Description
Collector's Note – Why This Issue Matters
The October 11, 1958 issue of The New Yorker features a cover by Arthur Getz, one of the magazine's most enduring and atmospherically distinctive visual contributors. Getz joined The New Yorker's roster of cover artists in the late 1940s and continued contributing into the 1990s — a run of several decades that places him among the handful of artists who genuinely shaped how the magazine looked across generations of readers. His covers are immediately recognizable to anyone who has spent serious time with the magazine's visual history: quiet, carefully observed scenes of American life, rendered in a palette that tends toward the muted and autumnal, with a particular gift for capturing the specific quality of light and atmosphere in urban and suburban settings at particular times of year. An October Getz cover is a natural fit — his sensibility was tailor-made for the seasonal transitions, the early darkness, the particular texture of American life in the fall.
October 1958 places this issue in the middle of William Shawn's editorship, at a moment when The New Yorker was operating with quiet authority as the most literarily serious general-interest magazine in the country. Shawn had been editor since 1952, succeeding the magazine's founder Harold Ross, and his editorial vision — more expansive in its journalistic ambitions than Ross's, deeply committed to long-form writing of every kind — was by 1958 fully expressed in the magazine's pages. The late 1950s were a period of genuine cultural ferment in American intellectual life, with the Beat Generation challenging postwar conformity, the civil rights movement building toward its watershed years, and the space age beginning to reshape how Americans thought about science, technology, and national identity. The New Yorker of this moment engaged those currents with characteristic intelligence and indirection, and each issue from this period is a layered document of a culture in the middle of significant change. For collectors focused on vintage New Yorker issues from the magazine's most artistically and editorially distinguished decades, the late 1950s represent some of the richest material available.
The "full magazine" designation in the listing is worth noting as a collecting consideration. Complete issues — all pages intact, cover attached, no clipped advertisements or extracted articles — are always preferable to partial survivors, and New Yorker issues from this era were frequently raided for their cartoons, their illustrations, or specific articles by readers who did not anticipate that the complete periodical would eventually be more valuable than any individual page. A complete October 1958 issue with a Getz cover and no address label represents a genuinely intact artifact of that moment in the magazine's history. Among surviving magazines from 1958, issues of The New Yorker from this period are consistently among the most rewarding finds for collectors who approach the magazine as both a literary and a visual artifact.
About the Publication
The New Yorker, founded by Harold Ross in 1925 and edited from 1952 by William Shawn, was by the late 1950s the defining American magazine of literary fiction, long-form journalism, criticism, humor, and illustration, with a readership that extended far beyond New York City to encompass educated, culturally engaged readers across the country and internationally. Its editorial format had been refined over three decades into something remarkably stable and remarkably alive simultaneously — the mix of fiction, poetry, "Talk of the Town," profiles, reportage, criticism, cartoons, and commissioned cover art felt both entirely characteristic and continuously fresh issue to issue. The magazine's cover artists, who worked on commission and whose images appeared without titles or captions in the magazine's tradition, gave The New Yorker a visual identity unlike any other American periodical, one that readers learned to read as closely as the text inside. Arthur Getz was among the most important contributors to that visual tradition, and his October covers in particular became a seasonal marker that long-term subscribers came to anticipate as reliably as the turning of the leaves.
Key Highlights Inside
- Cover illustration by Arthur Getz, whose work across several decades of New Yorker covers represents one of the most sustained and beloved contributions to the magazine's visual identity — an October cover by Getz is among the most atmospherically characteristic artifacts of his long tenure.
- A complete issue from the William Shawn editorial era at one of its most fully realized moments, containing the full range of the magazine's editorial format: fiction, poetry, "Talk of the Town," long-form profiles or reportage, criticism, and cartoons.
- Period advertising throughout the issue, which serious collectors of mid-century American culture treat as editorial content in its own right — the commercial landscape of late 1950s America is documented in New Yorker advertising with unusual vividness and specificity.
- Note: Specific interior articles, fiction pieces, cartoons, and named contributors for this issue are unconfirmed beyond what the listing states. Collectors researching the precise editorial contents would benefit from consulting archived New Yorker tables of contents or the magazine's own online archive.
Condition & Rarity
The absence of an address label on the front cover is a meaningful positive attribute for a New Yorker issue from this period, and it meaningfully narrows the field of surviving copies that meet collector standards for display. The magazine's subscription base in the late 1950s was substantial — far larger than its newsstand circulation — and the practical consequence for today's collectors is that labeled copies vastly outnumber clean ones among the survivors of any given issue from this era. Good overall condition with edge wear and possible rips is an accurate and realistic assessment for a sixty-five-year-old staple-bound weekly; The New Yorker used relatively lightweight uncoated and lightly coated paper stocks in the 1950s that are prone to tanning, edge brittleness, and surface oxidation over time, and copies that have remained genuinely readable and displayable after more than six decades represent the better end of what the market typically offers. The absence of a plastic protective sleeve indicates the issue has been stored and handled without that additional layer of preservation — not unusual for copies that have spent decades in private collections, bookshelves, or estate holdings, but worth factoring into any long-term preservation plan. When evaluating any surviving copy of this issue, the most important attributes to assess are the color integrity and surface condition of the Getz cover illustration, the completeness of the issue's page count, the flexibility and tanning level of the interior pages, and the security and alignment of the spine staples.
Looking for More Issues Like This?
Arthur Getz covers from the late 1950s are genuinely sought after by collectors at the intersection of New Yorker history and mid-century American illustration, and label-free copies in displayable condition take time to surface. If this particular issue has already found a home, the New Yorker collection at OriginalMagazines.com spans the full arc of the Shawn editorial era and regularly turns up issues from the late 1950s that reward close attention from both literary and visual perspectives. For collectors with a broader interest in American culture at the tail end of the Eisenhower years, the 1958 magazine collection covers the year across multiple titles and offers a rich cross-section of the period from several different editorial vantage points — well worth exploring if this issue sparked your interest in the era.