The Complete New Yorker, a DVD compilation of the magazine's first 4,109 issues, features error messages that are harder to decipher than the most inscrutable James Thurber cartoon. Its search functionality is neither as powerful nor efficient as it could be. Its user license, written in the chilling patois of the corporate lawyer, suggests that the magazine's famous mascot, Eustace Tilley, may be putting his monocle to some nefarious uses.
But forget, for now, its shortcomings. The Complete New Yorker corrects a huge imbalance that has existed in the world of archaic content over the last half-century. Finally, it's as easy to read a really good magazine from, say, 1954, as it is to watch a really bad movie of the same vintage.
Each of those 4,109 issues is presented as a series of digital scans of the original pages. You get the covers, the editorial, the cartoons, the ads, everything. On one page, there's a cartoon about people making out at the drive-in; on the next, there's the article (Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring") that catalyzed the environmental movement.
It's that mix of the frivolous and the serious that makes magazines such telling time capsules. More visual than books and newspapers, more wide-ranging than movies and television, they capture history as it is happening, completely indifferent to what hugely pressing concern will soon be forgotten, or what barely acknowledged incident will grow into the next hugely pressing concern. What matters to magazines is what's happening now, and perhaps because of this fierce allegiance to the present, old magazines are generally considered slightly less desirable than old milk. If you want to experience them in their original, unabridged form, you must visit the special-collections crypts at your library, comb through musty piles at antiquarian bookstores or engage in e-Bay bidding wars.
In contrast, old books, recordings and movies remain forever young, with periodic rejuvenation via new editions, remastered anniversary sets and various other forms of cultural Botox. And it's not just the best or the most popular that enjoy immortality: Companies like Rhino Records and Something Weird Video plunder bygone eras for the strangest, most marginal content they can unearth.
The magazine graveyard is packed with its own forgotten treasures and oddities too. Consider Wet, a late-1970s California publication devoted to "gourmet bathing." Or Ken, a well-funded Esquire spin-off in the late 1930s that only lasted two years thanks to its knack for offending everyone with its muckraking, in-your-face style.
So where's the Rhino Records of magazine oddities? The Penguin Classics to memorialize the medium's triumphs? The easy explanation, of course, is that there's no demand for old magazines. But would an audience for vintage VD scare films exist if you could only view them in the reading room of your nearest major metropolitan library?
People don't read anymore, the conventional wisdom goes, but somehow companies like Google and Yahoo! have made billions off of text and mostly static images. Recognizing this, Google is teaming with Harvard, Stanford and other universities to digitize millions of out-of-print books. Magazines, however, are rarely mentioned in the press releases for such projects. And even if this is just a semantic oversight, well, how likely is it that the mid-century scandal rag Confession, the most popular newsstand magazine of its era, or more obscure titles like the Eleanor Roosevelt-edited Babies, Just Babies, made it into Harvard's collection?
And thus, at a time when technology is making it increasingly cheap and easy to reclaim and repackage the past, one of its richest sources of content—the magazine—remains ignored. The Complete New Yorker offers a glimpse of what's out there, but its 4,109 issues are just an eyelash on the tip of a very large, very colorful iceberg.
Greg Beato has written for Spin and Reason.