The other day I was thinking about Edward Sorel‘s famous New Yorker cover featuring a punker riding in a hansom cab — you know, the one that received a huge amount of attention because it marked the beginning of Tina Brown’s short reign as New Yorker editor.

Sorel’s cover got me to wonder about other New Yorker covers featuring a hansom cab. I would’ve guessed there’ve been at least a half dozen over the years, but I found — having just revisited The Complete Book of Covers From The New Yorker: 1925-1989 (Knopf, 1989) — the number is two. Now if we started counting covers featuring horses, well…that would be a much much bigger number.

It’s possible there was a stray hansom cab cover, post 1989, but I doubt it (please advise if you know of one).

Below are the two known (to me) New Yorker hansom cab covers. The first one was also used as the cover of The New Yorker’s Fifth Album of Drawings (Harper & Brothers, 1932).

In one of those interesting interesections, my copy, sans dust jacket,  of the Fifth Album was given to me by Edward Sorel. The Album’s dust jacket was later given to me by Chris Wheeler, thus completing the set of dust-jacketed New Yorker Albums in the Spill library.

Julian De Miskey’s April 2, 1932 cover:

And this one from Robert Kraus, December 2, 1961:

Hansom cabs, cartoons-wise: it would take a lot (a whole lot) of searching to discover how many there’ve been. The magazine’s database turned up just one, and the hit was incorrect (the lone result was for a Ralph Barton drawing in the July 10, 1925 issue. The Barton drawing is there, but there’s not a hansom cab in sight). However(!), looking through that July 10, 1925 issue, I did find this:

The post Wednesday Spill: Hansom Cab Covers…And One Cartoon first appeared on Inkspill.