Photo Gives New Meaning to Mergers

Magazines often splash bawdy images across their covers to hype what lurks inside and to attract customers. The practice is less common, however, among internationally respected journals of global politics and business.

Thus the raised eyebrows this week when The Economist arrived in mailboxes with a cover shot of camels engaged in sexual intercourse and the headline: “The Trouble With Mergers.”

Editor-in-chief Bill Emmott said the British publication strives to amuse, provoke and entertain while balancing taste with the subject matter.

He said the mating dromedaries “just seemed very appropriate” as the graphic accompaniment to a story that warns of an impending merger frenzy and of the unimpressive fiscal outcome of many a past corporate marriage. Besides, he added, “It’s quite difficult to illustrate corporate mergers.”

A pair of ungainly animals was chosen, he said in a telephone interview Tuesday, to reflect the nature of large corporations. He and his staff searched for the perfect shot of mating mammals, dismissing elephants, hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses before settling on the coupling camels.

“It was a close call between elephants and camels, but the photo of the camels was more funny,” he said, adding that the old saying about the camel being a horse designed by committee helped decide the issue.

Newsstands around town reported little fluctuation in sales of the magazine, but Hersel Davedi, a salesclerk at Westside International News Magazine, said the cover elicited a few chuckles from customers.

The Economist has a history of using provocative cover art, Emmott said, from caricatures of national leaders to photographs of corpses. It also has its share of humor, he added, citing an editorial he once wrote about President Clinton in which he exploited a subtle typo, substituting peckerdilloes for peccadilloes .

That pun drew angry letters from a few readers who either didn’t get the joke or found it crass. “It’s hard to predict what kind of a mail bag you’ll get after something like this,” he said. “I can tell you it’ll be varied.”