If you go to The New Yorker‘s Web site, find an article or story you’re interested in, and click on it, you will be presented with a page the top of which looks something like this:
If you are a subscriber, you can make additional clicks and see a facsimile of this short story—the top of which is visible at the bottom of this screen shot—as well as the entire issue of January 31, 1948, including cartoons and ads. But the text and image, as shown, are available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.
The image is the cover of the issue. What about the text? If you’ve read “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” you’ll know that it’s a précis of Salinger’s story. But what an odd précis it is: present-tense, dispassionate, almost journalistic in its reluctance to claim too much knowledge (“He seems to get along perfectly with the child”). It is Salinger’s story…
