Press: Changing the Guard At 60

Its charm has always seemed to lie in its constancy: a neat and fixed formula of short stories, criticism, cartoons and articles, many of them serious, most of them current, all of them finely polished. Over the course of 60 years of independent proprietorship, The New Yorker won an enviably loyal audience along with an honored place on the country's cultural mantel. The magazine proved an accommodating haven for stylish writers as disparate as James Thurber and Isaac Bashevis Singer, E.B. White and J.D. Salinger. To many observers, the elegant weekly seemed not only steeped in tradition but nearly immutable, from its stubborn tenancy of a warren of cramped offices on Manhattan's 43rd Street to its whimsical insistence on printing its foppish inaugural cover every February: the high-necked Eustace Tilley espying a butterfly through an upraised monocle.

But last week The New Yorker proved that it was not inviolate after all. Its board of directors agreed to sell the magazine to Samuel I. Newhouse Jr., 57, head of a family owned publishing empire that includes 29 newspapers, the Conde Nast magazines (among them: Vogue, Vanity Fair and Gentlemen's Quarterly) and Random House book publishers. Newhouse offered a generous $142 million--$200 a share for the publication's more than 700,000 outstanding shares--and agreed to shelter the newly acquired property as a separate company under his corporate umbrella. Still, the announcement unsettled those who work for the magazine. "There is a great fear that a new boss would probably change the place so much that the character of the magazine would not be what it has been," said a longtime staffer. "When one sees a huge corporate presence enter, it is hard to think The New Yorker is going to be the same."

No one seemed quite as shaken as William Shawn, 77, the cloistered, elaborately polite man who has presided over the magazine since 1952, when he succeeded the sometimes choleric founding editor, Harold Ross. On Friday afternoon last week, "Mr. Shawn," as he is invariably called, slowly walked down the staircase from his 19th-floor office to the 18th floor, where staffers had assembled to hear the melancholy news. Standing on a stairwell landing, his voice wobbly with emotion, Shawn read from a single sheet of paper. After announcing the board's decision, he pointedly added that "the editorial staff was not a party to the negotiations . . . We were not asked for our approval, and we did not give our approval." After promising to keep the staff informed of further developments, Shawn walked back upstairs.