The entire August 31, 1946 issue of The New Yorker magazine was devoted to a single article, by John Hersey, about the bombing of Hiroshima the year before. The magazine has re-published the article to mark the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima, and while I laud them for doing that, I find myself constitutionally unable to read the magazine on the screen: it is an irrevocably print experience for me. And so I needed to find a way of approximating a read of the original article in printed format.
Fortunately I am afforded unlimited access to the magazine’s archives by virtue of being a print subscriber. So I printed myself a copy of the issue on my laser printer. Here’s how I did it.
First, I went to The New Yorker archives site and logged in.
Next, I clicked on Browse Issues and selected the August 31, 1946 issue:
With the issue itself on the screen I clicked Print and then selected all of the pages of the article (I opted not to print the Talk of the Town frontmatter, which a New Yorker purist might quibble with):
Clicking Print once I’d selected the page brought up the Firefox print dialog. I set the Page Headers and Page Footers to “—blank—”:
Finally, I clicked PDF and then Save as PDF… to print to a PDF file instead of the printer:
The resulting PDF had too much whitespace around the page images, which I used the Mac OS X Preview app to crop out:
To do the cropping I did this:
- Selected Tools > Rectangular Selection.
- On the first page of the article, drew the rectangular box around the border of the page image (as pictured above).
- Selected all of the pages in the thumbnail view in the sidebar.
- Pressed Command + K to crop all of the pages.
The result looked like this:
I then printed to my Brother laser printer directly from Preview, checking the Two-Sided option, and the Scale to Fit > Fill Entire Paper option:
The result is pleasantly like a real copy of The New Yorker, albeit in black & white and not nearly as crisp as an original:
Now, to read the 30,000+ word article!
About This Blog
I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.
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Comments
The print option did not work
The print option did not work for me on Mac OS . After selecting the pages I wanted, the printer would print 10 white pages with a few words at the top, and not the printing on the selected pages. I will try printing from a pdf and preview.
I have the exact same problem
I have the exact same problem with the New Yorker, using the Safari browser. Their customer service is no help. I found a partial solution in selecting A3 paper size in the print dialog box. It prints but produces alternating blank pages. Chrome worked well with the New Yorker, but I can't use it after downloading a Mac upgrade because of some conflict issue.
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