7 October 2005
The New Yorker may very well be the greatest magazine ever published. Since it began to be published in 1925, the New Yorker has featured some of the greatest writers in the English language. Dorothy Parker, E.B. White, James Thurber, Martin Amis, W.H. Auden, Stephen Vincent Benet, Ernest Hemingway, and F.Scott Fitzgerald have all contributed to the magazine. Every week for over eighty years the New Yorker has provided an eclectic mix of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, photographs, and of course cartoons.
After eighty years of publication, the entire archive of the New Yorker, from 21 February 1925 to 14 February 2005, is now available on DVD-ROM. Coming on eight DVDs, the entirety of every issues is available, all the articles, all the stories, all the cartoons, and even the ads.
The collection has a list price of $100, but is available on Amazon and elsewhere for a little over $60. At this price it is an utter steal.
The collection is not without flaws. Biggest among them is that the archive is not full-text searchable. You can search titles, article abstracts and key words, as well as by author, department, and issue, but you can’t search within the articles themselves. Also, you cannot install the issues on your hard drive.
But given the price, these are minor complaints. The archive is well worth it. If you can resist running out and buying it right away, be sure to put it on your holiday gift lists.
