This week, Mike Sansbury, of The Grove Bookshop in Ilkley, reviews The New Yorker Book of the ‘40s; Story of a Decade, edited by Henry Finder, William Heinemann, £25 (hardback)

If ever a magazine can be said to epitomise the sharp-witted journalism of North America, it is The New Yorker. Founded in 1925, it seems to have been part of the literary scene across the Atlantic for as long as anyone can remember, but the articles collected in this excellent book were written at a time when its reputation was just being established. As a 15 year-old publication it could not have wished for a more fascinating decade in which to stake its claim for journalistic credibility.

The editors had a fabulous list of contributors to call upon, from famous Americans (E B White, Ogden Nash, J D Salinger) to stars from these shores (George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Rebecca West).

The New Yorker provided shelter to those, like W H Auden, who were escaping the war, gave sustenance to others, like Roald Dahl, who were merely preparing for it, and the index reads like a roll call of the great American writers of the mid-20th Century.

There are poems by William Carlos Williams and Randall Jarrell, short stories by William Maxwell and Irwin Shaw, as well as theatre reviews of original performances of plays by Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller.

Any book focusing on the 1940s will inevitably have to deal with the Second World War, and it is to the editors’ credit that, while the conflict and its aftermath are covered in detail, there is so much more in these pages dealing with varied aspects of a decade which began before the USA entered the war and which ran for a good five years after hostilities had ceased. We can read book reviews (Orwell on Graham Greene, Auden on T.S. Eliot) articles on art and architecture, even fashion tips (readers in 1948 must have been relieved and excited to learn that “knickerbockers…are with us again”).

In such a rich collection it is difficult to select just a few favourite articles, but some, nevertheless, stand out. Mollie Panter-Downes files her regular “Letters from London” column, stoically reporting life in the blitz and bravely anticipating American involvement; “in spite of the dark times ahead, it is believed that better things are coming into sight beyond them.” Rebecca West finds herself “in a man’s world” as she reports on the Nuremberg trials and Louis Macneice hits on the supreme irony of writing anything in wartime in Barroom Matins; “Pretzels, crackers, chips and beer – Death is something that we fear, But it titillates the ear… Give us this day our daily news.”

There are essays about Albert Einstein, Le Corbusier and Duke Ellington (described by Richard O Boyer as “The Hot Bach” and portrayed fielding questions in a taxi while eating a chop), and among the short fiction are such gems as The Jockey by Carson McCullers and John Cheever’s The Enormous Radio, all packaged beautifully in a sturdily-bound hardback whose jacket bears the distinctive New Yorker typeface.

This is a book to dip into, full of small treasures, but more than anything it is a sort of time machine through which readers can return to a period when America was on the verge of achieving full confidence in its literary voice, announcing to itself and to its smaller cousin across the pond that, like Ellington’s music and Le Corbusier’s architecture, it had truly arrived.