“Every time I come out of Penn Station,” David Macaulay said, “I look at that post office with the wonderful phrase ‘Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds’ ”—the unofficial slogan of the U.S. Postal Service, derived from a line in Herodotus’ Histories about the ancient Persians’ courier service. “And I just saw these empty spaces at the end of the building and I thought, ‘Well at least they have space to make corrections,’ ” he said. “And that’s the kind of thing that amuses me after a seven-hour train ride from Vermont. Then again, at that point, almost anything does.”
Track the rise and fall of the postal service over fourteen New Yorker covers, from 1927 until now, in this slide show.
