Continuing my unexpectedly enjoyable mission to clear a loft of my possessions, I concluded that a particular collection of magazines I have built up over fifteen years would, like so many others, also need to go. However, for all times’ sake, this pile will be earmarked for a charity shop more than for recycling, because they were not easy to find.
Whenever I have picked up a copy of “The New Yorker”, on the rare occasion a UK newsagent had one for sale, I have treated its mix of essays, cultural reviews, fiction and cartoons as a portal to the cosmopolitan, sophisticated, noisy and outspoken city that acts like a far-away playground for my mind — I have always seen Los Angeles as more a place of industry, even if those are film and music, and London is too near to elicit the same kind of anticipation. Its art direction is second to none, its illustrated covers having been given away by me as birthday cards on a few occasions. Its pages saw the first appearances of James Thurber’s short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, a ghoulish family depicted in cartoons by Charles Addams, and articles on which the films “Saturday Night Fever” and “Coyote vs Acme” are based. The nearest magazine to that mix that is published in the UK is the satirical “Private Eye”, which I have been reading for decades now.
However, I the nearest newsagent to me that still sold “The New Yorker”, which is least ten miles away, has now closed. Adding to my need to create space, I have inevitably decided to subscribe to the magazine online, rather than risk being cut off altogether. Knowing the origin of its source material, the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” always hit a weird note with me when they sing, “we can try to understand The New York Times’ effect on man”, but I should have realised that can reference New York-based media as a whole, having read “The New York Times” for years for a similar vantage point, although one more reactive and with less time for consideration than a weekly periodical can afford itself.
My first action upon subscribing to “The New Yorker” was to look at their archive, which turned into my looking at a gallery of thousands of vibrant covers, in all manner of styles, portraying political events to everyday life, punctuated every February by a reproduction or reinterpretation of Rea Irvin’s portrait of Eustace Tilley, the magazine’s mascot, a dandy with enough time to examine a passing butterfly with his monocle. The magazine has been a butterfly for me for quite some time, but will that change now I have finally pinned it down?