Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Covers that need covering up

What makes a great magazine cover? Nudity, apparently. A naked John Lennon kissing Yoko Ono on the cover of Rolling Stone and a naked Demi Moore cradling her pregnant belly on the cover of Vanity Fair took the top two places in the American Association of Magazine Editors' list of the Top 40 Magazine Covers of the Last 40 Years. A shirtless Mohammed Ali is #3, but at least he's wearing boxing shorts. Also on the list, at #27, are nude Dixie Chicks on the cover of Entertainment Weekly. These sorts of lists exist mostly so people can disagree with them, but I'm not really enough of a student of cover art to be able to say one way or the other whether these are the tops (and bottoms) or not. I'm glad to see that classic New Yorker drawing of the world as seen from Manhattan make the top 5, though. If it was the Naked City, it might have hit #1.

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