MYSTERY MAN.

A slide show of images of Eustace Tilley

It's hard to know what people who picked up the first issue of The New Yorker, eighty years ago this month, made of the drawing on the cover. The picture is a joke, of course: which is more ephemeral, the dandy or the butterfly? But the picture also seems to be saying something about the magazine itself, and the question is: What? Is the man with the monocle being offered as an image of the New Yorker reader, a cultivated observer of life's small beauties, or is he being ridiculed as a foppish anachronism? Is it a picture of bemused sophistication or of starchy superciliousness? Did readers identify with the cover, or did they laugh at it?

The message was confusing because the magazine, in those days, was confused. The New Yorker was launched as a gossipy, facetious weekly for in-the-know Manhattanites, a sort of Jazz Age Spy. The cover was drawn by Rea Irvin, the magazine's first art editor, who also designed the distinctive New Yorker headline type. His character acquired a name, Eustace Tilley, in a series of humor pieces, by Corey Ford, that ran in the magazine during its first year, and that pretended to provide an inside look at the making of The New Yorker in a style that spoofed corporate promotional writing. Ford's stories were accompanied by illustrations in which Eustace Tilley turns up, like Waldo, in various scenes--for instance, supervising the felling of "specially grown trees to make paper for The New Yorker."

Ford's pieces were commissioned so that there would be something to run on pages that advertisers were not buying. Advertisers were not buying because they were not sure what The New Yorker was. Neither were the editors. The second issue ran a mock apology for the first. "There didn't seem to be much indication of purpose ...