Amazing graphics from the 1950s New York Times archive

A trip to the morgue

The “morgue” is a smelly storage room in a dark basement just down the street from The New York Times headquarters. About seven million photographs and tens of millions of clippings are stored there. A journalist’s dream, a minimalist’s nightmare.

I was visiting the morgue with colleague Jessia Ma and clip-filer Jeff Roth to see what we could learn. Jessia and I were reviewing some designs and fonts from the past, especially within Opinion and Sunday Review. But I found something else surprising and fascinating.

Jeff Roth gives us a tour around the “morgue.”

I stumbled across a series of books documenting graphics from the 1950s and early 1960s. Back then, the graphics team saved clips in scrapbooks so they could consult old work and repurpose relevant pieces. “So they didn’t have to reinvent the wheel each time,” Jeff told us. (There were a series of books between 1950 and 1962, but Jeff wasn’t sure what happened to the rest of them, if they were ever produced.)

While the New York Times graphics team been around for a very long time, I haven’t really spent much time considering its history. “Graphics” seems like such a new thing, maybe because the industry’s changing so quickly. We do more data wrangling and programming than illustration these days.

But as part of that change, maybe we’ve lost a bit of our history and the important lessons it can offer. So here are some things I noticed while flipping through these old scrapbooks.

Illustration played a bigger role

I’m really worried we’re losing a vital part of news graphics: illustration. Today it seems mostly relegated to the loathed “infographic,” with only the occasional fully-illustrated news graphic.

But graphics teams back then used illustration in creative and beautiful ways. Some of the most stunning graphics I saw in the collection were illustrations.

There was this amazing rendering of what scientists believed would happen after the U.S. government detonated an H-bomb in the ionosphere. Just consider the artistry and time involved in getting all these points right.

Then there was a full series of amazing graphics explaining the moon landing. It was obviously a huge story at the time and the graphics team was busy explaining all aspects of the mission, from launch to touchdown.

I love the small details here: the dots and shapes on the moon, tiny arrows around the shuttle’s path, the small figures inside the capsule. Such a delight to explore.