As I recall, a bit of a kerfuffle happened when it was published back in the day.Īuthor and illustrator of many many picture books, it’s little wonder that the Art Editor of The New Yorker, Ms. Banyai is well known in a different way for New Yorker covers, including this controversial one. I had a patron the other day ask if we had anything else that was similar but aside from Barbara Lehman all I could think of was Wiesner’s Flotsam. Zoom and Re-Zoom continue to circulate heavily in my library, all thanks to Banyai. Here then is a quickie encapsulation of some of the folks I discovered in the course of my cover removal. Sure, I knew that the overlap between illustrators of children’s books and illustrators of New Yorkers was frequent. For now, it’s just fun to flip through the covers themselves and, in flipping, I discovered something.

I once had the desire to wallpaper my bathroom in such covers, but that dream will have to wait (as much as I love New York apartments and all. “When I finally met Bruce McCall, I felt the thrill that other people feel when meeting Springsteen.In the meantime, we now are the proud owners of only three boxes worth of New Yorker covers.

He was a huge talent and such an important and protean presence in our pages.”-David Remnick Bruce was also a brilliant writer, both a sharp and hilarious satirist and a wintry memoirist. “Bruce is best-known for his visual world, the surrealist World’s Fair futurism, his affection for a past that never was, the sheer lunacy, but that is only part of his brilliance. I asked more of McCall’s friends and colleagues what they’ll remember and treasure about him and his work: For a curmudgeon, he was always happy to see you.” He often felt (needlessly) that he got short shrift as a writer, but I was always excited when my inbox contained a message from him, which would generally begin: ‘Please read this submission and laugh your goddamn head off.’ He was a first-class pal. “He alchemized his misanthropy into joyously anarchic paintings and drawings and pieces of writing. “Bruce was a genius,” the New Yorker editor Susan Morrison said. McCall contributed more than eighty covers (this is his eighty-third) and about as many Shouts & Murmurs columns.

Marveltown by Bruce McCall