The New Yorker

When I was 15 and bored, a Brooke Hill librarian saved my reading life: she introduced me to Scientific American, Time, and The New Yorker.

I well thumbed every new issue of all three magazines through the rest of high school. I'm not sure how much I understood of the first, though I had aspirations of studying molecular biology. I do know I read the second thoroughly. As for the third, I loved it in 1962 and I still love it today, though in some ways it is not the same magazine.

One thing hasn't changed: the way I read The New Yorker for the clever cartoons, and the beautiful (and sometimes controversial) painted covers.

I turn every page, noting the events and table of contents, studying each cartoon, enjoying the filler-drawings (and I love the continuing narratives implied by them in today's magazine), glancing at marginal advertisements (I usually skip the whole-page ones), reading the poems, and, today, laughing at the cartoon caption contest on the last page (I even sometimes go online and vote). Then, I go back and read the reviews (books, TV, film, and plays), selected long articles, and skim "The Talk of the Town." (Before these pieces were signed -- was that during Tina Brown's tenure? -- , I read them all for the famous "New Yorker style." I liked those talk-pieces better than most today.) I rarely read the short fiction, with the exception of works by writers in whom I'm interested. I do remember a fairly recent, terrific and strange story by Tony Earley and Annie Proulx' "Brokeback Mountain." I miss some columnists whose work was regular. (I especially enjoyed Jamaica Kincaid's gardening columns, of all things. I'm not a gardener myself.)

My favorite part of the magazine is the cover. I miss the brown-wrapper mailing days because then the cover was always pristine. I frequently saved the covers to decorate my dorm rooms in college, and then I saved them for decoupaging my guitar case, and then I saved them to post in my classroom. Now, I can't get the dadgum label off without stripping off some part of the cover design. Each is a left-framed work of original art worth saving.

(As I write this, I remember the fabulous pool house owned by friends of my parents. The "powder room" was wallpapered with New Yorker covers, not the originals but some fancy wallpaper popular in the early '60s.)

I thank all librarians for saving restless teens like me and the New Yorker publishing corporation for maintaining the magazine since its inaugural issue in 1925, especially since so many other magazines have died.