No disrespect to the venerable Time Magazine, but readers discouraged from subscribing during the era of the Great Dumbing Down, when the idea of an Author Cover is Ann Coulter, can take refuge in Time.com’s great selection of past covers stretching all the way back to 1923. The archive is searchable by name and by keword, so that if you type in “literature” you can get the beautiful covers of Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf, Conrad, Frost, Baldwin, Nabokov, and Orwell. They’re simply great illustrations, all in an emailable format. I don’t pretend to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Time covers, but I think it’s telling and sad that these search terms yield only one cover after 1983, Toni Morrison, whereas a search of “books” covers brings up only 10 hits since 1988 – and two of those are Harry Potter covers. As Milton’s Satan once said, how changed, how fallen.
