Forged Fronts

Almost ten years ago, the MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski argued on live television, “Nothing makes a man feel better than making a fake cover of a magazine about himself.” If I’m being honest, I can’t say that I completely disagreed with her.

In his memoir Squandering Aimlessly: My Adventures in the American Marketplace, from 2000, the business journalist David Brancaccio recalled a store in Minnesota’s Mall of America that used a video camera to “superimpose one’s face on a fake magazine cover.” When he learned the price for an eight by ten was $17, he simply walked out — only to return moments later for a copy of Casino Player Monthly featuring his own likeness. Really, who could say no?

It’s not just novelty shops in the fake magazine sector. In Twenty-First-Century Jet: The Making and Marketing of the Boeing 777, published well before his shameful fall from grace, the British journalist Karl Sabbagh wrote of dummy periodicals...