Eustace Tilley
The magazine's first cover illustration, a dandy peering at
a butterfly through a monocle, was drawn by Rea Irvin, the magazine's first art
editor, based on an 1834 caricature of the then Count d'Orsay which appeared as
an illustration in the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.[46] The
gentleman on the original cover, now referred to as "Eustace Tilley",
is a character created by Corey Ford for The New Yorker. The hero of a series
entitled "The Making of a Magazine", which began on the inside front
cover of the August 8 issue that first summer, Tilley was a younger man than
the figure on the original cover. His top hat was of a newer style, without the
curved brim. He wore a morning coat and striped trousers. Ford borrowed Eustace
Tilley's last name from an aunt—he had always found it vaguely humorous.
"Eustace" was selected by Ford for euphony.
The character has become a kind of mascot for The New
Yorker, frequently appearing in its pages and on promotional materials.
Traditionally, Rea Irvin's original Tilley cover illustration is used every
year on the issue closest to the anniversary date of February 21, though on
several occasions a newly drawn variation has been substituted.
The magazine is well known for its illustrated and often
topical covers.
Saul Steinberg's "View of the World from Ninth
Avenue" cover
Saul Steinberg created 85 covers and 642 internal drawings
and illustrations for the magazine. His most famous work is probably its March
29, 1976 cover, an illustration most often referred to as "View of the
World from 9th Avenue", sometimes referred to as "A Parochial New
Yorker's View of the World" or "A New Yorker's View of the
World", which depicts a map of the world as seen by self-absorbed New
Yorkers.
The illustration is split in two, with the bottom half of
the image showing Manhattan's 9th Avenue, 10th Avenue, and the Hudson River
(appropriately labeled), and the top half depicting the rest of the world. The
rest of the United States is the size of the three New York City blocks and is
drawn as a square, with a thin brown strip along the Hudson representing
"Jersey", the names of five cities (Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.;
Las Vegas; Kansas City; and Chicago) and three states (Texas, Utah, and
Nebraska) scattered among a few rocks for the United States beyond New Jersey.
The Pacific Ocean, perhaps half again as wide as the Hudson, separates the
United States from three flattened land masses labeled China, Japan and Russia.
The illustration—humorously depicting New Yorkers'
self-image of their place in the world, or perhaps outsiders' view of New
Yorkers' self-image—inspired many similar works, including the poster for the
1984 film Moscow on the Hudson; that movie poster led to a lawsuit, Steinberg
v. Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., 663 F. Supp. 706 (S.D.N.Y. 1987), which
held that Columbia Pictures violated the copyright that Steinberg held on his
work.
The cover was later satirized by Barry Blitt for the cover
of The New Yorker on October 6, 2008. The cover featured Sarah Palin looking out
of her window seeing only Alaska, with Russia in the far background.
The March 21, 2009 cover of The Economist, "How China
sees the World", is also an homage to the original image, but depicting
the viewpoint from Beijing's Chang'an Avenue instead of Manhattan.
Although its reviews and events listings often focus on the
cultural life of New York City, The New Yorker has a wide audience outside New
York and is read internationally. It is well known for its illustrated and
often topical covers, its commentaries on popular culture and eccentric
Americana, its attention to modern fiction by the inclusion of short stories
and literary reviews, its rigorous fact checking and copy editing, its
journalism on politics and social issues, and its single-panel cartoons
sprinkled throughout each issue.
The New Yorker debuted on February 21, 1925. It was founded
by Harold Ross and his wife, Jane Grant, a New York Times reporter. Ross wanted
to create a sophisticated humor magazine that would be different from
perceivably "corny" humor publications such as Judge, where he had
worked, or the old Life. Ross partnered with entrepreneur Raoul H. Fleischmann
(who founded the General Baking Company to establish the F-R Publishing
Company. The magazine's first offices were at 25 West 45th Street in Manhattan.
Ross edited the magazine until his death in 1951. During the early, occasionally
precarious years of its existence, the magazine prided itself on its
cosmopolitan sophistication. Ross famously declared in a 1925 prospectus for
the magazine: "It has announced that it is not edited for the old lady in
Dubuque."
Although the magazine never lost its touches of humor, it
soon established itself as a pre-eminent forum for serious fiction, essays and
journalism. Shortly after the end of World War II, John Hersey's essay
Hiroshima filled an entire issue. In subsequent decades the magazine published
short stories by many of the most respected writers of the 20th and 21st
centuries, including Ann Beattie, Truman Capote, John Cheever, Roald Dahl,
Mavis Gallant, Geoffrey Hellman, John McNulty, Joseph Mitchell, Alice Munro,
Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Nabokov, John O'Hara, Dorothy Parker, Philip Roth, J.
D. Salinger, Irwin Shaw, James Thurber, John Updike, Eudora Welty, Stephen
King, and E. B. White. Publication of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"
drew more mail than any other story in the magazine's history.
In its early decades, the magazine sometimes published two
or even three short stories a week, but in recent years the pace has remained
steady at one story per issue. While some styles and themes recur more often
than others in its fiction, the stories are marked less by uniformity than by
variety, and they have ranged from Updike's introspective domestic narratives
to the surrealism of Donald Barthelme, and from parochial accounts of the lives
of neurotic New Yorkers to stories set in a wide range of locations and eras
and translated from many languages.[citation needed] Kurt Vonnegut said that
The New Yorker has been an effective instrument for getting a large audience to
appreciate modern literature. Vonnegut's 1974 interview with Joe David Bellamy
and John Casey contained a discussion of The New Yorker's influence:
[T]he limiting factor [in literature] is the reader. No
other art requires the audience to be a performer. You have to count on the
reader's being a good performer, and you may write music which he absolutely
can't perform – in which case it's a bust. Those writers you mentioned and
myself are teaching an audience how to play this kind of music in their heads.
It's a learning process, and The New Yorker has been a very good institution of
the sort needed. They have a captive audience, and they come out every week,
and people finally catch on to Barthelme, for instance, and are able to perform
that sort of thing in their heads and enjoy it.
The non-fiction feature articles (which usually make up the
bulk of the magazine's content) cover an eclectic array of topics. Recent
subjects have included eccentric evangelist Creflo Dollar, the different ways
in which humans perceive the passage of time, and Münchausen syndrome by proxy.
The magazine is notable for its editorial traditions. Under
the rubric Profiles, it publishes articles about notable people such as Ernest
Hemingway, Henry R. Luce and Marlon Brando, Hollywood restaurateur Michael
Romanoff, magician Ricky Jay and mathematicians David and Gregory Chudnovsky.
