The Tilley Watch Online, The Week Of October 10-17, 2022
An end of the week listing of New Yorker artists whose work has appeared on newyorker.com features
The Daily Cartoon: Mads Horwath & Brendan Loper (a duo effort), Zoe Si, Robert Leighton, John O’Brien, J.A.K..
Daily Shouts: Sarah Kempa, Ali Solomon.
Barry Blitt’s Kvetchbook: “Liz Truss’s Official Portrait Goes Up”
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Did you ever wonder how Eustace Tilley came to be called Eustace Tilley? (Tilley is the fellow who appeared on Rea Irvin’s cover of the very first New Yorker). In 1925, New Yorker writer, Corey Ford, was asked by the magazine’s founder and first editor, Harold Ross to do a series of “promotion ads to fill the goddam inside cover.” (advertising dollars were scarce in the magazine’s earliest months).
What Ford and Rea Irvin came up with was “The Making of a Magazine” a 20 part series that “took the reader on a tour of the vast organization of The New Yorker.” New Yorker artist Johan Bull illustrated the pieces, picturing Tilley as a recurring character supervising all aspects of the magazine’s production. Ford came up with the name “Eustace Tilley.”
” ‘Tilley’ was the maiden name of an aunt, and I chose ‘Eustace’ because it sounded euphonious.”
— from Corey Ford’s The Time of Laughter, published in 1967 by Little Brown. p.120
