Over the last century of glorious, tragic, turbulent, and innovative human endeavour, the cover of the New Yorker magazine has used only the illustrated image to communicate talking points of American—and specifically New York City—life and culture.

Beyond the masthead and issue date, no set typography has ever been allowed, maintaining a unique wordless space in magazine publishing where only an image connotes the idea. The absence of copy is arresting, the silent core of what the solely visual can communicate. Though notably, the majority of weekly sales are by subscription, not impulse buys.

There are few of the New Yorker’s 1925 newsstand contemporaries left. Meanwhile, publications like Time, Newsweek, and Fortune have not resisted the dominant orthodoxy of photography with multiple cover lines to gain sales.

While photography delivers celebrity and the spectacle of modern life, the New Yorker has maintained a belief in visualizing without written explanation to reach those readers who seek something more. But how can a magazine whose survival depends on sales maintain appeal with such apparently humble graphic means?

The magazine’s strategy for success has been to employ a succession of brilliant art editors (just four in 100 years—somewhat unique in magazine publishing) who understand how illustration, in the right hands, can offer appeal, surprise, entertainment and imaginative freedom to invent what French poster artist Cassandre called “a visual incident.”

Posters and magazine covers have a similar task: both........

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