A Century of The New Yorker: Collected, Preserved, and Celebrated at the New York Public Library

So here we are, stepping through the grand doors of the New York Public Library, where ghosts of words past drift in the air like the last traces of frost clinging to the benches in Bryant Park. And what do we find? A celebration, an excavation, a wry, knowing nod to a magazine that, for a century now, has been the city’s most observant flâneur, its most critical darling, its funniest and most fastidious friend.

“A Century of The New Yorker” is an exhibition that unfurls like a well-thumbed issue—artfully composed, revealing in its juxtapositions, filled with wit, insight, and just enough ennui to make it feel perfectly at home in the stacks. The New Yorker has never been just a magazine. It’s a voice, a sensibility, a winking presence in the room.

One can almost see Harold Ross hovering in the wings—shaggy, exasperated, demanding an even more ruthless edit. Back in 1925, he and Jane Grant set out to create something unlike the other periodicals of their day, something urbane but never crass, sophisticated but not soulless, something that captured, as Ross put it, “metropolitan life.” What a thing to attempt. What a thing to actually pull off.

Since then, The New Yorker has been a city unto itself, populated by the sharpest minds, the driest wits, the most exacting critics, the most evocative storytellers. Over the years, its pages have housed James Baldwin’s thunder, Dorothy Parker’s bite, E.B. White’s luminous clarity. The exhibition, much like the magazine, doesn’t just dwell on the legends but traces the invisible architecture of its making—the editors scribbling in margins, the typists hammering out letters, the fact-checkers meticulously untangling exaggerations from truth.

And oh, the covers. Those miniature windows into a parallel world—Peter Arno’s smug, cocktail-clinking elites; Saul Steinberg’s playful distortions of space and time; Roz Chast’s neurotic, New Yorky brilliance. It all started with Rea Irvin’s Eustace Tilley, monocled and bemused, peering at a butterfly as if appraising the very essence of fleeting elegance. From then on, each week has brought a new visual haiku, an image that distills the moment, or sidesteps it entirely, because The New Yorker is nothing if not a little aloof, a little ahead of the game.

The exhibition reminds us that for all its highbrow elegance, The New Yorker is a magazine of contradictions: it is at once deadly serious and riotously funny, meticulously reported and wildly imaginative. It has shaped our understanding of the wars we fight, the injustices we endure, the culture we consume. Its cartoons alone—those masterclasses in brevity and wit—are enough to justify its place in the pantheon.

And yet, as the years have passed, The New Yorker has done the one thing you least expect from a century-old institution: it has adapted. It has folded itself into the digital age without losing its paper-and-ink soul. Its archives are now at our fingertips, a bottomless trove of voices and visions, meticulously preserved and endlessly reinterpreted.

In the end, this exhibition is more than a retrospective; it is a love letter to the peculiar alchemy of language, humor, and observation that turns mere reportage into art. As you wander through, pausing before the crisp typography of a vintage cover or the penciled scribbles of an editor’s note, you feel the pulse of something both timeless and timely. A century on, The New Yorker remains what it has always been: a mirror, a magnifying glass, a raised eyebrow, a perfectly timed punchline.

So take a moment. Stand still in the hush of the library and let it all wash over you. The voices, the wit, the meticulous brilliance of it all. Because if there’s one thing The New Yorker has taught us, it’s that paying attention—really, truly paying attention—is its own kind of art.

This exhibition is organized by The New York Public Library and curated by Julie Golia, Associate Director, Rayner Wing, and the Charles J. Liebman Senior Curator of Manuscripts, and Julie Carlsen, Assistant Curator, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature.