Of all the Mysterious Things in the world—the Bermuda Triangle, the Great Sphinx, crop circles, Anderson Cooper—perhaps none is more mysterious than The New Yorker’s un-published masthead. Who—or what—accounts for the magazine’s weekly offering of thorough reporting and sparkling prose? What coterie of characters—artists, writers, hipsters, flâneurs, urban professionals, woodland nymphs—could create, each week, such an amalgam of magic?

The New York Observer, ever the rugged adventurer, has unlocked the mysteries held deep in the heart of 4 Times Square. Thus, behold: The New Yorker’s masthead.