BENGALURU : The last issue of The New Yorker of 2019 dated December 30 was titled ‘Cartoon Takeover’. When the iconic magazine was founded, in 1925, by journalists Harold Ross and (his wife) Jane Grant, it was envisioned as a comic weekly. Amusing drawings have been its hallmark right from its inception. Soon, Ross was noting that everybody talked of The New Yorker’s art - its illustrations - and it was being described as the best magazine in the world for someone who cannot read! For many in India who grew up in the pre-liberalisation days, to get a copy of The New Yorker was a rare treat, often made possible by a friend or relative returning from the US.
My own initiation as a reader was somewhat embarrassing because I did not understand most of the articles and ended up skimming through the easy ones. With some issues I just looked at the cover (which was always the highlight) and read around the interesting cartoons inside. The magazine’s cartoons have won over millions. If you’re a fan you can choose from books of compiled illustrations, depending on how deep your pockets are.
The latest book came out in 2018 as The New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons: A Semi-serious A-to-Z Archive, a two-volume collection selected by Bob Mankoff with a foreword by editor David Remnick. But if you want the whole shebang and would like to feast your eyes on almost a century’s worth of cartoons, invest in the 2006 paperback The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker edited by Mankoff. The word paperback is misleading because the tome weighs a couple of kilos! It contains only 2,000-plus cartoons but it comes with a DVD that contains 70,363 illustrations! Mankoff writes: “We examined every single page. published since 1925 to ensure that that not a single cartoon was missed.”
The New Yorker cover is such a standout that few would be able to resist Blown Covers: New Yorker covers that you were never meant to see, a selection of the most controversial covers, some of them bordering on the outrageous. The artists have shared their process and the previous iterations of the artwork that set phones ringing and letterboxes overflowing. No subject is off the table when they choose topics for their satire, which include religion, sex, war and disasters. We have our very own Bengaluru connection to The New Yorker in Akumal Ramchander who ‘discovered’ an unknown New York artist, Harold Shapinsky, in 1985 and was the subject of a tongue-incheek essay, ‘A Strange Destiny’, by staff writer Lawrence Weschler in the magazine’s “Reporter at Large” section.
Regular readers have their favourite sections they look forward to every week, whether it is ‘The Talk of the Town’, which gives vignettes of life in the Big Apple, or ‘Profile’, a genre that has been shaped by The New Yorker. Profiles are not just interviews but complex portraits of individuals. Fiction is another staple. A whole host of illustrious American writers have contributed short stories to the magazine. I got introduced to the short stories of John Cheever when, thanks to my wife, I discovered an interesting and easier way to read - by listening to podcasts. The Crossword is another highlight; solving it is a bedtime ritual for my wife. As David Sedaris says, “If there is a problem with Esquire, the issue could be with the magazine. If you find a problem with The New Yorker, the problem is with you.”