Are Magazines Dead? Not At This Exhibition
The newsstands of New York may not be what they used to be. But on the ground-floor gallery of the Grolier Club, a book lover’s haven on East 60th Street in Manhattan, the print-besotted can console themselves with a Platonic vision of the Great American Newsstand as it never was, at least not all at the same time. “Magazines and the American Experience,” a kaleidoscopic survey on view through April 24, covers almost 300 years of periodic history, from Ben Franklin’s General Magazine and Andrew Bradford’s American Magazine, two rivals from 1741 for the title of America’s first magazine, to a 2016 New Yorker cover by Christoph Niemann that used augmented-reality technology. There are plenty of valuable rarities. And then there are the just plain oddities, like The Hobo News, an irreverent weekly (produced by self-described hobos), which, in 1942, was trying to do its part for the war effort. Read more at The New York Times.