Ben Yagoda

Some years ago local writer Ben Yagoda happened upon a little article in The New York Times; The New Yorker was donating its files to the New York Public Library. Then in 1994, Yagoda recalls from his home in Swarthmore, "I went up there and started looking around." Out of the 2,500 boxes of files, a substantial part was correspondence between editors and contributors, and interoffice memos covering the fascinating minutiae of a magazine’s daily workings.

The result of Yagoda’s labors is a fascinating cultural history of a magazine that is a culture unto itself. About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made (Scribner, 400 p., $30) documents an American publishing phenomenon that has spanned over 70 years. The book searches for the elusive New Yorker formula: sophisticated, metropolitan, "casual" and impossible to define, even for the army of editors, writers and cartoonists who created it.

To supplement his primary research, the author placed a notice in the New York Times Book Review soliciting readers of 20-plus years to fill out a survey about their remembrances. There were over 700 enthusiastic responses. When surveyed on their impressions of the magazine under recent editor Tina Brown, a high number of respondents had "profoundly negative things" to say with plenty of "vulgarity and profanity." What surprised Yagoda, however, was when he asked if they had consequently canceled their subscriptions: "Almost all of them said no. This New Yorker was better than no New Yorker."

—Scott Shrake

Ben Yagoda will read Tue., May 9, 7:30 p.m., at the Gershman Y, 401 S. Broad St., $5, 215-545-0153.