Annals of Tilley

Published: November 6, 2005

There was a time when copies of The New Yorker used to stack up, waiting to be read, in people's houses and apartments. For all of us who remember being stranded, gloriously, in the second and third parts of four-part articles from the late 1960's, there is now ''The Complete New Yorker,'' every issue from 1925 to 2005 on eight DVD's. All that's missing is the musty smell of old magazine stock.

As often happens, the text has not really dated that much, though those bits of Incidental Intelligence scattered throughout the Talk of the Town have shed most of their irony. There, a quarter-century ago, for instance, is Elizabeth Drew noting that the Carter campaign is hoping to portray Ronald Reagan as a ''flip-flopper.''

A truly committed browser of these discs will spend a lot of time in the Goings On About Town section, discovering, for instance, that ''Howdy, Mr. Ice of 1950'' was playing at the Center Theater in June 1949, and registering that interesting parenthesis, (No dancing, unless noted.), under Night Life. There is a world of social and cultural history packed into these listings, a calendar of acts and entertainers that have slipped out of nostalgic reach.

But the most visceral pleasure in these discs comes from the advertising. It is so interesting that you can be forgiven for confusing the real relation between advertising and editorial content, for supposing that ocean of warm, gray ink existed just to support those astonishing ads. Who remembered that Exxon made an ''intelligent typewriter''? Why should an ad for laser discs feel so cruelly ancient, more ancient than an ad -- ''Ask the man who owns one''-- for the Golden Anniversary Packard? There is quicksand here, and some of us are sinking fast.