40 Greatest Magazine Covers Ever!

Well, actually, the 40 Greatest Magazine Covers of the past ... 40 years ... published in America (which leaves out the overwhelming majority of the world's magazines, but anyway... ). The 40 covers were recently selected by the American Society of Magazine Editors at its annual conference. We were surprised to see so many covers from the past few years (the New Yorker and Time magazine Sept. 11 Twin Towers covers, the nude Dixie Chicks cover for Rolling Stone) included among the 40, but that's perhaps because, by virtue of being recent these were more readily recalled by memory. We were expecting to see more fashion magazine covers than the few examples from Vogue, Harpers and the like that were selected. We also had expected more from small, lesser known publications, like the famous cover by David Carson for Beach Culture magazine in the early 1990's. Naturally, there's a heavy contingent of those classic Esquire mag covers with Muhammed Ali and Andy Warhol of the 1960's that even in 2005 stand out as powerful and clever imagery. Our favorite -- without a doubt -- is The Economist cover (see above) showing two camels mating to illustrate the topic of that issue's feature: mergers. There's an excellent critique of the covers on the blog Under Consideration (the article is called "Dangling Listicles").

Essential Links

ASME Unveils Top 40 Magazine Covers
Display of The Top 40 Magazine Covers
Dangling Listicles Critique of "40 Greatest Magazine Covers"

Posted by Supercore at October 27, 2005 03:31 AM