Other enduring features have been "Goings on About Town", a listing
of cultural and entertainment events in New York, and "The Talk of the
Town", a miscellany of brief pieces—frequently humorous, whimsical or
eccentric vignettes of life in New York—written in a breezily light style, or
feuilleton, although in recent years the section often begins with a serious
commentary. For many years, newspaper snippets containing amusing errors,
unintended meanings or badly mixed metaphors have been used as filler items,
accompanied by a witty retort. There is no masthead listing the editors and
staff. And despite some changes, the magazine has kept much of its traditional
appearance over the decades in typography, layout, covers and artwork. The
magazine was acquired by Advance Publications, the media company owned by
Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr, in 1985, for $200 million when it was earning less
than $6 million a year.
Ross was succeeded as editor by William Shawn (1951–87),
followed by Robert Gottlieb (1987–92) and Tina Brown (1992–98). Among the
important nonfiction authors who began writing for the magazine during Shawn's
editorship were Dwight Macdonald, Kenneth Tynan, and Hannah Arendt; to a
certain extent all three authors were controversial, Arendt the most obviously
so (her Eichmann in Jerusalem reportage appeared in the magazine before it was
published as a book), but in each case Shawn proved an active champion.
Brown's nearly six-year tenure attracted more controversy
than Gottlieb's or even Shawn's, thanks to her high profile (Shawn, by
contrast, had been an extremely shy, introverted figure) and the changes which
she made to a magazine that had retained a similar look and feel for the
previous half-century. She introduced color to the editorial pages (several
years before The New York Times) and photography, with less type on each page
and a generally more modern layout. More substantively, she increased the coverage
of current events and hot topics such as celebrities and business tycoons, and
placed short pieces throughout "Goings on About Town", including a
racy column about nightlife in Manhattan. A new letters-to-the-editor page and
the addition of authors' bylines to their "Talk of the Town" pieces
had the effect of making the magazine more personal. The current editor of The
New Yorker is David Remnick, who succeeded Brown in July 1998.
Tom Wolfe wrote about the magazine: "The New Yorker
style was one of leisurely meandering understatement, droll when in the
humorous mode, tautological and litotical when in the serious mode, constantly
amplified, qualified, adumbrated upon, nuanced and renuanced, until the
magazine's pale-gray pages became High Baroque triumphs of the relative clause
and appository modifier".
Joseph Rosenblum, reviewing Ben Yagoda's About Town, a
history of the magazine from 1925 to 1985, wrote, "... The New Yorker did
create its own universe. As one longtime reader wrote to Yagoda, this was a
place 'where Peter DeVries ... was
forever lifting a glass of Piesporter, where Niccolò Tucci (in a plum velvet
dinner jacket) flirted in Italian with Muriel Spark, where Nabokov sipped tawny
port from a prismatic goblet (while a Red Admirable perched on his pinky), and
where John Updike tripped over the master's Swiss shoes, excusing himself
charmingly'".
As far back as the 1940s the magazine's commitment to
fact-checking was already well known.Yet the magazine played a role in a
literary scandal and defamation lawsuit over two 1990s articles by Janet
Malcolm, who wrote about Sigmund Freud's legacy. Questions were raised about
the magazine's fact-checking process. As of 2010, The New Yorker employs 16
fact checkers. In July 2011, the magazine was sued for defamation in United
States district court for a July 12, 2010 article written by David Grann, but
the case was summarily dismissed.
Since the late 1990s, The New Yorker has used the Internet
to publish current and archived material. It maintains a website with some
content from the current issue (plus exclusive web-only content). Subscribers
have access to the full current issue online, as well as a complete archive of
back issues viewable as they were originally printed. In addition, The New
Yorker's cartoons are available for purchase online. A digital archive of back
issues from 1925 to April 2008 (representing more than 4,000 issues and half a
million pages) has also been issued on DVD-ROMs and on a small portable hard
drive. More recently, an iPad version of the current issue of the magazine has
been released.
In its November 1, 2004 issue, the magazine for the first
time endorsed a presidential candidate, choosing to endorse Democrat John Kerry
over incumbent Republican George W. Bush. This was continued in 2008 when the
magazine endorsed Barack Obama over John McCain,in 2012 when it endorsed Obama
over Mitt Romney, and in 2016 when it endorsed Hillary Clinton over Donald
Trump.
The True History of Eustace Tilley
BY R.C. HARVEY AUG 31, 2017
Alfred D’Orsay was not the sort of fellow I’d invite into my
home for a drink, dinner, and deep philosophical conversation in the Hare Tonic
Library over a vintage bandy. Reading between the lines of even a short
biography (such as St. Wikipedia’s), we learn that Comte d’Orsay, while an
amateur painter and sculptor of modest attainment, was a calculating social
climber and parasite of somewhat more conspicuous success. He was the sort of
fellow who would make off with his host’s wife. And in fact, that’s exactly
what he did—with an eye on both her charms and her fortune.
Born in Paris in 1801, son of a Bonapartist general and the
illegitimate daughter of a duke and an adventuress, D’Orsay entered the French
army of the restored Bourbon monarchy at the age of 20 and while in London
attending the coronation of George IV, he became acquainted with the first Earl
of Blessington and his wife Marguerite, reputedly forming a menage a trois,
which may account for at least some of his attraction for George Gordon, Lord
Byron, who was rumored to have indulged in a similarly illicit affair with his
half sister, Augusta. Byron praised Comte d’Orsay’s “gifts and accomplishments”
and his knowledge of men and manners and his prowess of observation. And
probably envied the count’s domestic arrangements.
At 26, D’Orsay married Blessington’s 15-year-old daughter
Harriet by a previous wife, hoping to secure a claim to the Blessington estate,
but when Blessington died two years later, his widow took up with D’Orsay, and
the two of them established a fashionable salon for the literary and artistic
society of London. Meanwhile, Harriet, finally having had enough after a decade
of decadence, separated from D’Orsay in 1838, effecting a settlement in which,
in exchange for her paying off 100,000 pounds of his debt (about $150,000 at
today’s exchange rate, but only a portion of what he owed), he gave up any
claim to the Blessington fortune.
At his salon, D’Orsay met Benjamin Disraeli and Edward
Bulwer-Lyton, other young dandies of the day, and they became such friends that
Disraeli asked him to be his second when it appeared he would fight a duel with
the son of an Irish agitator. D’Orsay, however, declined the dubious honor on
the grounds of being a foreigner.
