You can't judge a book by its cover, but the rule is reversed for magazines. A magazine's personality is defined by its cover and the rest of the issue has to stand behind it. Started in 1925 at the height of the Prohibition era as a witty humor magazine, The New Yorker rose to preeminence as a bastion of journalistic excellence after the Second World War. After decades flying high in the cultural firmament, it saw its circulation decline in the later part of the twentieth century, as its devoted readers aged.

When, in 1992, Tina Brown was named editor, it was not entirely clear whether the magazine would even survive into the twenty-first century. The challenge has been for The New Yorker to establish a strong presence on the newsstand, so that new generations of readers might discover it, all the while reengaging its subscribers. A dozen years later, as the circulation nearly doubled from around 600,000 to over a million, The New Yorker has once again found its place at the center of the cultural dialogue. It is a testament to the loyalty of longtime readers that their attachment to the magazine has survived its changes. Sometimes explosive, never predictable, always noticed, the covers have played an incontrovertible role in The New Yorker's extraordinary rebirth.

The New Yorker is the only remaining wide-circulation publication that still relies on free-standing illustrated covers. Other magazine covers are dictated by the need to illustrate the "cover story," usually with a photograph, and are cluttered with written blurbs. When an artist does a New Yorker cover, it is a personal statement that represents his concept or anecdote. Noted cover artist, Saul Steinberg once talked about pictures that change the way a person sees the world, making visible concepts so fundamental that the viewer cannot remember how he thought before he saw them. Most of Steinberg's own covers are examples of original idea/pictures that influence the viewer's way of seeing things. Such images are rare, but they are what The New Yorker strives for.

For inspiration, artists often turn to the more than four thousand covers that have been published since the magazine began. The covers, especially the storytelling images of the thirties through the fifties, provide a snapshot of what urban sophisticates cared about, their attitudes and prejudices, their mannerisms and jokes. The goal of today's artists is to build a series of images that, looked at from a later vantage point, create a similarly vivid portrait of our times. Hence the artists function like lightning rods, gravitating towards the stormy issues in our culture. Readers, on the other hand, react according to their own feelings about the phenomenon or trend portrayed. The artist is the messenger, sometimes hailed as a hero, sometimes decried. A 1994 June wedding cover by Jacques de Loustal showed two men about to cut the wedding cake on a background of shocking pink. Some readers were incensed,while others called to ask for a print they could frame. Ten years later, the image is now routinely seen in the 'weddings' section of The New York Times.

By going back to its beginnings, The New Yorker has been reborn and has even stimulated the renewed use of illustrations, drawings, and cartoons in other publications. The new New Yorker covers have become an essential part of America's cultural dialogue. Standing out as they do in the wired world of transient and fleeting images, these weekly offerings from an eighty-year old institution are a testament to the power of drawing, and demonstrate that printed pictures can be far from obsolete in the twenty-first century.