http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/02/arts/02yorker.html?ex=1275364800&en=1f9f3b464d73a537&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rssThe New Yorker, the weekly magazine that started as "a hectic book of gossip, cartoons and facetiae," as Louis Menand once wrote, and has evolved into a citadel of narrative nonfiction and investigative reporting, will publish its entire 80-year archives on searchable computer discs this fall.
The collection, titled "The Complete New Yorker," will consist of eight DVD's containing high-resolution digital images of every page of the 4,109 issues of the magazine from February 1925 through the 80th anniversary issue, published last February. Included on the discs will be "every cover, every piece of writing, every drawing, listing, newsbreak, poem and advertisement," David Remnick, editor of the magazine, has written in an introduction to the collection.
The collection, which will also include a 123-page book containing Mr. Remnick's essay, a New Yorker timeline and highlights of selected pages from the magazine, is being published by the magazine and will be distributed to stores by Random House. It will have a cover price of $100, although it is likely to be sold in many bookstores and online for considerably less. The magazine also plans to issue annual updates to the disc collection, and it expects a first printing of 200,000 copies.
While innumerable neurotic New Yorker fanatics have saved piles of the magazine in closets or basements, the few easily accessible archives of the magazine's contents have been on microfilm or in bound volumes in public libraries. But those media hold little attraction for younger readers, Mr. Remnick said, and too frequently go unused. "Students who rely on Google as a turbo-charged Library of Alexandria feel no more eager to use microfilm than they do to pick up a protractor and a needle-nosed compass," Mr. Remnick states in his introduction.