Lincoln Center’s “A View Of The World”
I came across this poster online today. My first thought was: geez, even Lincoln Center got in on the Steinberg “View Of The World” phenomenon. I then reread the pertinent passages from Deirdre Bair’s Saul Steinberg: A Biography to help jog my memory of the details surrounding Steinberg’s ultra-famous New Yorker cover; if you have a copy of the book, you’ll find the meat of the tale on pages 461-465. Reading that section, you’ll discover just how difficult it was for Steinberg to see so many (soooooo many!) knock-offs of his work (Ian Frazier wrote: “The ubiquitous knockoffs…vexed him like horseflies.”).
For some reason, I thought Ms. Bair had mentioned Steinberg eventually turning the corner, and finding the knock-offs perhaps slightly more interesting than terribly annoying. Not finding that in her biography, I went to Joel Smith’s Steinberg At The New Yorker, where I found what I had remembered. Both books recall Steinberg’s lawsuit against Columbia Pictures for their Moscow On The Hudson advertisement. According to Smith, Steinberg “earned a major settlement.” Using a Steinberg letter to Aldo Buzzi as his source, Smith wrote: “With his point made and honor salvaged, Steinberg regarded the undiminishing tide of rip-offs with some indulgence, even entertaining the idea of anthologizing the cover’s ‘best falsifications.'”
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The Tilley Watch Online, The Week Of August 28 – September 1, 2023
An end of the week listing of New Yorker artists whose work has appeared on newyorker.com features
The Daily Cartoon: Brooke Bourgeois, Anjali Chandrashekar, Jeremy Nguyen, Paul Noth, Sarah Kempa.
Daily Shouts: Ali Fitzgerald.
Barry Blitt’s Kvetchbook: “The Indicted Ex-President’s Contemptuous Glare.”
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An Interesting Bound Volume
I check in daily on New Yorker bound volumes listed on Ebay. In recent years it’s more window shopping than buying. Prices of these volumes have soared, and I do mean soared. There are now plenty of volumes listed for hundreds of dollars apiece — $300.00 or $400.00 a volume is common (well under $100.00 used to be the norm). But this post is not about prices, it’s about a volume that just turned up that has a “different” binding.
To the left is a volume containing issues April 1, 1933 through June 24, 1933. There’s a handmade look to the binding itself, and of course the inked-in lettering is homemade. If I saw this in bookstore and it cost far far far less than the asking price of $422.75, I’d buy it in an instant, as much for the curious binding as for the terrific issues it holds.
I wonder if this volume matched the others in the library where it once resided. It’s possible it was part of a personal library. In the scans of the issues shown on Ebay, there are no library markings. The only non-New Yorker information is this small sticker on the inside cover.
By the way, a typical bound volume looks like this:
Or, as in the case of this one (still listed on Ebay) holding the magazine’s first 19 issues, they sometimes show their age:
