Books and Art

Fall Library, The New Yorker, October 20, 2014. Tom Gauld.

When Tom Gauld sent the first sketch for this cover, “Fall Library,” the magazine staff discussed a variant where the woman was holding an electronic-book reader. “But I decided against the e-reader,” Gauld says. The image “ended up having too much going on, which made it less interesting. I think the fact that she’s holding one of her millions of books is what’s nice.”