While I look at hundreds of magazines a week, it’s rarely at the newsstand. My magazine-wonk-friend, Samir Hunsi — Mr. Magazine — does. He checks out magazines in grocery stores, Wal-mart and — I feel certain — one of the best independent book stores in America, Square Books, in Oxford, Miss. (It’s worth a trip.) Because he does, Professor Husni is always posting side-by-side images of magazines he sees that are testing different cover treatments. If you start looking at covers in this way, you discover some amazing things magazine marketers test. Whenever I see one of these posts, it makes me feel better knowing that our staff debates about where something appears on the cover are probably being replicated in hundreds of offices everyday.
