Sight Unseen: The First Issue of The New Yorker, February 21, 1925

On New Year's Day, I came across an AbeBooks listing for the very first issue of The New Yorker, dated February 21, 1925. I was immediately taken aback by the asking price, an absurdly low $4.39.

The New Yorker
AbeBooks listing accessed January 1, 2021

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=31066285003&searchurl=kn%3DRea%2BIrvin%26sortby%3D17&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-title1

Copies of the magazine's rare first issue currently listed on eBay are priced at $4,000 to $4,500, give or take a penny. There's no way a true copy could be selling for one one-thousandth of its market value, right? My best guess was that Discover Books of Toledo had mistakenly listed the 1953 reprint of the first issue.

Two current eBay listings of the first issue of The New Yorker, preceded by the 1953 reprint

The title of the AbeBooks listing was "The New Yorker, February 21, 1925 (Volume 1)." There was no accompanying photo. Listed authors were Ralph Barton, Marc Connelly, Rea Irvin, George S. Kaufman, Alice Duer Miller, Dorothy Parker, and Alexander Woollcott. Those were indeed the advisory editors listed on the first issue's masthead. The listing's specific details were all absolutely correct, but the price was too good to be true. Who was I not to take a shot at it? I placed my order sight unseen. Ten days later, the package was in my hands.

Here then are the contents:

The New Yorker Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Album 1925-1950 was published in 1951 and reissued in paperback in 1986, some sixty-one years after the first issue's publication. How a scuffed copy of this paperback edition was erroneously listed as a copy of the original 1925 magazine is beyond me, but it strikes me as more careless than malicious. The book has a $1.00 price pencilled on the half title; the $4.39 price I paid included postage. For what it's worth, I did not previously own a copy of the paperback.

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