BENGALURU: When Modi was featured on the cover of Time magazine, with the headline ‘India’s Divider in Chief’, it created a huge uproar in the midst of the 2019 general election. There was a similar response when Manmohan Singh was on the cover with the tagline ‘The Underachiever’ in the July 16, 2012 issue. Let’s look back at the history of Indians who have made it to the cover of the magazine, which was started in 1923. Jawaharlal Nehru has been featured the most – six times; Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and Narendra Modi three times each; Vinoba Bhave, Subhash Chandra Bose, Sardar Patel, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh once each.
Movie stars Parveen Babi, Aamir Khan and Aishwarya Rai, and sportspersons Sachin Tendulkar, Saina Nehwal and Virender Sehwag have been featured in its Asia edition. Incidentally, Sachin has been on the cover of various magazines more than 500 times! Mahatma Gandhi is the only Indian to have been named the Time Person of the Year, in 1930 (the magazine introduced its annual January edition featuring Person of the Year in 1927). The September 14, 2001 issue devoted entirely to the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center was its best-selling issue: sales exceeded a million copies.
The late J S Sharma, a Bangalore-based book collector, used to collect old issues of India Today magazine! He was often seen squatting before pavement hawkers in Shivaji Nagar and Balepet, rigorously going through piles and piles of the magazine. He would painstakingly cross-reference a list of the issues he owned with the issues on the pavement to find those missing in his collection at home. In this way, over several years, he managed to lay his hands on every single issue. And then, perhaps not so strangely enough, he sold it to another collector and started all over again from scratch! Apparently he was more in it for the thrill of the chase than for owning a collection.
As more and more magazines transition from print to digital, the big question is: what is the shelf life of print magazines and are they worth collecting? To start with, given the fragile nature of paper, most magazines will not survive over a long enough period to render them collectable. However, there are collectables with covers that feature important news events or stars in the music and film industries. Other collectables are old issues of Look, Life (particularly its November 29, 1963 issue with the cover depicting the recently assassinated JFK) and specialty movie magazines. Some also collect for the uniqueness of the content between the covers.
For example, Playboy serialised Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in its entirety in the 1954 March, April and May issues. The most popular vintage magazine title has been Playboy, especially its undated first edition of December 1953 (v1 #1), which featured a Marilyn Monroe centrefold (a mint-condition issue is worth $6,35,000). National Geographic magazine issues which have Coca-Cola ads on the back cover, especially those with Santa Claus, are valuable, as are copies of Strand magazine that ran the Sherlock Holmes stories before they were published as books. The first two issues of Sports Illustrated are prized for the colour and black-and-white baseball cards included in them.
The November 8, 2016 issue of Newsweek published 1,25,000 copies of a commemorative magazine with Hillary Clinton’s picture on the cover and the headline “Madam President”. When this edition had to be recalled after Donald Trump was elected, the copies still available for sale became collectables.
(The author is a technologist based in Silicon Valley who is gently mad about books.)