The New Yorker Magazine

September 20, 1993, the complete issue in magnificent shape, as new, with no shipping label or label remnants because it never had a label, AND no UPC bar code, the combination of which is extremely hard to find.

A wonderful 1990s issue of The New Yorker, with a terrific J. J. Sempé cover titled “Arabesque”: a nighttime view down the narrow canyon between Manhattan buildings, where a brightly illuminated ballerina practices alone in a window high above the street. The New Yorker itself confirms both Sempé’s title and the September 20, 1993 date.

Here are a few highlights from this issue, with the entirety of the contents detailed further down:

Arthur Lubow contributes “George Wolfe in Progress,” an extensive look at director and playwright George C. Wolfe as he takes charge of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theatre in the aftermath of Joseph Papp, examining Wolfe’s theatrical imagination, his work on Jelly’s Last Jam and Angels in America, and the formidable task of remaking an institution built around Papp’s personality.

Terence Monmaney tells the extraordinary medical story of Australian physician Barry J. Marshall, whose conviction that bacteria rather than stress caused peptic ulcers led him to test the theory on himself, helping overturn decades of medical orthodoxy and establish the importance of Helicobacter pylori.

Lillian Ross writes an extensive Profile of Marsha Garces Williams and Robin Williams, centered on their life together and the making of Mrs. Doubtfire, which Marsha is co-producing for Twentieth Century-Fox.

There is also Julian Barnes on the financial catastrophe engulfing Lloyd’s of London and its individual investors; fiction by Tom Drury; Jay McInerney imagining the fate of printed books in the approaching computer age; Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid sending Stalin to a New Jersey motel; Anthony Lane, John Lahr, Paul Griffiths, Fernanda Eberstadt, and Louis Menand in the arts and review departments; poetry by Muriel Spark and Eric Ormsby; and much more.

The Complete and Utter Contents of This Issue

with grateful acknowledgment to Michael Palin and Terry Jones.

COVER

J. J. Sempé — “Arabesque.” A nighttime Manhattan cityscape seen through the deep, narrow space between buildings, with a tiny ballerina practicing in a brilliantly lighted window amid the surrounding darkness.

COMMENT

Sara Mosel — “Back to School (Not).” A detailed Comment on New York City’s public-school asbestos crisis and the scandal surrounding testing of the city’s schools. Investigators Edward Stancik and Thomas Thacher II found earlier asbestos inspections riddled with incompetence, mismanagement, and fraud, with as many as a third of the original tests apparently fabricated. Fourteen years into asbestos abatement, the Board of Education could not reliably tell parents which schools had actually been inspected or which were safe, throwing the scheduled opening of the school year into chaos.

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Brendan Gill — “Big Spender.” Architect Peter Marino gives a tour of the lavish new Barneys department store at Madison Avenue and 61st Street before its opening party, discussing its French limestone, mosaic floors, enormous windows, and his unusual opportunity to design both exterior and interior. Marino recalls that his first private commission was remodeling a townhouse for Andy Warhol, who paid him in pictures.

William Green — “Cowpox.” The bizarre story of South Carolina private investigator William Graham and his investigation of the suspicious death of a $200,000-insured Holstein, which uncovered a scheme involving grossly over-insured cattle, insurance fraud, and ultimately two suicides.

Thomas Beller — “Dog Days.” Beller contemplates the breakup of his band, Honus Wagner, and life without the drums, ranging through the peculiar indignities of being a drummer, rock stardom and its discontents, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Motörhead’s Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor, and Charlie Watts, whom Beller considers the rare drummer capable of playing in a rock band while retaining his dignity.

Jeffrey Toobin — “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo.” A portrait of Harry C. Batchelder, Jr., defense lawyer for Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, touching on Batchelder’s career representing indigent defendants, an earlier murder case in which he mounted a cultural defense, and his unusual hobby of cockfighting.

Adam Platt — “Bellhop.” Tony Cichielo, longtime bellhop at the Algonquin Hotel, remembers some of the celebrated people who passed through its doors, including William Faulkner, Laurence Olivier, Thelonious Monk, Brendan Behan, Thornton Wilder, and John Osborne.

ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS

Arthur Lubow — “George Wolfe in Progress.” An extensive examination of George C. Wolfe, the new producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival, and his efforts to inherit and transform the theatrical institution built by Joseph Papp. Lubow explores Wolfe’s working methods and visual imagination, his career from The Colored Museum through Jelly’s Last Jam and Angels in America, and his relationships with such collaborators as Robin Wagner, Jules Fisher, Luther Henderson, Tony Kushner, and Gregory Hines. The piece also considers Wolfe’s plans for reorganizing the Public Theatre and establishing a distinct identity for each of its stages.

ANNALS OF MEDICINE

Terence Monmaney — “Marshall’s Hunch.” The remarkable story of Australian physician Barry J. Marshall and the discovery that peptic ulcers are caused by bacteria rather than primarily by stress and other psychological factors. Working from the observations of J. Robin Warren, Marshall isolated Helicobacter pylori and famously experimented upon himself; the discovery transformed the treatment of ulcers and helped establish chronic Helicobacter infection as a major cause of stomach cancer.

LETTER FROM LONDON

Julian Barnes — “The Deficit Millionaires.” Barnes examines the disastrous financial problems confronting individual investors—or “Names”—at Lloyd’s of London. The prestige and apparently modest risk that had attracted upper-middle-class Britons to Lloyd’s concealed the terrifying consequences of “unlimited liability,” leaving many investors facing financial ruin.

ARTIST AT LARGE

Josh Gosfield — “San Gennaro.” An illustrated Artist at Large devoted to New York’s exuberant San Gennaro street festival.

POETRY

Muriel Spark — “That Lonely Shoe Lying on the Road,” a poem contemplating the solitary discarded shoe of the title.

Eric Ormsby — “For a Modest God.”

PROFILES

Lillian Ross — “Mr. and Mrs. Williams.” An extensive Profile of Marsha Garces Williams, wife and creative/business partner of Robin Williams, as she co-produces Mrs. Doubtfire for Twentieth Century-Fox. Ross follows Marsha, Robin, their family and entourage while looking at the production of the film and Marsha’s emergence as a producer in her own right.

FICTION

Tom Drury — “Strong.” Louise, a photographer in the fictional Midwestern community of Stone City, negotiates an increasingly peculiar domestic separation from her husband Dan Norman, the county sheriff. While Dan’s therapist recommends that he sleep outside the house to cure his insomnia, Louise rents a trailer, initially intending it for him but ultimately keeping it herself. Around them unfold portrait-studio work, an R.V. publicity shoot, bowling, drinking, marriage counseling, domestic tensions, and Louise’s discovery that she is pregnant.

THE THEATRE

John Lahr — “Pinter’s Night Sweats.” Lahr reviews Harold Pinter’s Moonlight.

THE CURRENT CINEMA

Anthony Lane — “Back to the Easel.” Lane considers Jacques Rivette’s Divertimento and La Belle Noiseuse.

MUSICAL EVENTS

Paul Griffiths — “The Santa Fe Trail.” Griffiths reports on the Santa Fe Opera season, encompassing works including Kurt Weill’s The Protagonist and The Tsar Has His Photograph Taken, Handel’s Xerxes, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Puccini’s La Bohème, and Richard Strauss’s Capriccio, along with the singers, conductors, directors, and designers involved in the productions.

BOOKS

Fernanda Eberstadt — “Northern Light.” A consideration of Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally, with its Danish and Greenlandic settings and cultural background.

Louis Menand — “Willie’s Version.” Menand considers Willie Morris’s New York Days, the author and editor’s memoir of New York, magazines, and his years at Harper’s.

Briefly Noted — Body & Soul by Frank Conroy; American Slavery: 1619–1877 by Peter Kolchin; and Broadsides from the Other Orders: A Book of Bugs by Sue Hubbell.

PORTFOLIO

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid — “Stalin in Jersey.” A wonderfully mordant Portfolio of paintings by the Russian émigré artists, including Josef Stalin shooting himself in a New Jersey motel room. The accompanying text discusses Komar and Melamid’s mockery of Soviet Socialist Realism, their work in New York and New Jersey, and their paintings made in ironic homage to workers at the Bergen Point Brass Foundry in Bayonne.

SHOUTS & MURMURS

Jay McInerney — “The Way of All Text.” A very 1993 satire on books, computers, the Internet, and predictions of print’s impending demise. McInerney imagines making a backyard bonfire of the now-obsolete books on his shelves because everything is going digital—until an issue of Wired and futurist Paul Saffo’s prediction of the written word’s continued flourishing cause him hurriedly to rescue Bertie and Jeeves and return the books to their shelves.

