New York Magazine's 40th Birthday: The Print Edition

If only we would all celebrate our 40th birthdays with this kind of fervor: our friends at New York magazine have their huge anniversary issue on the newsstand this week, and it's a beauty. What we can find inside, and some behind-the-scenes photos after the jump...

From the New York magazine staff:

The cover features the skyline photograph from the original first issue in 1968, this time rendered in metallic silver. The great Dan Winters shot all the original photography in the issue over a 2-week period in NY and LA. Illustrator Riccardo Vecchio painted 23 beautifully small portraits of famous new yorkers for the q&a's. With essays from Pete Hamill, Jay McInerney, and Kurt Andersen, among others, it is a unique look at New York city over the last 40 years.

A comparison of the covers (left shows the flap printed for newsstand distribution; center is the first cover, in 1968; right is the same skyline, in today's metallic silver):



Putting the magazine together, in miniature: