Three of this year's covers were done by a new artist, Holly Kaufman Spruch, while the Summer cover was done by veteran Ken Copel.

The mini-cover in the upper right-hand corner continued to appear for all issues.  The covers this year were notable in that they focused on world events much more than in the past.  It was also a very eventful year on a number of levels.

Spring 1989 featured an Abbey Road takeoff with a Salman Rushdie flavor.

It was in February that Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, a book seen by some as spreading blasphemy against Islam.  The idea of someone being put on a hit list for the words they wrote was true blasphemy to writers and free thinkers everywhere, ourselves included, which led to the idea behind this cover.

The Ayatollah himself is pictured, dressed in black, as the first of the four men crossing the street to Rushdie's house.  In his hand is a copy of the Holy Koran (as it was spelled in English then).  The turbans of the three assassins following him are Sikh rather than Arab, which served as a bridge to The Beatles' embracing of Indian culture (Hinduism in their case).  As in The Beatles' famous album cover, different footwear is apparent in those crossing the street, and one of the four is out of step.  Of course, we had to insert a British payphone in the distance.  Even the license plates had meaning, with staff and their friends hiding their addresses there and 7383USAF being an allusion to someone we knew named Pete (spelled out on a Touch-Tone dial) joining the Air Force.

As for the mini-cover, there was a picture of a guy, possibly actor Raymond Burr, next to an excerpt from The Freedom Fighter's Manual, a propaganda leaflet dropped over Nicaragua by the U.S. government in the 1980s.  This particular excerpt contains instructions on how to sabotage telephone lines.

Finally, the mini-cover corrected an omission from 1988 - the Spring issue of that year had failed to carry on the tradition of having an exclamation point on the cover of the first issue of the year.  So, for Spring 1989, we included two of them.