Latest Addition To The Spill Library: A Volume of Bound New Yorkers, September 1944 – November 1944
The WWII years on my homemade chart of bound New Yorkers is s-l-o-w-l-y filling in (I wasn’t able to match the blue I’ve used in the past to fill in the issues acquired.Note to self: time to make new chart). As noted here the other day, bound volumes of the New Yorker have gone sky-high, price wise. I was lucky to have found this one not quite as high as an elephants eye, price wise.
Just over half the covers in this volume are war-themed. I haven’t done a study of the cartoons; just by eyeballin’ them, I’d say the percentage that refer to the war was in that vicinity as well. It should be noted that the Fall of 1944 marked the beginning of Peter Arno’s strike for more pay, and for being provided “the right kind of ideas.” From the issue of August 12, 1944 through March 2, 1946, there were no Arno drawings in The New Yorker. Readers used to full page Arno drawings or any Arno drawings or covers, would be out of luck. After so much Arno in the magazine’s pages from mid-to-late 1925 on, it is very odd to go from issue to issue without turning a page to find an Arno [his work did appear in some of the “pony editions” created for our Armed Forces. These drawings were reprints of earlier New Yorker work].
Looking through the October 28th issue, I came upon these two pieces shown here.
David Lardner‘s obituary, written by Wolcott Gibbs (according to The New Yorker‘s database), stands in stark contrast to the magazine’s mention of Arno’s latest book.
I look at these issues from long ago as time capsules. Especially with the war issues, I refer to online timelines to help me understand what was going on at the time these issues were published. It’s not entirely necessary to do this — the cartoons and writing do a very good job of wrapping the reader in the moment. I often wonder what folks 80 years or so from 2023 will think of our times as seen through the covers and cartoons of the 2023 issues of The New Yorker.