The Complete New Yorker: this thing is great. Every issue of the magazine—literally reproductions of every page, covers and ads included—on eight DVDs, accessible on Windows or Mac computers. I’ve read plenty of reports that the interface could be more intuitive, that you can’t copy and paste article text, that it’s slow and that the need to swap DVDs frequently makes nerds reminisce unfondly of the mid-80s when they would play King’s Quest and have to swap 5 1/4" floppies every five minutes.
Pshaw! Although The Complete New Yorker lists for $100, you can get it for a shade more than $60 with free shipping from Amazon.com. I daresay you get what you pay for. Yes, the interface is clunky with a completely unintuitive search screen that frequently turns up strange or incomplete results. Disc swapping is slow only when you’re tracking the “complete works” of an author or a topic over time: “television” or “the Yankees,” say. But enterprising individuals have released a hack that shows you how to copy every issue to an external hard drive and access the content from there, drastically improving article retrieval speed. (I intend to do this as soon as UPS delivers my 250GB external LaCie drive.) And, yeah, you can’t copy and paste text, but if you could, it’d be a probable copyright law violation. But the pages print crisply-I don’t want to squint-and-scroll on my PowerBook’s 12" screen to read a 15-page feature anyway.
But the bottom line is that $60 figure. That’s a lot of hits for little cash. For me, highlights includes every Pauline Kael movie review and essay. Every James Thurber and Roz Chast cartoon. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which was first serialized in the magazine, and a 1957 interview he conducted with Marlon Brando.
Susan Orlean, whose piece on orchid-hunter John Laroche appeared here before it became the book that became Adaptation, has turned out other profiles on diverse people and topics, including the Shaggs, Corcoran Group broker Jill Meilus and the World Taxidermy Championships. Calvin Tompkins, meanwhile, has profiled the most original artistic and cultural minds of the twentieth century: Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Buckminster Fuller, Georgia O’ Keeffe, Paul Strand, Julia Child, Claes Oldenburg.
Certain content is indispensable for New York history aficionados. You get E.B. White and James Thurber’s original “Talk of the Town” pieces, an early one of which, from 1928, encapsulates an anecdote of Thurber sitting a few rows behind Rachmaninoff as the great pianist first hears the theremin played.
A lengthy 1950 profile of Hemingway catches him during a New York stopover en route to Italy. “This ain’t my town,” he grumbles. “It’s a town you come to for a short time. It’s murder.” The reporter tags along as the author drinks constantly, shares Perrier-Jouët and caviar with old friend Marlene Dietrich (“the Kraut”), begrudgingly purchases a new coat and belt at Abercrombie & Fitch, appreciates art at the Met and, throughout, speaks in the clipped, precise tones of one of his own characters.
You also get the ads, humorous curiosities that should prove invaluable to pop culture fanatics and graphic designers. In the mid-’50s alone, we learn that the BarcaLounger “can work relaxing wonders for a tired man...or a frazzled housewife” and that a full, “legation blue” men’s suit retails for about $69.50 at Saks on 34th Street and “stretches from the conference table to the cocktail hour to an evening of entertainment.”