In the past couple of years it’s become more and more difficult to find affordable bound volumes of The New Yorker. For some reason, they are, in many cases, now hundreds of dollars per volume, and not $20 or $30 as they were for years when I built up the majority of the Spill‘s collection. The other day when I spotted a volume listed on Ebay at a very reasonable price, I pounced on it. As you can see by the stamp on Steinberg’s fab cover, this volume was once in the Louisville Free Public Library. I’m sorry to see libraries discard bound volumes (I know, I know — space issues and all that) as there’s nothing quite like leafing through the real deal rather than seeing it on a screen. Here’s a look at the Oct. 27th cover by one of the magazine’s great artists, Abe Birnbaum.
Years ago I made a simple grid to help me remember what issues, bound and single, are in the Spill library. Here’s one page showing the years 1963 – 1973. The blue areas are the issues that are bound, while the areas in white show either single issues in the Spill library, or if blank, lack of issues. If there are numbers within blue areas, our library also has those particular (unbound) single issues from that date. The 1960s are filling in nicely, but other decades are a near impossible mountain to climb — especially the 1920s.
Abe Birnbaum’s A-Z Spill entry:
Abe Birnbaum Born, New York City, 1899. Died June 19, 1966, New York City. New Yorker work: 1929 -1974. Mr. Birnbaum began at the New Yorker as a cartoonist, contributing a handful before switching to cover work, of which he produced 141. He also provided spot drawings and illustrations. According to Mr. Birnbaum’s New York Times obit, his work was exhibited at The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Carnegie Institute.