On finding an old New Yorker

"But doctor, you talk about "hoarding" as though it's a bad thing."

The advantage of having a basement is that you can pile boxes down there for decades without being especially inconvenienced.  And when you occasionally root through a box, you sometimes -- in fact, almost always -- find interesting items.  Albeit, items whose reason for having been saved totally escapes you.

And thus it was with a copy of the New Yorker that I discovered a couple of days ago.  A big fat copy.  The issue of April 20, 1968.  To those of us who lived through it, the year 1968 seems only a modest time ago.  To most of humanity now living, however, I suspect it sounds like a time when men wore spats and women wore bustles.    

But come on, kids, the Beatles had already been around for five years.  The prior summer had been the "Summer of Love," and Hippiedom was still floridly in flower.  Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy were dueling for the Democratic nomination -- McCarthy didn't win, Kennedy didn't live, and the Democrats lost the whole shebang as the nefarious Richard ("You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore!") Nixon arose like a vampire from the dead.

But the New Yorker.  The cover looks typically New Yorker-ish.  But I forgot how thick the magazine used to be.  I suspect this issue wasn't unusual -- not one of those double issues they foist on us now occasionally -- and I have no idea why I chose to save it.

How thick was it?  One hundred ninety-six pages.  Contrast that with this week's issue of a mere 78 pages.  It was also 2 cm taller and 1 cm wider in size.  I haven't measured the column inches of text, but I doubt if there was much difference between then and now.  The difference is in the advertising space.

This week's issue has three ads at the front and three ads at the back.  The 1968 issue was a mass of advertising, devoted to the interests of the moneyed classes.  Alcohol in its many forms was a primary advertiser -- not beer so much (one for Michelob)  or wine, but hard liquor and various cognacs, cordials, rums, and vermouths.  I counted 22 liquor ads.  New Yorker readers did a lot of drinking.  But not always on their own money ("Let's make it Chivas, the company's buying," suggested one ad.) 

They also did a lot of travel.  Ads for travel agencies, tours, cruise ships, air lines, foreign countries, Amazon safaris, Eurailpass, hotels ("The Tuscany .... Only hotel in the world with color TV," bragged one New York hotel.).  The State of North Carolina advertised that some of its citizens still spoke Elizabethan English, and offered a free dictionary to help tourists translate.  And a full page ad for the City of Atlanta sounded just like, well, like Atlanta:

The countryside is right outside your window.  Because Atlanta has an unbeatable land use combination -- no natural boundaries to block growth; a woody, rolling terrain; and a lot of people who love trees." 

Ads for expensive clothes.  Expensive furniture.   And expensive (I assume) hair care products.

Ignoring the ads, however, the magazine seemed reassuringly familiar.  Same sophisticated cartoons.  Same initial feature, "Goings on about Town," the "town," of course, being New York.  (Although there seemed to be more going on about town in 1968 than today.)  The same "Talk of the Town," although less oriented toward politics than it is today.  Perhaps more fiction.  Most New Yorker issues now have one short story; the 1968 issue had two.

The 1968 issue also contained one of the New Yorker's seemingly interminable feature articles -- this one involving gun control and the N.R.A.  The more things change ... 

The earlier issue did have one feature that I loved.  In fact, it was my earliest memory of the magazine, reading issues in the college library as a student.  I mean those little fillers at the bottom of columns, where an odd or ungrammatical sentence or two from  some other publication would be quoted, followed by a witty remark.  Example:

Last year was a good growing season at Woodlawn.  Rainfall was ample , and after five years of drought the entire cemetery seemed to revive. -- Letter from the Woodlawn Cemetery.

Were there any unusual noises?

Maybe technology has made it possible to avoid gaps at the bottom of columns that need filling.   Our loss, I'm afraid.

The biggest difference between the two issues, of course, was the newsstand price.  In 1968, you could buy the magazine for 35 cents.  Today, it will cost you $8.99.  

Go back and read what I wrote about the loss of advertising.