying all the issues out on the floor chronologically, was the difference in height, beginning with the 1942 issue and ending with the issue of 1945. By 1946, the anniversary issue had returned to its prewar size. The next shortening came in 1981, then again in 1985, and again in 1987, where we are now.
Then there’s the matter of the disappearing clouds. Rea Irvin’s pink clouds floating in from either edge of the cover and along the top appeared from 1925 through 1981. They completely disappeared in 1982. (They first returned, albeit in a roundabout way, in 1996, when R. O. Blechman included them on his “Eustacia Tilley” cover.) The original clouds were finally reunited with Irvin’s original Tilley in 2001.
Tilley himself remained on the anniversary cover for sixty-eight uninterrupted years, from 1925 through 1993. In 1994, R. Crumb’s “Elvis Tilley” appeared, and was followed in 1995 by the gold Tilley cover, celebrating the magazine’s seventieth anniversary.
In the late nineties, two other Tilley variations appeared: Blechman’s aforementioned 1996 “Eustacia Tilley” and Art Spiegelman’s “Dick Tilley,” in 1997. The seventy-fifth Anniversary Issue, in 2000, featured one of William Wegman’s famous dogs done up as Tilley. In 2001, the original Tilley resurfaced, clouds intact; he then reappeared for each anniversary, until 2005, when Chris Ware took a multi-panel crack at him. In 2006, the original Tilley once again returned, but this year’s anniversary cover puts a political spin on him, and readers offered their own variations. One thing about Tilley: when he leaves, he never goes far, and he always comes back.
[Update to the piece: “classic” Tilley returned in 2009, 2011, and then in February of this year, albeit with the added “100”]