Comte d’Orsay went bankrupt in 1849 and returned to Paris;
the widow Blessington (Marguerite), after selling all her possessions, followed
him there but died a few weeks later, leaving him heartbroken and without
means. He dabbled in portrait painting, but as a Bonapartist, he probably
banked on his acquaintance with Prince Louis Napoleon, who had been elected
President of France in 1848, subsequently, in 1852, through a coup d’etat,
establishing himself as Emperor Napoleon III. Leery of D’Orsay’s dependability,
Napoleon appointed the count to the harmless post of Director of the
Beaux-Arts, but D’Orsay died of a spinal infection just a few days after the
appointment was announced.
In his day, D’Orsay was a model of men’s fashion but
scarcely a model of decorum and propriety. With his appetites and indulgences,
he may, however, have been right at home in New York’s Roaring Twenties. In
fact, by a circuitous route, he was exactly that. Which brings us, by the sort
of oblique roundabout manner of the writers of articles in The New Yorker, to
Eustace Tilley, the actual subject of this posting.
Eustace Tilley is the name given to the 19th century
boulevardier languidly inspecting a passing butterfly through his monocle on
the cover of the first issue of The New Yorker dated February 21, 1925. The
same picture appeared on the magazine’s anniversary issue every year until
1994, when a new editor at The New Yorker, Tina Brown, suddenly violated
hide-bound tradition by replacing Tilley with a 20th century version of the
boulevardier, a chronic slacker and layabout drawn by Robert Crumb. Nothing was ever the same at The New Yorker
since.
Crumb’s drawing arrived at the magazine without explanation,
said art director Francoise Mouly. “We noticed that it showed the view in front
of our old offices on 42nd Street, but we didn’t realize that it was also a
play on Eustace Tilley.” Understanding that the picture was a parody of Eustace
Tilley, Brown seized upon it as a way of breaking a 69-year logjam: she put
Crumb’s Tilley, subsequently christened Elvis Tilley, on the cover of that
year’s anniversary issue.
As Lee Lorenz, one-time cartoon editor at the magazine told
me, Eustace Tilley appeared on the cover of the anniversary issue because no
one could think of an appropriate alternative. So year after year, Eustace
Tilley returned. Without too much difficulty, we can see how this custom had
become a habit. It was Harold Ross’s fault.
Without question, Harold Ross was the world's most unlikely
candidate for editor-founder of the nation's most sophisticated magazine of
humor and urbanity. A frontier kid with only a tenth-grade education, he was
born November 6, 1892, in Aspen, Colorado, then a mining camp, not a ski resort
or a hideaway for Hollywood celebrities. The Ross family moved around to some
small Colorado towns, and then to Salt Lake City, where Harold attended high
school but never graduated; he quit school after his sophomore year and went
into newspapers. In high school, he’d worked on the school paper, The Red and
Black.
There, he met the other Salt Laker who would influence
cartooning in America—a teenage artist three years older than he, John Held,
Jr., who was born and raised in Salt Lake City.
They became friends and both were stringers for the Salt
Lake Tribune while in school, and they were sometimes sent to the Stockade, the
old redlight district, to interview such stellar attractions as Ada Wilson,
Belle London, and Helen Blazes.
When Ross left Salt Lake City as a teenager, he became a
slovenly tramp newspaperman who spend his years before World War I roving from
one newspaper to another, a common type in those years. By the time he was 25,
he had worked for at least seven papers around the country; then he joined the
American Expeditionary Force attacking the Hun in Europe.
During the War, he worked on Stars and Stripes, the armed
forces newspaper, where he was nominally managing editor. The staff was a
convivial crew, and after the War, they all landed in New York; there, Ross was
encouraged to launch, after a false start or two editing other magazines, The
New Yorker. The magazine struggled in fiscal red ink for years, but Ross never
wavered in pursuit of his vision.
Ross remained throughout his life the same contradictory
sort—a rowdy, gangly, mussed-up hick-looking wight with electric hair (a sort
of brush cut standing on its ends), Hapsburg lower lip, gap-toothed grin, a
droll sense of humor, and a profane vocabulary. In both his uncouth
eccentricity and sheer doggedness, Ross was without equal in American
journalism. He was also very, very
lucky.
Ross knew what he wanted The New Yorker to be, but he
couldn’t articulate his vision in order to guide his writers and cartoonists.
So they all fumbled around for several months and a couple years until
something started to gel. Eustace Tilley was one of Ross’s first fumbles. And
it turned out to be a very lucky fumble.
By mid-February 1925, the first issue of The New Yorker was
ready to go to the printer. But it lacked a cover. “Ross toyed with various
concepts for this crucial first cover,” said Ross’s biographer, David Kunkel in
Genius in Disguise, “and he asked several artists to work up sketches on what
amounted to a dreadful visual cliche, a curtain going up on Manhattan. What he
got back was predictably static and maddeningly literal.”
At the last minute, Ross turned, luckily, to his art editor,
Rea Irvin.
Irvin was born August 26, 1881, in San Francisco,
California, to which his parents had journeyed by covered wagon in the 1850s.
Although Irvin attended Hopkins Art Institute in San Francisco, he also
entertained the idea of a career in acting, which he pursued briefly beginning
in 1903. He then served in the art departments of several newspapers, including
the Honolulu Advertiser, but eventually, he moved to New York, and by the 1920s
he had achieved a good measure of success as a newspaper and magazine
cartoonist, becoming art editor of the venerable humor magazine Life. His
thespian inclinations remained, however, finding expression in his theatrical
manner of attire and in his demeanor, which radiated the stage presence of an
accomplished actor. A lumbering bear of a man albeit soft-spoken, he was a
familiar figure at both the Players Club and the Dutch Treat Club.
As Ross refined his plans for The New Yorker in the latter
months of 1924, he enlisted Irvin to help with the art chores. Irvin, who had
just been replaced as art editor at Life, had a flourishing freelance art
business, but he agreed to serve as "art consultant" (Ross eschewed
formal titles), stipulating that he could afford to give only one day a week to
the task, for which he was paid $75 and shares of the magazine’s stock.
The day that Irvin gave to the magazine every week was the
day he helped Ross select the cartoons for the next issue. The "art meeting"
was "one of the great New Yorker institutions," according to Russell
Maloney, a member of the staff for many years who, in the August 30, 1947 issue
of The Saturday Review of Literature, described the process, "hardly
changed by the passage of the years," by which the cartoons are selected.
"The art meeting has always been attended by Ross and
Irvin, the first art editor. The current art editor attends; so does one of the
fiction editors; Mrs. White does if she is in town. [She's E.B. White's wife,
who was Katharine Angell when she started editing fiction and poetry shortly
after the magazine began.] These people sit four abreast at a conference table,
while the [cartoons], one after another, are laid on an easel in front of them.
