Binders Of Respect

And some news

You know that I keep my pulse on the news and sometimes write about it here. All the major news items today make me feel like we are waiting for a shoe to drop (or worse). The storms in California sound horrible. Secretary Blinkin is back in the Middle East looking to find support for a solution to end the war between Israel and Gaza. We are still sending missile strikes at Iran linked targets in Syria and Iraq. King Charles has cancer, we don’t know what kind. A bipartisan bill to solve the immigration crisis is going to voted on on Thursday. The Border Patrol (according to Jake Tapper of CNN is fairly conservative) supports this bill. Speaker Johnson rejects the bill, saying it is “dead on arrival.” The radical right is wanting to keep the immigration crisis alive so that Trump can run on it as a campaign issue.

Where do you get your news?

Taylor Swift won Grammys last night (suprise), it was exciting to see Tracy Chapman perform and Joni Mitchell sang at the event. It was wonderful, like most women my age, she was a hugely influential songwriter for me as I entered adulthood.

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On another note, I ran across this T-shirt ad on The New Yorker Instagram the other day. I show it to you because the model is looking at something you might find interesting. She’s leafing through scrapbooks that the magazine used to religiously keep up, housed in their library. Look at all of them behind her! Ever since the beginning of the magazine, each week an employee would clip out each cartoon and paste them in these books, organized by artist. The big black binders have labels for each artist and some artists are grouped together alphabetically. But for example Charles Addams has his own binder (or two) as does Helen Hokinson and Peter Arno. My work is in a “D” binder with artists like Eldon Dedini and Boris Druker. The magazine no longer keeps the binders going, sadly.

I started writing the first edition of my book Funny Ladies before the internet had much useful information, and so I used these binders to look at women cartoonists work. I sat day after day in The New Yorker library and looked at each woman’s work. It was fascinating to look at an artist’s drawings all together and chronological. Now of course, this can be done on the internet to a degree, but it is spotty and often not comprehensive. I don’t know what will happen to thes binders, but I hope they will go into The New Yorker’s archives in the New York Public Library. They are such great artifacts. I wonder what the last issue was that they cut up and pasted in the binders?

What I love is how the magazine valued and respected its artists.

Here is photo that my husband Michael took a while back.

That’s all I got for today! I hope you are having a good Monday.