The New Yorker Covers Itself in Its Own Glory

‘The New Yorker: From Cover to Cover’By Françoise MoulyRizzoli Universe, 336 pagesThe New Yorker magazine, which celebrated its centenary last year with a lavish and only slightly nauseating Netflix documentary, is riding high. Much like the Washington Post in President Trump’s first term (“Democracy Dies in Darkness”, its new slogan proclaimed before its owner Jeff Bezos seemingly hit the brakes), the Manhattan media institution has been the liberal media’s bastion in the second.Much of that is down to its famous covers. For all of the New Yorker’s Pulitzers, long-form journalism, impenetrable cartoons — summed up by the Family Guy scene in which hours pass before Peter gets the joke and laughs — short stories and arts coverage, it is the covers which resonate. They “cut through,” as political apparatchiks would say, and have an undeniable tendency to capture the zeitgeist.Furthermore, they are often beautifully styled and always catch the eye, meaning that, though dating back to the first issue in 1925, the weekly cover series is perfectly suited to the social media age. Whether portraying a cell-bound Statue of Liberty ticking off the first 100 days of Trump’s second term or Marco Rubio in a UFC fight with JD Vance on the White House lawn to mark the state of America at its 250th birthday (or semiquincentennial, as the high-minded New Yorker might prefer to call it), they tend to go viral.H.O. Hoffman’s cover illustration of the New Yorker, June 4, 1927. New YorkerAnd now the covers have their own book, a 336-page toe-breaker of a coffee table tome by Françoise Mouly, the magazine’s French art editor. She has had the weekly cover within her brief for more than three decades (that’s more than 1600 covers, so far) and works in close tandem with David Remnick. The erudite former Moscow correspondent took over as editor in 1998, a Stakhanovite innings indeed, from Tina Brown.The New Yorker can be easy to mock as out of touch — an ivory tower preoccupied by topics far removed from the concerns of everyday Americans — but its consistently excellent long-form journalism and clever covers complicate the caricature. Like Britain’s Private Eye magazine, it has turned its commitment to print (seen by many as a weakness in a digital media landscape) into a strength; its subscriber base only grows more loyal as peers disappear into the ether.‘The Politics of Fear,’ by Barry Blitt, featured on the cover of July 14, 2008 edition of the New Yorker magazine, depicting Barack Obama and Michelle Obama. Via Chris Hondros/Getty ImagesIt is a title which knows its role and sticks to it, often knowingly. Perhaps the most famous New Yorker cover is Saul Steinberg’s 1976 “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” a nod to the city denizens’ skyscraper-high self-regard and scant awareness of events beyond the Hudson River. That is one of hundreds of covers reproduced in Mouly’s magisterial book, which also features thirty “Spotlight” sections on artists who designed multiple covers, ranging from Addams Family creator Charles Addams to British painter David Hockney.It is striking how little the unmistakable masthead has changed during the magazine’s century-and-change, giving many early covers a contemporary feel. Often the cover has no link, on the surface at least, to any of the contents. That was the case in August 1946 when the New Yorker published John Hersey’s 30,000-word account of the nuclear devastation in Japan, but showed families enjoying a park on the cover. That article formed part of the magazine’s post-war coverage, one of its finest eras, including dispatches from Nazi concentration camps and war crimes trials.‘From Cover to Cover’ covers the history and highlights (and lowlights) of the covers well but undoubtedly skews toward the modern era, with an outsized proportion of more recent covers. They provide a unique portrait of the past few decades.Mouly’s arrival coincided with the tenure of media titan Tina Brown, who, though replaced by Remnick in 1998, was integral in steering the magazine away from sometimes placid covers. She has, amusingly, stated total disregard for Eustace Tilley, the caricature of a gentleman that appeared on the first cover and subsequently on anniversaries — an opinion bordering on heresy in New Yorker circles. Mouly, you sense, might not disagree. Tilley is nowhere to be seen on the cover of the book itself, which depicts a sophisticated woman looking over her shoulder.For Brown’s Valentine’s Day, 1993 edition, the cover showed a Hasidic man kissing a Black woman — after conflict between the two communities in Crown Heights — and sparked headlines around the world. Other standouts in the book include the shadow-black twin towers after 9/11, the haunting Abu Ghraib cover in October 2004 and the March 2020 cover showing an empty Grand Central Terminal as the pandemic began.The book is not without flaws. Did the New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checking department (as the Netflix documentary pointed out, when else do you read the word vaunted?) spend any time with this book? A typo on page ten misdates the November 14, 2016, cover — which depicts a fedora-wearing subway passenger reading about the presidential election — as November 2026.But the quibbles are minor. Overall the book delivers sumptuously produced insights into the stories behind the covers, and a history of both the magazine and modern America — or at least the east coast of it.

The New Yorker Covers Itself in Its Own Glory

The New Yorker Covers Itself in Its Own Glory

More from the New York Sun

Former Trump Administration Health Advisor Targets Susie Wiles for MAHA Morass

The Rush to Judgment on Hegseth

Nations Clamor To Assist Deluged Gaza While a Reconstituted Hamas Raises Few Objections

‘Ready for AOC’ Group Launches Campaign to Draft Ocasio-Cortez for 2028

Mississippi’s Moment

Fetterman Draws Far-Left, Gaza-Born Primary Challenger Who Is ‘Running To End the War in Iran’

Judge Fines Owner of California Cafe That Sold ‘Sweet Sinwar’ Juice $59,000 for Defying Repeated Court Orders

Outgoing Civil Rights Chief Harmeet Dhillon Scorches Fringe Conservatives Who Attacked Her Indian Heritage

More from the New York Sun

Former Trump Administration Health Advisor Targets Susie Wiles for MAHA Morass

The Rush to Judgment on Hegseth

Nations Clamor To Assist Deluged Gaza While a Reconstituted Hamas Raises Few Objections

‘Ready for AOC’ Group Launches Campaign to Draft Ocasio-Cortez for 2028

Mississippi’s Moment

Fetterman Draws Far-Left, Gaza-Born Primary Challenger Who Is ‘Running To End the War in Iran’

Judge Fines Owner of California Cafe That Sold ‘Sweet Sinwar’ Juice $59,000 for Defying Repeated Court Orders

Outgoing Civil Rights Chief Harmeet Dhillon Scorches Fringe Conservatives Who Attacked Her Indian Heritage