At each of the four places at the table is a pad, pencil, ashtray, and knitting
needle. The knitting needle is for pointing at faulty details in pictures. Ross
rejects pictures firmly and rapidly, perhaps one every ten seconds. 'Nah ...
nah ... nah.' A really bad picture wrings from him the exclamation 'Buckwheat!'
—a practical compromise between the violence of his feelings and the restraint
he feels in the presence of Mrs. White or a lady secretary [taking notes on the
proceedings]. 'Who's talking?' he will ask occasionally; this means that the
drawing will get sent back to the artist to have the speaker's mouth opened
wide. Now and then Ross gets lost in the intricacies of perspective. 'Where am
I supposed to be?' he will unhappily inquire, gazing into the picture. If
nobody can say exactly where Ross is supposed to be, out the picture
goes."
Irvin's taste in art was expansive: he liked classic and
modern art, he was sympathetic to anything new, and he knew good craftsmanship
when he saw it. Moreover, he was articulate about art: he could tell artists
specifically what to do to improve their work and to make it acceptable to the
magazine. When a drawing amused him during the art conference, he chuckled; and
he often gave little lectures on art appreciation. Irvin's presence and his
manner undoubtedly educated Ross in the subtleties of cartooning, refining the
editor's taste and raising his standards.
In his 1959 book, The Years with Ross, James Thurber,
assessing Irvin's contribution to the magazine, says unequivocally that Irvin
"did more to develop the style and excellence of New Yorker drawings and
covers than anyone else, and was the main and shining reason that the
magazine's comic art in the first two years was far superior to its humorous
prose."
In her Defining New Yorker Humor, Judith Yaross Lee agrees
that Irvin was essential: noting his "taste for ironically related images
and text," she goes on to say that "what is often called the 'New
Yorker cartoon' deserves to be called 'the Irvin cartoon.'"
Since The New Yorker style of cartoon set the pace for
American magazine cartooning since the early 1930s, Irvin looms large in the
history of the medium as a major influence. In fact, he might even be said to
be the "father" of modern magazine gag cartooning.
In turning to Irvin for the magazine’s first cover, Ross
asked for a picture that “would make the subscribers feel that we’ve been in
business for years and know our way around,” said Dale Kramer in Ross and the
New Yorker—“anything that might suggest sophistication and gaiety,” added
Kunkel. Over the months of preparation for The New Yorker’s debut, Irvin
had prepared the layout for the first
issue and designed the distinctive typeface for the magazine, modifying a face
developed by Carl Purington Rollins. He also drew most of the department
headings, including, for the first section of the magazine (called, initially,
Of All Things, it was soon dubbed Talk of the Town), a monocled Regency-era
scribe in a high collar with his nose in the air. The same personage is shown gazing
through his monocle at an assortment of thespian caricatures for the Theatre
department.
About the owl: I have no idea why an owl figures so
importantly in all of the Talk of the Town headings. Is it intended to suggest
a “night owl,” a creature of the evening and wee hours, haunting speakeasys and
saloons? Whatever—whoever (“who, who”?)—the owl has been as faithful an
attendant at The New Yorker as Irvin’s dandy; he’s there even today, winking at
us conspiratorially.
In waiting until the last possible minute before enlisting
Irvin for one more try at a cover illustration (he’d already done one of the
lifeless curtain raisers), Ross hadn’t given his art editor much time.
Desperate, Irvin went back to his files for the pictures that had inspired the
19th century dandy that headed two of the magazine’s departments. Since the
character appeared twice in the first issue already, why not on the cover too?
Irvin might have settled for something similar to the cover he drew for Life
the previous fall, instead he turned again to an 1834 caricature of the Comte
Alfred d’Orsay at the height of his stylish influence (bringing us, in the
manner of New Yorker writers, back again to the otherwise wholly superfluous,
but tenuously, slyly, pertinent paragraphs of our opening gambit).
Irvin again added a monocle to signify supercilious
intellect and, this time, a butterfly for whimsey, producing an elegant emblem
of insouciant detachment.
(This incarnation of D’Orsay seems harmless enough that we
might invite him to dinner—only to discover, doubtless, that his conversation
was so vacuous that we could tolerate his company only once a year.)
Irvin’s picture was perfect. The perfect portrait of a
seeming sophisticated man-about-town who is so vapidly empty-headed as to find
a fluttering insect an object worthy of minute inspection. What prospective
first-time reader-buyers thought of this incongruous picture when they saw it
on the newsstand, we can’t, with authority, say. Certainly they knew nothing
about the Comte d’Orsay or his vaguely shady but entirely extraneous
machinations of the previous century, so they were no doubt baffled by the
image of a man dressed in the height of 19th century fashion covering what
purported to be a magazine of contemporary jazz age sophistication and wit.
But what they thought, at this last minute of preparing the
first issue for the printer, was, like everything we now know about Comte
d’Orsay, irrelevant. Ross, knowing nothing of d’Orsay, loved the drawing.
Despite the time-warped attire, Irvin’s picture of a would-be sophisticate
gently ridiculed the very people the magazine aimed to appeal to, embodying
exactly Ross’s intention. Irvin’s dandy set the tone and intent for everything
that followed—within the first issue and all subsequent issues.
Ross always said Irvin’s cover was the best thing in the
first issue. It was so apt an emblem for the magazine that no one could ever
think of a suitable sequel to use for the ensuing anniversary issues. In fact,
until the first anniversary issue, probably no one had given any thought to
anniversary issues. That the magazine had survived a year since its debut,
running deeply into the red, was miraculous, so to celebrate the miracle, Ross
and his cohorts no doubt decided to repeat the cover image of the first issue as
a gesture of defiant triumph—“Look at me! I’m still here, snooty and distant as
ever.”
Perhaps for substantially the same reason, Ross repeated the
cover again on The New Yorker’s second anniversary and then the third, by which
time, the magazine was running a little in the black. The habit was formed.
Thereafter, Ross ran the same cover every year on the last issue in February.
And until the advent of Tina Brown, Ross's successors did the same in honor of
the founder (and of Irvin). So Irvin's haughty dandy, anachronistically attired
in top hat and high collar, graced the cover of America’s most urbane weekly
magazine once a year for nearly 70 years. And he continued to appear inside
every issue of the magazine in the heading for the opening section, Talk of the
Town. Still does.
