National Geographic Magazine History: The First Issue, the Covers and the Yellow Border

On 13 January 1888, thirty-three men met at the Cosmos Club in Washington to found a geographical society, and nine months later they had a magazine. The first issue of the National Geographic Magazine is dated October 1888, and it looked nothing like the title now sold with a yellow rectangle on the front. This is the National Geographic magazine history in outline: the scholarly beginnings, the invention of the picture-led cover, and the changes of ownership that have followed.

National Geographic magazine history in dates

The first issue and the founders

The Society was organised at the Cosmos Club on 13 January 1888 and incorporated two weeks later. Its first president was Gardiner Greene Hubbard, and his son-in-law Alexander Graham Bell took over in 1897. The first issue of the National Geographic Magazine, dated October 1888, was written for members who were mostly scientists and government surveyors. It carried papers and notes, not pictures, and it was not meant for a newsstand. The founders described the Society’s purpose as the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge, and among the early members were John Wesley Powell, who had explored the Colorado River, the naturalist William Healey Dall and Adolphus Greely, who led an Arctic expedition that came close to the North Pole. A magazine for that group needed maps and reports from the field, and little else.

The Society itself marks October 1888 as the start, and it celebrated the 125th anniversary of that first issue in October 2013. The size and print run of the number are not something the Society’s own anniversary writing spells out, so any precise first-issue circulation figure should be treated with suspicion. The turning point for the title was a hire, not an idea.

Grosvenor and the picture-led magazine

Gilbert H. Grosvenor joined in 1899 as the Society’s first full-time employee. Bell, who was also his future father-in-law, had hired him, and Grosvenor would edit the magazine until 1954. He argued that photographs should carry the stories, against the resistance of some board members, and he built a staff of photographers and a darkroom.

The pictures arrived in stages. The first photograph, a topographic relief map of Africa, ran in April 1889. A natural scene, Herald Island in the Arctic, followed in July 1890. Colour came in July 1914 with an autochrome of a flower garden in Ghent. Kodachrome film arrived in April 1938. Underwater photographs began in January 1927 with a hogfish photographed off the Florida Keys, and Jacques Cousteau’s “Fish Men Explore a New World Underwater” appeared in October 1952.

One of the most disputed pieces of the early period was Robert Peary’s claim to have reached the North Pole on 6 April 1909, an expedition the Society sponsored, with the article running in January 1910. Whether Peary reached the Pole has been questioned ever since, and the magazine’s role in promoting his claim remains part of its history.

From text to pictures, 1905 to 1914

The change did not happen in one issue. In January 1905 the magazine began to move from text towards pictures, and by 1910 more than half of its pages were photographs, which is the year photographs became its trademark. The same July 1914 number that carried the first colour photograph also carried the first article by a woman, Eliza R. Scidmore, a traveller and writer who had worked with the Society for years.

The sequence matters for anyone studying the title. An issue from the 1890s is a society transaction, closer to what is described in the guide to science journals than to a modern magazine, while an issue from 1914 already looks like the product readers know. Only a quarter of a century separates them.

National Geographic covers and the yellow border

For its first decades the magazine’s front page was a table of contents. The yellow border and an oak leaf design arrived in February 1910, and the design remained, with minor changes, until the oak leaf was removed in September 1979. Small cover photographs began in July 1959 and large, full-cover pictures in January 1962. After that the cover became a showcase, and the best National Geographic covers are some of the most reproduced images in modern publishing. For the anatomy of a cover in general, see how a magazine cover is built.

Four stand out.

The March 1984 cover carried a hologram of an eagle, the first on a national periodical, and the print run went to roughly 10.5 million subscribers, which stretched printing technology at the time. The June 1985 cover, Steve McCurry’s portrait of a girl in a refugee camp in Pakistan, became known as Afghan Girl. McCurry took it in 1984, and she was identified as Sharbat Gula when found in January 2002. Her age at the time of the photograph was about twelve, an estimate, since the camp kept no birth records. She was arrested in Pakistan in 2016 for living with forged documents and was evacuated to Italy in 2021.

