As I’ve entered my 49th year of contributing to The New Yorker I’ve become slightly more interested in knowing what I’ve been up to, drawings-wise, for all these years. I’ve always kept a list of what I’ve sold to the magazine, and for a while, I even kept track of when those drawings were published. But the latter part slipped away sometime back.
There was also a period when I dutifully slipped tear sheets of every one of my published New Yorker drawings into clear plastic 3 ring binder sleeves and then added said sleeves to black binders. It was my home version of what The New Yorker once did for all contributors: add their work to the black binders kept in the magazine’s library. Here’s a photo of a few “official” binders in the magazine’s library:
The other day, when I pulled the most recent home version binder down off the shelf, I noticed that the last tear sheet I’d added was dated October 20, 2008. I’ve no idea why the archiving ended that week, that year.
Below: several of the home version black binders; the one on the far right contains the October 20, 2008 drawing.
And so, with this new year, already into its Valentine’s Day period, I’ve made it my business to try and bring things up to date. I liken the experience to going through an old album of family photos and recalling this person, or that.