A Weighty and Whimsical Century of The New Yorker’s Archives

The archives of The New Yorker, housed at the New York Public Library, consist of more than 2,500 boxes of manuscripts, letters, page proofs, cartoons, art, photographs and memos. They are studded with the celebrated names — E.B. White, J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Rachel Carson — that filled this most mythologized of magazines, and helped transform American literary life.

And then there are the “Distasteful Ads.”

A folder with that label holds examples like one for “wonderfully expensive children’s knits from Italy,” or another for men’s socks, with a mildly racy illustration and the tagline “Go to Any Length.”

That one struck William Shawn, the magazine’s famously fastidious longtime editor, as inappropriate innuendo, and it never appeared. But it’s now on view at the library as part of a new exhibition, “A Century of The New Yorker.”

The show, which runs until February 2026, fills two upstairs galleries at the library’s flagship building on Fifth Avenue. It mixes the weighty and the whimsical and is designed to appeal to New Yorker devotees and casual browsers alike.

“The magazine’s own style and ethos became an inspiration to us in the way we laid out the show,” Julie Golia, one of the curators, said during a recent tour. “We really wanted the walls to feel like a page of the magazine.”