The Tilley Watch Online, The Week Of October 14-18, 2024
An end of the week listing of New Yorker artists whose work has appeared on newyorker.com features
The Daily Cartoon: Amanda Chung, Paul Noth, Ellis Rosen, Ali Solomon, (the duo of) Evan Lian and Evan Allgood.
Shouts & Murmurs: Eugenia Viti…“Nonalcoholic Ways To Unwind, Showcased By Famous Painitngs”
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The New Yorker, Bound & Unbound
I’ve been gathering back copies of The New Yorker for a long long time. In the earliest days, before bound copies became my favorite means of collecting, finding single issues was like finding gold. The biggest haul was in the 1980s, came about from a visit to a used bookstore in Hudson, New York. I discovered a few single issues in the back room of the shop, and while paying for them, the owner (an elderly fellow who once had a bookstore in Manhattan) offered that he had many more copies at his home.
We set a date, I arrived at his home; he lifted his garage door, revealing a mountain of plastic milk crates, filled with old New Yorkers. I bought as many as I could stuff into my car (I don’t think he wanted very much money for them — perhaps he was happy that so much storage space was freed-up. I may have paid no more than $80.00 for hundreds of copies). That purchase became the anchor of the Spill‘s single issue collection.
As you can see in the above photo of some of the single issues, I’ve tried to keep the magazines orderly, arranged by year, and within the piles, in chronological orderĀ It’s a good feeling to suddenly need to see an issue and be able to go right to it. Such was the case when I had a desire some years ago to photograph all the Eustace Tilley issues in the library: I just plucked them, one by one, from their respective pile (after photographing them, I decided they needed to stay together; they no longer reside in piles):
Years after the big garage haul, the idea of acquiring bound issues became attractive to me. It’s a lot of fun sitting with a large (usually) heavy book, browsing through several months worth of Harold Ross’s “comic weekly.” In the early days of Ebay, bound volumes of the magazine were relatively inexpensive (there are still some to be found that aren’t sky-high). The Spill bound collection is in fairly good shape from the mid 1930s up through the 1960s (many of the single issues are from the 60s). The magazine’s earliest years continue to elude me (if they did appear, they’d most likely elude my budget as well). Should an opportunity arrive (meaning that an inexpensive volume turns up online) I continue to fill in gaps. Just today I bought a volume that includes issues from the first two months of 1977, the year I finally broke into The New Yorker.