The first issue of The New York Review of Books hit newsstands on the 1st of February 1963. It sold out its initial printing of 100,000 copies within days during a massive newspaper strike that had shut down The New York Times and other major dailies in New York City.
Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein launched The New York Review of Books to fill the void left by suspended publications. They edited the paper together from its founding until Epstein died of cancer on the 2nd of May 2006 at seventy-seven years old.
The magazine moved its headquarters to 435 Hudson Street in the West Village in 2008 before relocating again to 207 East 32nd Street in Kips Bay in 2023. The founders purchased that townhouse from graphic designer Milton Glaser in 2020.
The Review took a vocal role in contesting the Vietnam War during the 1960s and opposed the Iraq War with a remarkably consistent and unified voice. A British commentator noted in the 1980s that the publication had taken a line mildly Keynesian in economics and pro-Israeli but Anti-Zionist.
During the year-long lockout at The Times in London in 1979, The New York Review of Books founded a daughter publication named the London Review of Books. For the first six months this journal appeared as an insert in The New York Review of Books before becoming independent in 1980.