Magazine cover art: the rest of the story: publishing companies and art vendors alike are discovering the potential of this vintage market

Art Business News, Feb, 2003 by Julie Mehta

Look at the generic celebrity shots draped in cover lines that overrun today's news-stands, and it's hard to imagine an era when magazine covers were designed to be anything more than an advertising tool. Yet a survey of the major magazine covers of the early 20th century reveals a stunning array of lush, evocative illustrations that have become highly collectible artworks.

"Few people have ever seen them, but covers from the 1920s and '30s are striking because a lot of them were influenced by Abstract Expressionism and Cubism," said Bob Mankoff, president of Cartoonbank.com and cartoon editor for The New Yorker, one of the few magazines that continues to feature illustrated covers.

"They were a splash of color," said Wilbur Pierce, president of BuyEnlarge.com, a Philadelphia-based wholesale distributor of magazine cover reproductions. "People didn't have color TV back then, so color was brought into the home through magazines. Some of the greatest art done by American illustrators was in this form."

These covers were a snapshot of the events, attitudes and styles of a particular moment in time. Yet that very specificity also made them ephemeral; they were read and thrown away. Those in the know about this golden era of magazine cover art have traditionally had to root around musty used bookstores, scavenge flea markets or, more recently, bid on online auctions to acquire old issues. Occasionally, past covers, including those of Vogue, MAD, The Saturday Evening Post, Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, have been released in book compilations. But with the continued interest in all things vintage and the growth of digital scanning technology, magazine publishers have begun offering high-end prints as vibrant as when the covers were hot off the press, while online retail sites are pushing cheaper reproductions to fit into design schemes from the dorm room to the boardroom.

A Collector's Item

At the forefront of this movement is Cartoonbank.com, which displays more than 3,000 New Yorker covers in a searchable database. Prints sell for $250 matted and $350 framed and have been steadily growing in popularity since they went on sale in 2000, according to Vice President Andy Pillsbury. "Our customers are usually a New Yorker reader or related to one. People often request a cover from a certain time in their life--the week they got married or the week their son went off to college."

Spurred by The New Yorker's success, Condenastart.com was launched to showcase old covers from other Conde Nast magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, House & Garden, Gourmet and the now-defunct Mademoiselle. Priced similarly to The New Yorker's cover prints, they are browsable by by decade, by artist or by categories such as "Personality Cavalcade" or "Pleasures of the Table." What's startling is how little type there is--just the title and date--which makes the cover more of a canvas than a billboard. And the images are eye-catching, from the sumptuous Henry Stahlhut Gourmet illustrations of desserts to the stylized caricaturish Vanity Fair designs by Miguel Covarrubias and A.H. Fish to the sleek, paper-doll-like figures of Vogue by Georges Lepape and Pierre Brissaud.

The, Vogue covers are especially popular among distributors. Graphique De France began selling these covers three years ago, and "they're still performing fairly well," according to Customer Services Supervisor Jeff Lipman. "Old-time advertising and covers are becoming more popular. Baby boomers are looking for nostalgia, things they remember from their youth."

Image Conscious, a San-Francisco-based distributor, also has done well with its selection of Vogue covers from 1947 to 1991. "The recent ones don't sell as well," said Account Executive John Munnerlyn. "The best sellers are from the 1950s and '60s. They have the vintage look that is so hot right now and tie into the popularity of French and Italian turn-of-the-century posters."

But BuyEnlarge.com's Pierce said the market could be a lot bigger if more magazine companies got the word out about covers dating even farther back. Barnesandnoble.com offers more than 2,000 magazine cover prints from BuyEnlarge.com, most of them from before WWII. You can buy a print of a green alien sitting on Santa's lap from Galaxy Science Fiction or an antique-looking floral print from American Perfumer as easily as you can get a dramatic industrial graphic from Fortune or a piece of classic Americana by Norman Rockwell from The Saturday Evening Post.

That's because BuyEnlarge.com prints on demand from its massive digital archive. Pierce said recent law changes favor corporations and license holders, but 95 percent of his company's images are from the public domain. "We sell to lots of college students and professors who are designing to a topic like tanks or baseball," said Pierce. "And then there's the husband who has a train set and wants railroad pictures or the ham operator who wants an old radio magazine cover. Affinity groups are what drive this kind of sales."