Emma Allen on Otto Soglow’s Spot Art

The New Yorker doesn’t easily let go of the old stuff. Recently, our copy department retired the hyphen we’d kept in “in-box” for longer than anyone should keep anything in an inbox. But “teen-ager” clings to its appropriately awkward hyphen, and “coöperation” retains its diaeresis. (Don’t call it an umlaut.) My favorite still functioning relics are two fat binders of “Talk spots”—hundreds of postage-stamp-size drawings that appear at the tops of Talk of the Town pieces, which the cartoonist Otto Soglow drew from 1926 to 1970, to illustrate stories in the section, and which have (mostly) been paired with new Talk pieces ever since.

One of my first jobs at the magazine was to flip through these binders and pick decades-old drawings to run alongside some of our timeliest stories. It was astonishing how well these vintage vignettes continued to match the week’s news. Sure, over the years hemlines fluctuate; TV replaces radio; Nixon’s jowls droop. But something about the drawings’ look and tone is ageless. On a micro scale, they display the cheekiness and the reverence for the hyper-specific that make up the magazine’s DNA.

Soglow was born in Manhattan in 1900, and pretty much never left. He wanted to be an actor but settled for being a cartoonist, and was best known for his syndicated comic “The Little King,” a wordless strip about a rotund, charmingly immature monarch. Soglow’s first New Yorker cartoon was published nine months into the magazine’s existence, and his increasingly spare aesthetic, which eschewed text and favored a clean, elegant line, was a harbinger of a style that became immensely popular.

When Soglow died, in 1975, the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, wrote of his Talk spots, “He worked on these modest drawings with great seriousness, spending hours on each of them to get the meaning and the composition right.” Shawn describes Soglow as “a sweet-spirited, melancholy-looking, reticent man.” (His collected spots were published under the sweet-spirited, melancholy titles “Ho Hum” and “More Ho Hum,” although, per other accounts, Soglow was a bit of a party animal.)

But back to the spots. I recently dug up the Talk stories that originally ran alongside a handful of Soglow’s diminutive drawings—the images that most mystified or charmed me. A piece from the May 9, 1931, issue, accompanied by a skyscraper wearing what I always assumed were sunglasses, reads, “Too little emphasis was placed, at the opening of the Empire State Building, on the topmost tenant. It is significant that the world’s most magnificent architectural creation should be crowned by the Model Brassière Company. . . . We take off our hat to the architects and engineers who were able to lift a brassière company eleven hundred feet above the ground.”

A drawing of two naked people worshipping the sun was paired with a story commenting on the “great growth of nudist cults” (July 21, 1934). A spot of a sculptor carving what seems to be a duck was, in fact, drawn for a piece, from 1950, about a woman carving a duck out of a chunk of marble scavenged from the construction site of the N.Y.U. law-school building. (We’d be pleased to run such a story today!) A dinosaur-skeleton drawing long used to illustrate stories about the Natural History Museum first ran above a 1938 account of how the government was buying drab clothing for the needy. (The author deemed “blue suits as synonymous with Sunday, a day of relentless adult supervision when our spirit broke quietly in the Museum of Natural History.”)

And the baseball players holding musical instruments, from 1947? “The Yankees are going to sponsor a symphony program on the radio next season in order to get more ladies interested in baseball.” Meanwhile, a 1939 spot of someone filming a cowboy and a top-hatted fat cat first illustrated a piece about Presidential candidates who wanted movies made about them. Our columnist’s counterpoint: “This country loves dull Presidents, who give it a certain feeling of security and repose.” Here’s to more ho hum. ♦