The April 2018 cover, part of the Race Issue, showed the twins Marcia and Millie Biggs, sisters of mixed heritage who look very different from each other. The issue also included a letter from the editor, Susan Goldberg, saying that for decades the magazine’s own coverage had been racist.

More famous National Geographic covers can be compared in the guide to famous magazine covers, which sets them next to titles from other genres.

Reading the covers by period

It helps to divide National Geographic covers into periods, and the dates above fix their edges.

Before 1959 the front was typographic: title, contents, the border from 1910. From 1959 to 1962 small photographs sat inside the frame. From 1962 the picture filled the cover, and from September 1979 the oak leaf was gone. The latest period is the one in which the cover competes with a phone screen. A cover that works at thumbnail size arguably matters more now than one that rewards a closer look, and that may be one reason the border has survived so long.

For readers who want to place the title among others, the famous magazine covers page makes the same comparison with Vogue and with news titles, and the page on the oldest magazines explains why a title dated 1888 is old in American terms and young beside a British weekly.

After Grosvenor: Goodall, Cousteau and the satellite age

Grosvenor stepped down in 1954 at the age of 78, after more than five decades with the Society, and the magazine he left was a picture-led monthly with millions of members. His successors kept the formula. The Society began funding Jane Goodall’s chimpanzee research in 1961, and her work became a long-running thread in the magazine. In September 1930 Melville Bell Grosvenor, Gilbert’s son, had taken the first natural-colour aerial photographs, of the Statue of Liberty from an airship.

Other details of the period are small but telling. The word “Magazine” dropped out of the masthead in December 1959, a few months after the first small cover photograph in July 1959, which showed a 49-star American flag. By 2015 the magazine had won 25 National Magazine Awards.

The Society’s website at nationalgeographic.com went online in 1996, and by November 2024 its Instagram account had about 280 million followers, a figure that dwarfs print circulation.

Readers who want to see the earliest pages for themselves will find that the plain text of the 1890s is nothing like the glossy reputation. That contrast, between a modest society journal and a global brand with hundreds of millions of social media followers, is the best short summary of the whole story, and it took barely a century and a quarter to happen.

Controversies in National Geographic magazine history

Any account of National Geographic magazine history has to include the occasions when the picture proved less reliable than it looked. The image of a flawless, unaltered window on the world has been tested more than once. In February 1982 the Pyramids of Giza were moved digitally to fit a vertical cover, a retouching that damaged the magazine’s credibility. In 1999 the Archaeoraptor, a supposed dinosaur-bird link, turned out to be a composite fake. These were editorial failures, and the magazine has acknowledged them.

The 2018 acknowledgement went further. John Edwin Mason, a historian of photography at the University of Virginia, was asked to review the archive, and he found that until the 1970s the magazine had largely ignored people of colour in the United States who were not labourers or domestic workers, while foreign peoples were repeatedly presented as exotic. Goldberg’s letter used his findings. Not every reader accepts that an apology is sufficient, and that argument has not ended.

Ownership, editions and the present

The magazine was long the property of a non-profit Society. In 2015 the Society formed National Geographic Partners with 21st Century Fox, which took a 73 per cent stake for a reported $725 million. Disney took over that stake in 2019. In June 2023 the magazine laid off its remaining staff writers and said it would rely on freelancers, and it ended US newsstand sales in 2024. Nathan Lump has been editor-in-chief since May 2022.

Circulation tells the story of the shift. The United States total peaked at about 12 million subscribers in the late 1980s and stood near two million in 2024. The first foreign-language edition, in Japanese, appeared in April 1995, and by 1995 there were nearly forty local-language editions, and by 2024 there were 29, after some closures including the Russian edition in April 2022. The separate UK edition launched in January 2018.

For comparison with another large American title with a different history, read about The New York Times Magazine, and for a wider view of where National Geographic sits among long-lived titles, see the oldest magazines guide. The Society’s own site, nationalgeographic.com, carries the current issue, while the Society’s Wikipedia entry and the magazine entry list the milestones with sources, and the Afghan Girl entry gives the photograph’s record. The Society’s own anniversary article confirms the October 1888 date.

Goldberg’s 2018 admission is the part of the story that has not closed, because a magazine that shaped how millions pictured other countries has to answer for the pictures it chose.