Salon has republished a really good Imprint piece by Michael Silverberg in which the New Yorker‘s excellent art editor Françoise Mouly explains how the magazine creates its covers. (There is a new book that shows the process, collecting some of the brilliant rough sketches that never made it to the newsstand.) The opening:

“Françoise Mouly, the New Yorker’s art editor since 1993, doesn’t have normal relationships with the artists who draw the magazine’s covers. ‘Think of me as your priest,’ she told one of them. Mouly, who co-founded the avant-garde comics anthology RAW with her husband, Art Spiegelman, asks the artists she works with—Barry Blitt, Christoph Niemann, Ana Juan, R. Crumb—not to hold back anything in their cover sketches. If that means the occasional pedophilia gag or Holocaust joke finds its way to her desk, she’s fine with that. Tasteless humor and failed setups are an essential part of the process. ‘Sometimes something is too provocative or too sexist or too racist,’ Mouly says, ‘but it will inspire a line of thinking that will help develop an image that is publishable.'”