"The white band had originally been added as a bit of an afterthought. The editors knew that Hersey’s report was shocking, and they quickly realized that the cover they’d chosen for the issue—a vibrant, bucolic scene of children and families frolicking in a park—might not give readers enough warning about the devastating nature of its contents. (New Yorker covers rarely have a connection with the contents of an issue, but, in this particular case, the dissonance was marked.) “My God, how would a guy feel, buying the magazine intending to sit in a barber’s chair and read it!” one editor was said to have thought, during a meeting at the time. So the white band was hastily added to about forty thousand newsstand copies in New York. (It was not included in the national run.) Very few copies of the edition with the original band exist today, which is why, as Blume noted, it’s considered one of the “white whales” of the antiquarian-magazine world."
