UNCOVERED: Revolutionary Magazine Covers

This book is a sheer delight, showcasing over 100 magazine covers from the late 1950s onwards, with a commentary on the inside story of each by editors and designers. Magazine covers need to make their impact according to the 5/5 rule (within five seconds from five feet away). There has to be an arresting image, complementary wording, and above all the cover as a whole distils a cultural moment. In autumn 1962, just after Marilyn Monroe's death, the cover of Eros magazine featured a photographer's contact sheet showing stills of Marilyn from a shoot she had done six weeks before. In April 1968 the boxer Muhammad Ali had been sentenced to imprisonment for being a conscientious objector, and the cover photo of Esquire magazine shows him in his white shorts transfixed with arrows in imitation of medieval paintings of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. Private Eye's February 1965 cover featured a cartoon of Winston Churchill by Gerald Scarfe, one of the few really sharp satirical cartoonists at the time, showing the old man not in bulldog mode but hunched and decrepit. Vogue magazine of March 1966 captures Donyale Luna looking out at the viewer from behind her carefully manicured hand, the first woman of colour to feature on Vogue. The photographer was David Bailey and he describes how he got the best out of his nervous subject. The feminist Spare Rib was launched in 1972 as an antidote to fashion magazines, with a casual photo of two women wearing no make-up. Time Out has had some startling covers, including the green-all-over issue on jealousy in 1973. In 1977 the violence of the modern game of cricket was captured for Radio Times by Ralph Steadman's cartoon of bowler Dennis Lillee. In 1981 Rolling Stone magazine featured a naked John Lennon embracing a clothed Yoko Ono, photographed hours before he was shot, and in September 2001 the New Yorker's apparently black cover in fact faintly features the twin towers. Every cover in this superb book tells us something about ourselves. 256pp, over 100 colour reproductions.
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