Pop History Moment: The New Yorker Is First Published

On this day in 1925 Harold Ross and Jane Grant launched an entirely new kind of magazine, aimed at an entirely new kind of person - the New Yorker. More urbane than the average urbanite, possessed of a more-sophisticated-than-thou attitude - not to mention über-liberal - whether they actually lived in New York was irrelevant; if they couldn't come to Manhattan, Manhattan would henceforth be brought to them.

For more than eighty years, under the varying guidance of half a dozen editors, The New Yorker has remained the gold standard in magazine publishing; contrasting witty cartoons with serious journalism, relying on quality content rather than gimmickiness, you'd think the magpie on crack responsible for anything as ninnified as this blog would be averse to its quality, but you'd be wrong.

Not only do I hover over the girl at the corner store until she shelves it every Friday morning, only to devour every word of each issue as quickly as I can - cartoons first, of course, then articles, interspersed with poems - both The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker and The Complete New Yorker (eight decades' worth of issues on DVD-ROM!) have pride of place in the collection of the Pop Culture Institute.
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In Memoriam: Harold Ross

The founding editor of The New Yorker was a mass of contradictions; his brash personality and occasional philistinism clashed with the sophisticated tone and intellectualism of the magazine he created and launched in 1925. He was, in the words of his successor, 'a genius in disguise'...

Born on this day in 1893, Ross began his career as a journalist writing for newspapers beginning in high school; by 1918 he landed a job with Stars and Stripes, where he made many influential contacts that would come in handy later: Alexander Woollcott, Cyrus Baldridge, Franklin Pierce Adams, and Jane Grant, who would become his first wife in addition to helping him co-found what was then an entirely new kind of publication. Through Woollcott many members of the Algonquin Round Table would come to write for him as well.

The New Yorker was a success nearly from its inception; having survived six turbulent months at the outset, the magazine went on to weather the worst years of the Great Depression with an increase in both subscriptions and ad revenues, mainly due of course to the exceptional talent on staff, including James Thurber, E. B. White, Katharine S. White, S. J. Perelman, Janet Flanner (aka 'Genet'), Wolcott Gibbs, John O'Hara, Robert Benchley, and Dorothy Parker. Much of Ross' success as an editor can be credited to his knack for spotting and nurturing talent in writers, although he often did so in a bullying manner.

Ross died in December 1951, at which time he was replaced by William Shawn; during his tenure as editor, Harold Ross personally oversaw 1,399 issues of The New Yorker.

In 2006 the whole of the magazine's output - 4,109 issues published over 80 years from February 1925 - were put onto DVD-ROM and sold as a set, one of which was snapped up by the Pop Culture Institute for its archive; it currently resides next to a companion coffee table book and CD-ROM collection of cartoons from the landmark publication, released the previous year. Together they bring to light not only Harold Ross' brilliant idea - that being a New Yorker is a state of mind rather than a geographical situation - as well as his life's work.
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