For seventy-five years The New Yorker has been entertaining and enlightening its loyal readers. The magazine’s peerless covers—created by a large stable of extraordinarliy talented artists and cartoonists—have mirrored its feisty spirit from the beginning, and have become even more topical in recent years. No noteworthy subject or scandal has escaped their scrutiny, from Broadway flappers and the eternal Eustace Tilley to scheming pols, modern romance, and the gigahertz speed of contemporary life. Inexhaustibly varied in mood and style, the covers are united by their visual sophistication, their imaginative wit, and their high pleasure-giving quotient.
|
 |
This stylish compendium presents not only the best of The New Yorker’s covers—selected by art editor Françoise Mouly and organized into such classic themes as The Big City and The Arts—but also a behind-the-scenes peek at some of the sketches that lead up to them and a look at the controversy that sometimes follows in their wake. A conversation between Ms. Mouly and Lawrence Weschler—a noted New Yorker writer and are critic—illuminates the history of the magazine’s covers and how they have changed over the past decade. In addition, portfolios throughout the book highlight the work of six especially evocative cover artists: Barry Blitt, Bruce McCall, J. J. Sempé, Edward Sorel, Art Spiegelman, and Saul Steinberg.
|
|
Complementing these portfolios are six detachable full-size covers, suitable for framing, which are bound into the back of the book. Each perusal of this richly satisfying book uncovers some delicious new detail that reveals a precisely observed aspect of passing fads or eternal human nature. And the juxtaposition and new covers on recurring subjects tells more about society’s twists and turns over the past seventy-five years than many a doctoral dissertation. Whether whimsical, provocative, drop-dead-gorgeous, or laugh-out-loud funny, The New Yorker’s covers are always the talk of the town.
From Abbeville catalog description
|