CARTOONS

Victoria Roberts — “I thought Daryl Hannah was promised to King Neptune.” Two mermaids gossip about Daryl Hannah.

Stuart Leeds — “The Ikea Family.” An entire family is shaped like Swedish modern furniture, complete with mock-Ikea names for mother and father, children, and dog.

Lee Lorenz — “There’s no, no in your eyes, but yes, yes in your pheromones.” A man attempts a biologically informed pickup at a party.

Mike Twohy — “We adopted a highway, but it’s just not the same thing.” A man speaks to a woman holding a baby.

Henry Martin — “Remember when life was all ‘Heigh-ho! Come to the fair’?” Two businessmen reminisce.

Edward Koren — “She’s not very good at defending herself, but she does very well at identifying her feelings.” A mother discusses her crying young daughter with another woman.

Dana Fradon — A couple passes an electronics store named “3 GUYS Threatening to Move to New Jersey.”

Michael Crawford — “I put in a full day with the big cats, Kasmer. I need a sympathetic human cannonball I can come home to.” A weary female lion tamer talks to her human-cannonball husband.

J. B. Handelsman — “I’d like to buy everyone a drink. All I ask in return is that you listen patiently to my shallow and simplistic views on a broad range of social and political issues.” A man proposes a candid bargain to the other men at a bar.

Barry Blitt — “C-SPAN’S NEW FALL SEASON,” with such prospective programs as The Girls of NAFTA, Beavis and Rebut-Head, and Filibusters.

Robert Mankoff — “Diane, this is Karen, an old war buddy of mine.” A husband introduces another woman to his wife.

Roz Chast — “INFLATABLE GUYS FOR THE LADIES.” A full-page color assortment of balloon men useful for such jobs as moving the refrigerator, staying home with the children, dealing with a jammed window, and answering the telephone.

Gahan Wilson — “It’s their idea of cute.” A dog living in a doghouse decorated with a coat of arms explains his owners to another dog.

Richard Cline — “Here we are again, back in our little town, flush with exotic tales from the potato fields.” A man reports on recent travels to two women.

Arnie Levin — “Something you have to accept, Porky. You may always be ‘Looney Tunes.’” A psychiatrist counsels Porky Pig.

Charles Barsotti — “I can’t talk now.” An anthropomorphic desk answers the telephone while an executive is sitting behind it.

Bruce Eric Kaplan — “A day is a long time.” One small child speaks to another on a playground.

Danny Shanahan — “EUROBARNEY — ‘Zank heavonz for leetle girls . . .’” Barney the dinosaur acquires a decidedly adult, Maurice Chevalier-style French persona.

Leo Cullum — “I do have a fallback position, but it involves firearms.” One businessman explains his negotiating position to another.

Ed Fisher — “You mean when I use a phrase like ‘Pharaoh dreamed seven cows came up out of the Nile,’ or ‘God remembered Noah,’ or David’s wife Michal ‘despised him in her heart’—that’s speculative journalism?” An ancient Hebrew scribe discusses editorial standards with a colleague.

Mick Stevens — A bar full of businessmen is decorated with a large reclining portrait of a seductive woman—who is completely dressed in a business suit and carrying a briefcase.

William Hamilton — “Neat ancestors—biological?” Two women at a party contemplate portraits of one woman’s parents.

Peter Steiner — “And are you the plaintiff or the defendant?” A saleswoman questions a female customer trying on clothes.

FASCINATING VINTAGE ADVERTISEMENTS

The issue opens with a vintage print ad for the Windsor Court Hotel in New Orleans, presenting the hotel as “A Celebration of Good Taste and Good Living.”

The back cover is a striking Chanel No. 5 / Lord & Taylor advertisement: a woman in a white strapless dress holds a bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume, accompanied by Coco Chanel’s declaration that perfume is part of a woman and that elegance is impossible without it.

A dramatic Emanuel Ungaro Parallèle at Saks Fifth Avenue fashion advertisement presents a model in a sharply tailored dark ensemble inside an enormous geometric folding-screen construction.

And a full-page Cayman Islands tourism advertisement promises that from the first moment visitors arrive, they will be “relaxed vacationers not tourists,” dominated by the wonderfully contradictory island sign: PRIVATE PROPERTY — VISITORS WELCOME.