Celebrating 150 Years of Harper’s Edge

The New Yorker, which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary with a grand cultural festival in its namesake city, is just a pup compared with Harper’s magazine.

The venerable journal of American literature and thought, which began publishing before the Civil War, celebrates its 150th anniversary in the June issue with a special collector’s edition. And as with every issue of Harper’s, it’s packed with excellent reading.

A congratulatory letter from President Clinton leads the issue, which is perfect-bound and, at 184 pages, almost double the normal size.

The content spans the magazine’s history, with “Hazards of New Fortune,” by editor Lewis H. Lapham, a well-written and lengthy illustrated look back at the magazine. A section titled “Readings” presents selected work published in the last two decades, and it includes a wildly disparate range of names: Nancy Reagan, Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Primo Levi, Jorge Louis Borges, Glenn Gould, Orson Welles and others.

Harper’s nod to the past includes cartoonists’ visions of the future, including the last magazine illustration by Edward Gorey, who died in April, and an annotated map of the old Oregon Trail.

The Harper’s Index, a regular feature, is tailored to the anniversary and contains some intriguing numbers: “Estimated number of ‘river pirates’ operating on New York City’s waterfront in 1850: 500;” “Chances that a 19th century ‘opium eater’ in Albany, New York, was a woman: 4 in 5.”

A map feature on the last page illustrates what a difference 150 years makes. It’s similar to the maps once used in geography classes, with figures and symbols for exports and imports.

When Harper’s was first published, the country was doing big business selling wheat, pork, lard, tobacco and cotton to other countries. Today, our big exports include vehicles, computer accessories and semiconductors.