12 issues: Jan. 1931, Jan. 1932, Jan. 1936, Jan. 1937, Jan. and June 1938, Jan. and June 1939, Spring 1940, Spring 1942, Winter 1943 and Spring 1945. Each in original illustrated wrappers, approx. 8 x 11” and 80+pp. in length. Extensively illustrated. Some with student signatures and inscriptions. Varying condition.
With: Clintonian (Year Book), Jan. 1939, Vol. XXXIX, No. 1. Original buckram binding, 81pp+unpaginated addition at rear. With many signatures of teachers and students, including four of the African-American graduates). Robert Blackburn was on the Art Staff and probably designed the endpapers; Sid (Paddy) Chayefsky was voted the “Class Wit” and was given a $25 award for having done the most to improve the standards of the Magpie.
The handsomely-produced Magpie was probably the most significant public high school literary and art journal of the Depression and World War II. The scarce issues offered here include articles by Chayefsky and Baldwin, poems (not photographs!) by Avedon, WPA-type illustrations by African-American Blackburn and Walter Iler, and a host of other youthful efforts by such later celebrities as publishers of The Nation magazine and of the largest English-language newspaper in the Middle East, the marketing genius who was CEO of Bloomingdale’s, even a Russian atom bomb spy.
As recorded in the 2009 book, “Castle on the Parkway, The Story of New York City’s Dewitt Clinton High School and its Extraordinary Influence on American Life”, from 1920 to 1950 Clinton had the most amazing group of adolescent graduates of any public school in America, including Richard Avedon, James Baldwin, Paddy Chayefsky, Robert Blackburn, Romare Bearden, Edward Bernays, Richard Condon, Countee Cullen, Will Eisner, Bruce Jay Friedman, Bill Graham, Robert Hofstader, Stanley Kramer, Charles Rangel, Daniel Schorr, Neil Simon, Laurence Tisch, and Lionel Trilling. Many of these future luminaries contributed to Magpie