But Irvin’s Regency dude didn’t get a name until he was
almost six months old. In the summer of
1925, Ross had another of his routine fits of exasperation—this time, about
“the goddam inside cover” of the magazine, which was “embarrassingly empty of
advertising” as Judy Yaross Lee puts it. So he asked humorist Corey Ford to
fill the page with comical subscription promotions for the magazine.
Ford would become an occasional diner at the famed “round
table” lunches of writers, actors, critics and other wits (among them, Robert
Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, cartoonist Ralph Barton and,
often, Ross) that were held daily through the 1920s at Manhattan’s Algonquin
Hotel just a block away from The New Yorker’s offices.
“Although Ross was liked by the Round Table group,” Ford
wrote in his 1967 memoir, The Time of Laughter, “its members did not take him
seriously, and his raffish face and gawky manner made him the butt of continual
‘joshing’ as he called it. Woollcott [another fugitive from the WWI Stars and
Stripes, who, with Ross and his wife and a fourth cohort, co-owned the midtown
apartment they all lived in], considered Ross his personal protégé and
described him as ‘a dishonest Abe Lincoln.’”
Ross may have been ribbed for his country-boy appearance and
demeanor, but he regularly moved in celebrity circles. The apartment he lived
in was designed by its tenants who remodeled it, connecting two adjoining
brownhouses, and it became a gathering place for artists and literary types,
including such dignitaries as George Gershwin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Irving Berlin, Dorothy Parker and Harpo Marx
Ford, who would soon make his way into this exalted company,
was born and raised in New York City and had just graduated from Columbia where
he edited the campus humor magazine, Jester. He would eventually author 30
books and over 500 magazine articles, mostly humorous, but in 1924, he was
peddling his comedy around town to humor magazines like the old Life and Judge.
At the latter, he met and grew to like Ross, who was then enduring his brief
frustrating tenure as that magazine’s editor.
In his memoir, Ford confessed that “it is hard to say what
inspired my immediate confidence in Ross. He looked like a bucolic bumpkin, his
features plain to the point of being homely, his big hands flailing in all
directions to bolster his inarticulate speech. Often he would leave a sentence
unfinished, and fling both arms aloft in utter futility. He was always perched
on the edge of his chair ready to leap up and start pacing the room in restless
pursuit of an idea. Even when standing in one spot, he managed to remain in
motion, jangling a pocketful of keys and loose change or stabbing the air with
a forefinger or banging the desk as his voice rose to a squawk.
“Ross seldom laughed aloud. If something amused him, his
upper body heaved spasmodically a couple of times, and his heavy lips parted in
a broad silent grin, showing large teeth with a gap in the center. He wore his coarse
brown hair brushed upright to a height of three inches; and now and then, when
he was embarrassed or frustrated, he would rub a hand across his face and comb
his fingers back through the thatch of hair in one prolonged gesture of
confusion, or explode with a heartfelt ‘Jesus!’ and then grin at his own
ineptness.
“His language was a curious admixture of roundhouse oaths
and bits of antiquated slang which dated back to my earliest
childhood—bughouse, spooning, stuck on her, sis. After a tirade, his mobile face would light
with sheepish amusement and he would sigh, ‘God, how I pity me.’
“It was his balancing sense of humor about himself, I think,
that made him a great editor, another of the half-dozen greatest I’ve known.
‘All right, Ford,’ he would conclude an interview with me, waving a limp hand
in dismissal, ‘God bless you.’”
In picking him to fill the hole on the inside cover, Ford
said Ross was recalling a “random series” Ford did “on the Fugitive Art of
Manhattan—beards and moustaches on subway ads, chalked sketches on brick walls,
doodles on Wall Street blotters, and the like. In his impulsive way, he called
me into his office and began jangling coins and pacing the floor. Could I do a
series of promotion ads to fill the goddam inside cover. Have the first one by
tomorrow? Done and done. God bless you.”
Irvin suggested to Ford that he use the inside cover to
parody the kind of burlesque in-house testimonial that Vanity Fair was then
running. Ford obligingly produced twenty-one “chapters” (including an
unnumbered Introduction) in an epic entitled “The Making of a Magazine.” Each
chapter delved into some arcane aspect of the magazine’s production: beginning
with “Securing Paper for The New Yorker,” Ford discussed in exhaustive
pseudo-scientific detail how paper is made from wood and from rags, how ink is
obtained from squids, how type is “mined” deep underground, how the pages are
bound together, how punctuation marks are cultivated, how contributors are
nurtured, and so on.
Before getting into these mechanics of magazine production,
Ford assembled some statistics (“the Funny Little Things”) testifying to the
immensity of The New Yorker’s circulation.
“Here it is Friday,” he commences, “and at a rough estimate,
there have been probably thirty or eighty millions of people who have bought
The New Yorker since last night; and the returns from Maine are not due till
tomorrow. This means that if you add all these figures together and multiply
them by the number you just thought of, then the card there in your hand is the
eight of clubs.”
At the time, the circulation of Ross’s brain child was
minuscule, scarcely between “thirty or eighty” (which?) millions.
Not content with perpetrating a paragraph of this ludicrous
nonsense, Ford forges on: “Perhaps the
following illustration may serve to bring home to the average mind the
magnitude of these figures: first, conceive in your mind’s eye the entire
population of New York, New Haven, Hartford and a fourth city about the size of
Pittsburgh (let us say, Pittsburgh), and picture them arranged kneeling side by
side single file in a long line, all blindfolded and holding in their hands the
combined output of the New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, and Dr. Frank
Crane. Now suppose that someone were to sneak up and give the first man in line
a sudden shove. Why, over they all would go like so many nine-pins, and
wouldn’t it be fun though?”
He concludes with a promise to conduct a “tour” through the
“great organization behind that circulation, making stops at Tennessee and
other points of interest along the way. ... For this trip we should advise a
complete change of clothing, two blankets, and comfortable footwear, since
there is nothing so important on a journey as easy feet except (ah, yes)—The
New Yorker.”
And here, amid the concatenation of increasingly meaningless
statistics, we first see “Mr. Tilley.”
He appears in an illustration that compares a towering stack of New
Yorker magazines (B) to the Leaning Tower of Pisa (A). Because Mr. Tilley is
included chiefly to provide a human dimension against which the height of the
two towers can be compared, he is pictured at a monstrously diminutive size. We
can see only that he wears a top hat and carries a cane and is referred to as
“Our Mr. Tilley.” No first name yet. And he isn’t mentioned in the surrounding
text at all.
