cover history

Cover types 1. Early Magazine Covers 2. The Poster Cover 3. Pictures Married to Type 4. In the Forest of Words Early Magazine Covers In the mid-1700s, the earliest magazines dedicated the opening page to a title and table of contents. When early magazines used covers, they provided only a title and publication data. There were no descriptive words indicating what would be found inside the magazine. Generic covers appeared without any cover lines indicating the contents, or, at times, with a line or two unobtrusively tucked under the standard design. The Poster Cover Pictures that need no words. From the 1800's to the 1960's, one cover could be said to dominate the magazine field. It produced many memorial covers and issuses of numerous magazines. The covers of many of these oversized magazines looked as if they were printed to be framed and hung on the wall. Although magazines have traveled far from the all-visual art-poster approach so many magazines took toward their covers in the early part of the 20th century, the poster cover did not die. Pictures Married to Type While many magazines boasted artful poster covers, others relied heavily on cover lines to draw readers inside in a more definite way than the cover art could accomplish. By the late 1800s, cover lines were common, and in the early1900s, magazine cover lines started the ongoing dialogue that they have been carrying on ever since with cover art. Placement of type on the picture contributes to the sense of depth obtained by the layering of planes, as we will often see again in covers 80 years later. In the Forest of Words Though the path is irregular, with many creative byways, there has been a general movement of magazine covers away from the artistic poster cover and toward covers that integrate intense photography with an amazingly large number of vivid cover lines. A powerful picture is rarely enough for magazine covers of this period. On today's covers, fashion models and celebrities practically rent space on their own bodies on which the magazine can advertise its contents.