Postcards from the New Yorker. One Hundred Covers from Ten Decades by Françoise Mouly

Postcards from the New Yorker. One Hundred Covers from Ten Decades Reviews

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  ALLEN

  (Note): Because of an inaccurate listing, this is a duplicate of a GR review already filed):
  This is NOT A BOOK but a box of 100 postcards based on NEW YORKER magazine covers going back to the magazine's founding in 1925. There are no photographs, only original artwork created for the magazine by artists and illustrators who sometimes became famous in their own right, among them Charles Addams, Edward Koren, Saul Steinberg and Roz Chast.
  
  The earliest cards from the early years are a celebration of urbanity: a biplane looms over Manhattan's signature nighttime grid; flappers and philosophers consort on dance floors; foppish Eustace Tilly, complete with top hat, monocle and butterfly, represents the magazine. People and their foibles are more representative of the 1930s and 1940s: a woman in full bridal-party finery types a society column at a metropolitan newspaper; crowds attend a modernist exhibition; another woman carries a Christmas tree on a her bicycle through a snowy village. Later, the kid-centric 1950s and 1960s show up in large families and suburban venues.
  
  The 1970s and 1980s show a return to the original, Manhattan-centric concept of the distinctive metropolis; sometimes a grittier feel like a sketch of the lower East Side's DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) district; Saul Steinberg's witty drawings make parody of maps and maps into social statements. Most recent decades in this collection tend more to lifestyle or political themes: a brief visual encounter between a young man and a young woman in passing subway trains, gay and lesbian weddings, Michele and Barack Obama satirized as fist-bumping terrorists -- toward the end of this 2012 collection we see "Eustachia Tilley," a modern take on the NEW YORKER's celebrated mascot, drawn as a woman.
  
  This is a worthwhile collection of cards, and from personal experience I can tell you it has wide currency among Postcrossing members both here and abroad. Discounts below the usual $25.00 retail price are not hard to find. If there is a flaw in the choices made for this assortment, it's that the cards tend toward a feelgood orientation; NEW YORKER covers over the years would sometimes allude to tragedies such as World War Two or the Kennedy assassination, but those concerns are virtually absent here. Cardstock and print quality are quite good.