“And We Won’t Aim To Please”
In this year of celebrating The New Yorker‘s centennial I think it’s a good idea, every so often, to go way way back to the very beginnings of the magazine. As incredible as it may seem, the below appeared in the second issue of The New Yorker, dated February 28, 1925 (in the column, Of All Things).
Written by Harold Ross, the magazine’s founder and first editor, the declaration returned with different wording from time-to-time over the years (in other words, it wasn’t a passing fancy).
Not giving “the people what they want” is essential to understanding the magazine’s lure (for some of us). Here’s William Shawn, writing sixty years later in The Talk Of The Town (the issue of April 22, 1985):
I’d be a liar if I said that the founding editor’s declaration (and his successor’s) wasn’t bent out of shape during Tina Brown’s editorship — she chased the buzzy “cutting edge” carrot stick. But that was then. I cannot speak to any areas of The New Yorker other than the cartoons, and what I can say is this: how I work, and why I work, is barely any different from how and why I began working for The New Yorker in the first place, nearly half a century ago. Recently, in another place, I mentioned that John Updike called The New Yorker a “sheltering place.” The magazine has certainly been that for me, its very existence allowing me to go to work every morning with the impulse to draw as I please. It’s remarkable really that after all this time, there is this place, The New Yorker itself, that patiently awaits our work, not knowing what to expect. As Emma Allen, the current cartoon editor, wrote in a popular New Yorker piece, “I’m interested in what is tickling you.”