In the next chapter of Ford’s “Tour through the Vast
Organization of The New Yorker,” Tilley is pictured directing the cutting down
of trees for making into paper. Compared to the size of the trees, he is still
pictured very small, but we can discern a top hat, cane, and cut-away
coat—formal attire. And the caption tells us that he is “Our Mr. Eustace
Tilley.”
According to Ford in his memoir, the last name he borrowed
from a maiden aunt. And he says he chose the first name “for euphony,” a
patently false but lugubriously comical claim. Eustace is scarcely euphonious
with Tilley. Instead, the assertion reveals only Ford’s penchant for word play:
euphony = Eustace. More likely, he chose Eustace because he liked the
high-toned but vaguely effete sound of a fraternity brother’s name, Eustace L.
Taylor.
While Eustace Tilley is named in the text of most of the
other chapters in Ford’s saga and appears in the illustrations accompanying all
of the rest of the series, we don’t get a good look at him until Chapter XVII,
when he appears in close-up; and the last chapter provides a portrait at full
length. Close-up, Ford’s Tilley looks
absolutely nothing like Irvin’s Tilley. In the last chapter’s portrait, we see
the top-hatted figure in a cut-away coat, striped trousers and spats, carrying
a cane and wearing—a monocle.
The monocle is the only physical evidence that Ford’s “Our
Mr. Eustace Tilley” is the same as Irvin’s cover creation. In fact, of course,
they aren’t the same at all. Ford’s Tilley is a 20th century fop-about-town;
Irvin’s is an elegant refugee from the early years of the previous century.
Ford’s Tilley is drawn throughout the series by Johan Bull,
who had recently been added to the magazine’s staff having just immigrated to
the U.S. from his native Norway; for Talk of the Town, Bull supplied spot
drawings, wonderfully deft and clean-cut renderings. He also illustrated longer articles in the
magazine with supple wash drawings, and he produced two-page “cartoon essays”
(groupings of cartoons all illuminating the same subject) in naked linear
style. He was remarkably versatile, resorting sometimes to an entirely
different sketchy manner for cartoons.
Bull may have been, after Irvin, one of the most
accomplished artists to work in the cartoon form in the early New Yorker.
Bull’s crisp drawings show up in various other American magazines of the day,
but he seems, unaccountably, to have disappeared from New Yorker annals
altogether: he shows up in none of the reprint tomes that started coming out in
1928. His last cartoon for the magazine appeared in the issue dated October 22,
1927; his first, July 4, 1925. (We’ve posted a short gallery of his New Yorker
art down the scroll.)
Bull was in good company in those early years. The magazine
featured much more purely decorative art, illustrative only in the sense that
pictures of festive restaurant diners might accompany an article about New York
nightlife. Reginald Marsh often supplied ash-can scenes of city street life
spread across the bottoms of the two facing pages that followed the Talk of the
Town opening. Two-page spreads of cartoon essays were common. Helen Hokinson,
famed for her matronly ladies, provided a couple such spreads during that first
summer, neither featuring her plump, doughy matrons; one was a visit to the
beach, and the sun bathers were all young people; the women, shapely rather than
dumpy.
Spot drawings were not tiny inserts as they are today: in
the early issues, spot drawings took as much space as their subjects needed.
During the notorious “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, which unfolded during
The New Yorker’s inaugural summer, caricatures of William Jennings Bryan
sometimes broke up columns of gray type the content of which had nothing to do
with the Scopes Trial. Almost in the manner of editorial cartoons, the drawings
themselves commented on the evolutionary questions being addressed.
Page layouts under Irvin’s watchful eye were much more
free-spirited, particularly in the several pages of Talk of the Town: layouts
continually changed to suit lavish display of the art, the subjects of which
were often merely tangential to the prose surrounding them.
Cartoons were only part of the magazine’s visual content.
Eventually, most of the visuals were cartoons—until Tina Brown arrived. Then,
overnight, photographs were introduced, and other kinds of decorative art
showed up throughout the magazine.
But, to return to our Tilley history and the identity
question we left dangling: how do we connect Ford’s Eustace Tilley that Johan
Bull attires in modern dress with Irvin’s cover drawing of a Regency
boulevardier in 19th century garb? How did the name get transferred from one to
the other?
The conundrum is all the more puzzling when we notice that
the dandy of Irvin’s design appears in every one of Ford’s promotional chapters
as a decoration at an upper corner of the border surrounding the treatise. Two
Tilleys? Or only one—the one in modern dress, the only one given a name?
We don’t find out that Irvin’s creation is Eustace Tilley
until someone at The New Yorker tells us that’s his name. And exactly when that
happened, I can’t say. Ford doesn’t know either: he says only that “in time,
Irvin’s creation became known as Eustace Tilley”—without remarking at all upon
the discrepancy in the appearance of the two characters. And so, with no more
evidence than a monocle, the lepidoptera fan, himself more social butterfly than
the object of his lassitudinal gaze, came to be called Eustace Tilley; his
namesake, “Our Mr. Eustace Tilley” of Ford’s put-ons, faded in memory and in
fact.
But before we leave him behind, let’s glimpse the comedy of
Ford’s essays, all worth more exposure than they ever get. And here, we
accompany these excerpts with some of Bull’s illustrations—by way of giving the
only authentic Eustace Tilley, an otherwise airy nothing, a local habitation
and a moment of fame.
Here’s the conclusion of Ford’s discussion of “Securing
Paper for The New Yorker”:
“Although most of the paper is made nowadays from trees,
nevertheless, there is a certain percentage which is made the old way, by
picking it up here and there. The material best suited to this work has been found
to be an oblong sheet of green paper issued by the United States Government and
bearing the words ‘Five Dollars.’ From this single scrap, enough paper can be
procured to print 52 copies of the magazine; and to any reader who will submit
such a bill to The New Yorker, the editors will mail a year’s subscription
free.”
A year’s subscription, we rightly conclude, is $5. Some of
Ford’s essays plug subscriptions, but not all; restraint is the mark of the
sophisticate, even the mock sophisticate.
Nurturing forests of trees to make into paper requires a
vast number of “paperjacks”—so many that “an area equal to half the State of
Kansas is needed to raise sufficient grain to feed these men and an area equal
to the other half of Kansas is needed to clothe them. To meet this problem it
was necessary for The New Yorker to purchase Kansas, at considerable expense.
“The merry paperjacks often indulge in friendly contests of
skill, testing their prowess in chopping with the axe. Fred, a powerful Canuck,
who if laid end to end would reach six feet four in his stocking feet, was
recently declared the champion paperjack.”
Our Mr. Eustace Tilley is the Field Superintendent of
paperjacks.
