My Mistake by Daniel Menaker

which impresses me a lot. She tells me, once, that she became a writer in part because she wanted to know writers. A good reason and a bad one.
    The New Yorker
gets some letters about the Biafra matter, as I expected we would. Fred Keefe comes into Checking, and Phil Perl says, “Uh-oh, it’s Fred.”
    When I need help, Phil lolls around the stacks, plucks down a book seemingly at random, opens it, often goes to the back (index), then flips through pages disgustedly, turns one more page, lazily digitates what I’m looking for, and wanders over to me with the fact in question safely, lepidopterously pinned.
    Some of the books:
The Social Register
(surprisingly reliable),
Who’s Who
(less so),
Jane’s Fighting Ships,
Grove’s Dictionary of Music
and Musicians
(superb), the venerable
Britannica
(good but often idiosyncratic and sometimes even argumentative),
Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition
(still the gold standard methodologically, I believe to the day of this writing, though increasingly out of date), the less respected but in ways still useful
American Heritage Dictionary,
the estimable
Chicago Manual of Style.
Altogether, it resembles an agoraphobe’s conquest of the world to master these books, which contain the world, in their way, and to be able to be sure at the start of your journey that without mishap or missed connections you will end up where you are headed.
    However consciously or un-,
The New Yorker,
a kind of Jonestown of the literary/journalistic realm, encourages in its employees an ethos of superiority, essentialness, and disregard for fad and fashion. Shawn himself, in his words and demeanor, appears to disavow any self-importance. He wants to be taken as a quiet, modest man who puts the greatness of the institution he runs above all else. This faux-modest version of occupational vanity, in combination with native timidity, keeps very intelligent people in the same, often dead-end, jobs for years, simply because they can say, in this modestly quiet voice, that they work for
The New Yorker.
Great institutions, so long as they are small, will often (a) eventually take themselves too seriously and (b) try to camouflage their pride with self-effacement.
    Shawn always claims that
The New Yorker
does not and cannot, with integrity, try to attend to what a reader might want to read. We publish what
we
like, and hope that some people might want to read it too. This modest formulation of hauteur finds its best expression in a remark made by a Checker when the magazine finally breaks down and adds a real table of contents—as opposed to the almost microscopically small and cryptic listing that seemed on occasion to fly around and land obscurely in Goings On About Town. The real table of contents arrives shortly after I do, and the new feature has been kept a secret, and when we all get our First Run Copies on a Monday morning, a collective gasp of dismay goes up from the Checking Department. A colleague finally says, “This is just
awful!
How could we
do
such a thing.” Being green, I say, “Well, don’t you think it’s a good idea for readers to know what’s in the magazine?” She says, “It’s none of the readers’ business what’s in the magazine.”
    There are seven of us, including Phil. Phil slops around the place in that lazy-looking and fed-up way, but as I’ve said, he knows where to find anything in the reference books that line the metal shelves. Occasionally a Checker, at wit’s or initiative’s end, will call out “Room at large!” and ask a question. Less than a week after I arrive at
The New Yorker,
one of my colleagues says, “Room at large! What does ‘Angeleno’ mean?”
    â€œSomeone who lives in Los Angeles,” I say. I feel as though I’ve just passed a test.
    â€œIt doesn’t look like there’s a lot in here,” Phil says, putting a