Read about this week’s cover, “Moving Day,” by Bruce McCall: http://t.co/7pmmuof1oC pic.twitter.com/5zWQUQb4eU
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) January 26, 2015
The New Yorker’s latest cover is a farewell to 4 Times Square, where the magazine’s offices were located for 15 years. Nick Paumgarten writes for The New Yorker about the move to 1 World Trade Center and the things staff sifted through on the way out.
Frankly, it was harder to get ready to leave. As a prelude to the move, the staff, told that it would have to travel light, spent weeks purging offices of the detritus of the decades. Some of it was easy to bid goodbye to: here and there a shrine of exotic booze (flask of Ugandan banana gin, anyone?) or a Cornell-box assemblage of promotional doodads. The things we keep around! But mostly it was paper, whole forests’ worth. Thousands upon thousands of orphaned books, some hoarded for novelty appeal, or a nascent interest, or a bygone assignment, or out of allegiance to (or guilt about) writer friends—an “accretion of intention,” as one acquaintance put it—were trucked off to Housing Works and the like. Many more perfectly good books were sent to their doom, like so many unclaimed stray dogs. (An uncommercial thought: a secondhand bookshop called Perfectly Good Books.)
