However, when it comes to the covers, I still hold favor to the extremely clean style done for the covers of the late 80s and early 90s of Beckett Baseball Monthly. These covers didn’t have to scream “we have editorial inside!” Instead, these clean covers functioned much like a single baseball card. A photo and a title. Just as baseball cards are desirable enough with those simple elements, I appreciate how Beckett’s magazine covers had enough confidence to make such a simple statement every month.

Another way to think about this is with storefront window displays. The best displays are ones that keep it very very simple. You know a store isn’t doing good business when they start to put more items in the front window. By cluttering up the front window with multiple messages, the store owner is saying, “Nobody is coming into my store to look at these things, I gotta put them all in the front window!”

I would plead to Beckett that you remain confident in your great editorial and that people will pick up your magazines, because we know what’s great inside. There isn’t a need to clutter up the fronts of the magazine to make it look like every other magazine on the market. Your simple designs of the late 80s and 90s distinguished your brand from every other magazine on the market. I would hope you would return back to this distinguishing, confident, elegant, collectible method.

I’m not sure when it made BSCM first as I don’t handle that but it should have been in there in recent issues.