It is subsequently discovered that “the very best paper is
made from rags,” which causes a massive adjustment in the production of the
magazine. Gathering rags suddenly takes precedence over chopping down trees.
“In the early days, the editors gave their shirts, handkerchiefs and socks to
be made into paper.” But the supply was soon exhausted. “At this crucial
moment, a young member of the staff entered the room clad only in a barrel,
bearing in his outstretched hand the remainder of his clothing,” which he
donated to the cause.
In the accompanying illustration, “Our Mr. Eustace Tilley,
Director of the Committee on Paper Shortage, may be seen supervising the
collection of offerings by society matrons who gave their finery to relieve the
paper shortage of 1882.”
The next chapter is devoted to a description of how rags are
made into paper. Bull’s illustrations show “one of the many debutantes employed
in the Rag Cleaning Department of The New Yorker. On the table may be seen the
hat and gloves of Our Mr. Eustace Tilley, one of The New Yorker’s
Directors-in-Chief of Rag Cleaning.”
Another illustration shows “the thrashing and mangling of
rags from which paper is made. In the background may be discerned Mr. Eustace
Tilley himself.” When pondering “the actual work of printing itself,” Ford
emphasizes the importance of type: “Were it not for type, The New Yorker would
have to be printed in pictures instead, and probably would sell for two cents
in the subway like the illustrated Graphic, sometimes laughingly referred to as
a ‘newspaper.’”
The New York Evening Graphic, founded only a year earlier,
in 1924, by Bernarr Macfadden, a physical cultist, was notorious for its
doctored photographs, many of which faked scandalous scenes involving well-know
personages. Before the discovery that letters of the alphabet must be mined
“far underground,” the magazine “obtained its letters from alphabet blocks,
noodle soup, or even the monograms on the editor’s watch and cuff links; and
letters were used sparingly, hell being spelled ‘h–l’ and damn ‘d—m’ in those
times.”
Then a prospector in Chile, “while washing out the dirt at
the bottom of a stream preparatory to taking a bath, suddenly discovered two
R’s, a Y and a battered figure which might have been an E or an F or part of an
old bed spring. Seizing his pickax, he struck down into the earth and uncovered
a rich vein of alphabet, including the letter S, which had been missing up to
that time, our forefathers using F instead of S, as for example ‘Funny face’
for ‘Sunny face,’ followed by a sock on the jaw.”
Alas, the “rich vein of alphabet” was missing W, resulting
in the magazine being called The Ne Yorker until “the memorable (will we ever
forget it?) late afternoon of Thursday, August 26, 1823, when young Joseph
Pulitzer, while putting his head between his legs to avoid a playful ceiling
draught, considered the problem from a new angle and discovered that what was
being exploited as an M vein was really a rich strain of inverted W. By turning
the dredging machinery upside down and working it standing on their heads, our
workmen were able to mine excellent W’s from then on.”
In Bull’s accompanying illustration, “Our Mr. Eustace
Tilley, Field Superintendent of Type Mining [attired, as always, in cutaway
coat, striped trousers, top hat and monocle], may be seen in the background
registering polite, though conservative, surprise.”
No effort is spared in the mining of letters, we are
assured. “In The New Yorker type mines, operated by the Type Representative Mr.
Eustace Tilley, one letter receives just as much attention as the next and is
read and answered personally by Mr. Tilley himself. Sometimes these letters
contain a five-dollar bill and to all such correspondents, Mr. Tilley
invariably mails back a year’s subscription, just to show his appreciation and
good will.”
In the next chapter of his disquisition, Ford takes up the
matter of arranging the letters into words and words into sentences. “Sentences
in The New Yorker vary in length from six inches to six months or $100 fine or
both.” Bull’s illustration shows “a group of The New Yorker’s
highly-specialized General Utility Men puzzling over the carefully selected
bench-made syllables which will eventually be put together as words, sentences
and articles. In the left background may be seen Our Mr. Eustace Tilley, one of
The New Yorker’s staff of Syntax Engineers.” In succeeding chapters, we learn
that punctuation marks are cultivated at a farm, and that at its founding in
1867 (the date varies from chapter to chapter), the magazine was delivered by the
editor on a high-wheel cycle, an operation described as “peddling his wares.”
When Ford arrives at the actual printing of The New Yorker,
he is forced to describe the gigantic electrical printing press (“named
Bertha”) which, “according to legend,” consists of only 24,927 pieces, “over
half of which were cotter pins.” When the editors ran out of spare parts, they
advertised for more and received a goodly quantity, including “a piston ring,
three fly-wheels, and a rare gasket, or female gadget.”
But Our Narrator found the printing operation itself “too
long and difficult to describe here, where it may help the reader to form some
conception of this important step in the Making of a Magazine.” Wait—what? So
Our Narrator, after asserting that a description of the printing operation may
help the reader understand “this important step” (a circular statement in
itself), he refrains from offering the description. The height of nonsense—at
which, as we all now acknowledge, Corey Ford was proving marvelously adept. The
magazine and its staff and printing plant were housed in a 74-floor structure
occupying eight city blocks, and each department was put into a separate room
of its own, each named “Private” —“after the father of Our Mr. Tilley, a
private in the Civil War.” The departments were connected by an intricate
network of pneumatic tubes through which pieces of the magazine are conveyed
elsewhere until they emerge as a whole issue of The New Yorker.
Later, in order to provide housing for the magazine’s
millions of staff members, Our Mr. Eustace Tilley purchased Manhattan Island in
1893, “ingeniously” evolving the name of the place from the name of the
magazine—New York.
Bull provided illustrations showing a movie critic at work
and Our Mr. Eustace Tilley christening the island “New York” in the presence of
a couple local citizens (whose names no longer signify much to us) and such
historic personages as Christopher Columbus, Napoleon, Pope Gregory VII, Edgar
Poe, George Washington, Caesar and Lief Erickson.
The last of Ford’s chapters is devoted to a description
(with illustrations) of “the original New Yorker building, destroyed by fire in
1868" (pictured is Grant’s Tomb), the interior of the present headquarters
where contributors wait to see the editor (depicted is the inside of Grand
Central Station), the printing press Bertha, and the present New Yorker
buildings, where the staff meets every day in weekly meetings.
And so we conclude the True History of Our Mr. Eustace
Tilley, who, by proclamation in lieu of any substantial evidence, is the same
person as Rea Irvin depicted on the cover of the first issue of The New Yorker.
