Coming Soon in The New Yorker

One of the more interesting of the very few books published about Long Island Sound is Morton M. Hunt’s The Inland Sea. It came out in the mid 1960s and is long out of print, although copies can be found online and in used-book stores. Hunt’s account of sailing around the Sound for two weeks was first published in The New Yorker.

I thought of it when I read in yesterday’s Times that The New Yorker plans to issue facsimiles of every issue, from the magazine’s inception through the 80th anniversary issue published in February, on 8 searchable DVDs. The list price will be $100, which, as the Times points out, means it will be on sale for considerably less. It will be out in the fall.

Among all the other things The New Yorker has done over the years, it has published some ground-breaking environmental reporting. Off the top of my head: Silent Spring first appeared in The New Yorker, as did Peter Matthiessen’s The Wind Birds and McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid and Coming into the Country; and Barry Commoner’s articles about ecology, which included his great four principles of ecology (I think he added a fifth later, but it wasn’t as pithy):

1. Everything is connected to everything else.
2. Everything must go somewhere.
3. Nature knows best.
4. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Here’s the Times story.