LIFE 75 Years

Book excerpt: In this deluxe commemorative edition, LIFE's editors focus on the publication's achievements more tightly than they ever have before: This is truly the best of everything LIFE has accomplished. In these pages are the best war photos ever taken for LIFE; the best photo essays ever to grace our pages (including the works of Capa and Parks and Smith); the loveliest pictures from Hollywood (in fact, the best pictures of Marilyn Monroe ever taken by such as Halsmann, Eisenstaedt and her dear friend Milton Greene), the best sports pictures, the funniest pictures we ever ran. The best pictures from the space race, and the most significant pictures to the human race, including Lennart Nilsson's "Life Before Birth." This is a premium volume of LIFE, and beyond its 200-plus pages, which include a review of every LIFE cover ever published, there is, included here, the ultimate premium: The first-ever LIFE issue, with the Margaret Bourke-White photograph of the Fort Peck Dam on the cover, reprinted in its entirety, at actual size (which was really big 10 1/2" x 14") and able to be detached. We've come a long way: We, you, those places, LIFE itself. This book tells, and celebrates, that voyage.