As noted in the array of Bull’s Talk of the Town spot drawings, Our Mr. Eustace
Tilley—that is, Johan Bull’s Tilley—may have appeared at least once outside of
the Ford narrative. And he also may be discerned, perhaps, in the accompanying
cartoon by Peter Arno: the top hat is maybe a clue, but the defining monocle is
altogether missing. Probably not Our Mr. Eustace Tilley at all.
Irvin’s Tilley also appeared at least once beyond the cover
or any of the department headings Irvin designed. He appears next to the
aforeposted Arno cartoon in his customary Irvin garb, welcoming a visitor to
New York, the British actor Michael Arlen. Don’t know who drew the picture, but
the signature seems to be a dingbat of that irrepressible owl. Perhaps in
recognition of his persistence, we ought to give him (it) a name. How about
Comte d’Orsay?
Eustace Tilley, as it turns out, is not the only fabricated
personage lurking the editorial offices and the pages of The New Yorker. For
almost forty of its ninety-two-year existence, Owen Ketherry has been writing
to some readers in response to their letters. Not all readers who write the
magazine get a letter in response: only those who write to point out an error.
The magazine has been, since the beginning, paranoid about making mistakes in
print. And when an alert reader catches an error and writes about it, Owen
Ketherry dutifully responds.
But Owen Ketherry, like Eustace Tilley, is not a real
person. The name is an anagram of “The New Yorker” and represents a collective
response, Rachel Taylor tells us in the April 1999 issue of Brill’s Content
(now sadly defunct). “Reader correspondence is routed through the letters
editor, the fact-checking department and occasionally the writer and editor of
the story [at issue]—all before it reaches ‘Ketherry’s’ desk,” explains deputy
editor Pamel McCarthy. ... Because ‘so many people are involved’ in responding
to reader corrections, ‘it does seem appropriate that the response come from
the magazine rather than one person.’”
Owen Ketherry has been signing response letters since at
least 1975 or so.
Taylor asked editor David Remnick whether it was appropriate
for a magazine of The New Yorker’s standing and reputation to lie to its
readers. “I don’t think it’s a lie,” he said, “—it’s an institutional rubric,”
adding that the Owen Ketherry tradition is “harmless. The key thing,” he
continued, “is that letters are answered institutionally. The editor of the
magazine cannot personally answer hundreds and hundreds of letters” (from
know-it-all readers who’ve made a spare-time vocation of pouncing on
imagined—or real—errors).
The Brill Content report is illustrated with a picture of
the imaginary Owen Ketherry. Ingeniously fashioned by Rollin McGrail, Owen
Ketherry looks remarkably like Bull’s Tilley might look if he’d survived his
short life in 1925 to displace Irvin’s Tilley.
But Irvin's Tilley keeps reappearing, as we said at the
beginning of this foray, every year on the cover of the magazine’s issue for
the last week of February. Until, that is, 1994, when Crumb’s Elvis Tilley took
the place of honor. After that—the habit having been broken, shattered—other
“Tilleys” surfaced on the covers of succeeding anniversary issues. Eustace
Tilley returned in 1995 to soothe the feelings of rampant traditionalists (like
moi), but the year after, we had “Eustacia Tilley”—a feminine image at long
last!—then Art Spiegelman produced a rendering of Chester Gould’s cleaver-jawed
detective, “Dick Tilley.”
Eustace Tilley was back again for a couple years, then
William Wegman dressed one of his dogs in dandy duds and called it “Putting on
the Dog.” Eustace Tilley returned until 2008, a presidential election year,
when two Tilleys adorned the cover, one upside down, together creating the
impression of a face card. One looked like Hillary Clinton; the other, Barack
Obama. The title: Eustace Tillarobama. One year, the butterfly was featured in
a six-panel cover comic strip.
The covers from 2012 through this year have been “takes” on
Tilley—a blurred image like that on the computer screen as your computer is
loading, a “Brooklyn Tilley” (an somewhat artsy dude in his apartment, and through
the window, in just the right juxtaposition to the man’s raised right hand, we
see a panel truck out in the street with a butterfly painted on the back door),
and 2014's “Night Windows,” a silhouette of Tilley formed by lighted windows of
buildings in the New York night.
For a few years, readers were invited to participate in
annual Eustace Tilley contests, contributing comic-strip Tilleys, dog Tilleys,
tattooed Tilleys, emoji Tilleys, and twerking Tilleys. But in 2015, the anniversary Tilley had to be
different, as art director Mouly remembers. She was asked by editor Remnick
months in advance to come up a way to celebrate the magazine’s 90th birthday.
She turned, as she does every week, “to our artists for
ideas, and this time we decided to publish more than one. We picked nine covers
for our ninety years”—one for each decade—“selecting images that reflect the
talent and diversity of our contributors and the range of artistic media they
use: oil painting for Kadir Nelson and Anita Kunz; pen and ink with watercolor
for Roz Chast, Barry Blitt, and Istvan Banyai; oil pastel for Lorenzo Mattotti;
collage for Peter Mendelsund; and digital art for Christoph Niemann. Some of
these artists are regulars—this is Barry Blitt’s eighty-eighth New Yorker cover
and Lorenzo Mattotti’s thirtieth. Others are newcomers. Each brings Eustace
Tilley squarely into the twenty-first century, and proves that art is as alive
on the cover of the magazine today as it was in 1925.”
And here they are, all nine of the covers, one of which,
Blitt’s, consists of nine separate images.
Blitt explains: “I thought it would be amusing to present Eustace Tilley
in the various styles that have come and gone over the past ninety years. So I
showed the inveterate dandy coming unstuck in time, appearing as greaser,
hipster, hippie, yuppie and punk, among others.” So does that make 97 covers
for Blitt? Or only 89?
His Eustace Tilleys look pretty good, but his fragile
sometimes wavering penline bespeaks a kind of tentativeness, and in more complex
compositions, that lack of confidence is a distinct blemish—in my so-called
mind, anyhow. But then, Blitt’s rich and famous, and I’m just a harmless
drudge, laboring enviously in the digital backwaters.
The 2015 anniversary issue prints all nine of the covers,
including Blitt’s nine-Tilley cover: three as actual covers, one after the
other at the front of the magazine; then all nine, in miniature on the table of
contents page. Behind the opening trio of covers, the magazine does little to
celebrate the occasion: nine one-page essays, called “snaps” (for “snapshots,”
I assume), each focusing on some minutiae of each decade.
For the 2016 anniversary, Eustace Tilley is again on the
cover, albeit a somewhat updated version showing him in a subway car performing
a “manspread” (by spreading their legs, men claim more than a reasonable amount
of space on the bench).
