100 Years of Magazine Covers
By Steve Taylor
Black Dog Publishing, 256 pages, 2006
I don’t think that most people don’t buy coffee table books to actually read. However, I am not one of those people. I read it all — from cover-to-cover — laying it flat on my lap to best be able to read everything from the main text to the image cutlines. And a big, thick coffee table book about magazine covers? Well there was no way I could resist diving right into that. But now, I sort of wish I had just stuck with the pretty pictures.
The premise of the book is solid, but the execution not-so-much. The book is over-designed with different typefaces and overlays that date it mid-naughties immediately. But I can live with that. There are so many great covers reprinted here, and it was those of ’80s issues of The Face and i-D that sold me on the book in the first place. Unfortunately, those great covers attracted me initially contribute to its downfall.
While author Steve Taylor does offer a general overview of the history and impact of magazine covers as one would expect, the scope is strangely and simultaneously very narrow.
The book is clearly written with a UK bent and the majority of covers featured and discussed are of English magazines. An anglophile like myself is always pleased to see UK covers (especially 1980s UK covers) in abundance, but this doesn’t always work in the bigger picture. And when the facts are wrong, it’s hard for me to keep my motivation to read.
Early on in the book Taylor takes Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue, to task about putting British tabloid favourite Jordan (aka Katie Price) on the cover of her magazine. Then he brings it up again, pointing out Wintour’s perceived hypocrisy and stating the date of the issue: March 1996. This didn’t seem right. I’ve read American Vogue faithfully since I was 12-years-old and I think I would remember this cover.
Jordan was never on Vogue’s cover. She was featured in the pages of the April 1996 annual “Body Issue” as an example of how to dress when you’re top-heavy, but certainly never on the cover. In March 1996, it was Claudia Schiffer who graced the cover of American Vogue; the following month it was Lisa Marie Presley.
This may not seem a big deal to some, but to me, getting such easy-to-check facts wrong about a magazine cover that is specifically referred to twice in a book about magazine covers, puts into question the credibility of the entire book.
This time, it would have been better for me just to stick with the pictures.
