An image of a naked John Lennon curled around Yoko Ono has topped a survey of the best US magazine covers of the last 40 years. The picture, which appeared on Rolling Stone in 1980, possibly stayed in the minds of the editors, artists and designers who voted because it was taken the day before Lennon was shot, and was published just a month later.
Other covers mentioned in the survey, undertaken to mark the 40th anniversary of the annual awards event of the American Society of Magazine Editors, include that 1991 Vanity Fair cover featuring a very pregnant Demi Moore, a 1968 Esquire cover showing Muhammad Ali with arrows in his body, a 1976 New Yorker cover featuring a Saul Steinberg drawing of New York's West Side dwarfing the rest of the US, and another Esquire cover, this one from 1969, showing Andy Warhol drowning in a can of tomato soup.