Half a century at the center of the world

A suitably sumptuous book to celebrate fifty years of the cities leading weekly, of course, there is that other weekly with the addition of ER on its name and that, too, has plenty of listing information but the readership is as much the east coast liberal elite as well as city dwellers. The editors took the wise decision to avoid dividing the years into decades and looking at each in detail, which tends to be the usual format for anniversary books, instead they summed it up in eight chapters: Power; Midnight; Food; Crisis; Living; Culture; Family; Style.

Each of these picks out the highs and lows of how it effected New York folk. It's worth saying that this is a highly visual book, covers, photos and pages from the magazine are reproduced or the articles reset, for example, Bernie Madoff's March 2, 2009 cover fills a page and the next spread has a  reprint of the article by Steve Fishman and a graphic of the original spread in the magazine. There are eight two page fold-outs with covers and reproduced pages for various subjects like Nixon, Trump, food, design, celebrity et cetera.

A couple of items I would have expected to see but are absent, one -- the commercial architecture of the city, there have been some very significant skyscrapers erected in the last fifty years and two -- fifty years of covers. OK, 2600 of them maybe going too far, as it is  think there are probably around two hundred throughout the book. Pages eighteen to twenty-one has a hundred of them. Looking at a page of covers confirms that the magazine has had some very talented Art Directors over the years, it always looked a beautifully designed publication.

Overall, I thought this was a handsome, pictorial reminder of an essential weekly read. Incidentally, when you get your copy remove the cover because the reverse opens out to a large poster called The Approval Matrix, everything from highbrow to lowbrow, the NYC taste hierarchies revealed.