Graydon Carter

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025 IN THE INDEPENDENT, GQ, NEW STATESMAN, FINANCIAL TIMES AND BBC CULTURE'Graydon Carter is a brilliant raconteur of his own life...it's a real yarn of a lost world' Marina Hyde, The Rest is EntertainmentWhen the Going Was Good is Graydon Carter's lively recounting of how he made his mark as one of society's most talented editors and shapers of culture. Carter arrived in New York from Canada with little more than a suitcase, a failed literary magazine in his past and a keen sense of ambition. He landed a job at Time, went on to work at Life, co-founded Spy magazine and edited The New York Observer before catching the eye of Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse, who tapped him to run Vanity Fair. With his inimitable voice and raconteur's quip, Carter brings readers inside the drawing rooms of the great and not-always-good of America, Britain and Europe. He assembled one of the best-ever stables of writers and photographers under one roof, and here he re-creates in real time the steps he took to ensure that Vanity Fair during his 25-year run cemented its place as the epicentre of art, culture, business and politics. Charming, candid and brimming with humour, When the Going Was Good perfectly captures the last golden age of print magazines from the inside out.

The coveted Annie Leibovitz SUMO is now available in an unlimited XXL edition. Drawing on more than 40 years of work, including photojournalism made for Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s and conceptual portraits for Vanity Fairand Vogue, Leibovitz selected iconic images and also photographs that have rarely, if ever, been seen before.

Vanity Fair 100 Years showcases a century of personality and power, art and commerce, crisis and culture--both highbrow and low. In the sumptuous 384-page coffee table book, the editors of Vanity Fair have created the definitive history of the most talked-about magazine of our day. From its inception in 1913, through the Jazz Age and the Depression, to its reincarnation in the boom-boom Reagan years (after a 47-year hiatus), to the image-saturated Information Age, Vanity Fair has presented the modern era as it has unfolded--using wit, imagination, peerless literary narrative and bold, groundbreaking imagery. The most innovative voices in popular culture are all compiled within these pages (from Robert Benchley, Jacques Cocteau and Dorothy Parker, to William Styron, Christopher Hitchens and Dominick Dunne) along with the greatest magazine illustrators, artists and photographers of all time--most notably Edward Steichen and Annie Leibovitz, who, through Vanity Fair, virtually invented the modern celebrity portrait. Writers Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger contribute an essay on the incomparable Frank Crowninshield and the birth of the Jazz Age Vanity Fair, Jim Windolf chronicles the magazine's rebirth in 1983, and Frank DiGiacomo gives the history of the glamorous Vanity Fair Oscar Party.