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.

The Summer 1989 cover took an entirely different approach.

This was a rare personal profile of editor Emmanuel Goldstein, which was based on a photograph taken by Ken Copel in a field near the 2600 offices.

Included in this portrait are all sorts of little allusions: a Number 6 button (from The Prisoner TV series); a black button (these had become popular in that time and place); Touch-Tone buttons that displayed "2600" lying around the field; a strange bicycle running through an EXXON credit card (this was shortly after the Exxon Valdez oil spill); a cellular antenna; various faces, including Cap'n Crunch (whose cereal boxes had once contained the 2600 hertz whistles), Abbie Hoffman and Ayatollah Khomeini (who had both recently died); Vicks Formula 44 (for hacking coughs); "No Place Like Ohm;" a little image of the Citicorp building where 2600 meetings took place; Bell System logos; a monitor with the word "Meow" over cat paws ("on little cat feet" which was one of our favorite phrases that implied stealth, taken from a Carl Sandburg poem entitled "Fog"); and a can of ham with "(516) Bean" written on it.

One of our local pager numbers in area code 516 had spelled out the words "BEAN HAM" (232-6426) and that kind of thing seemed to mean a whole lot more back then.

As for the mini-cover, as this came out right after the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests, the Chinese characters for the word "oppression" appeared next to the startled face of an animated donkey from the film Animal Farm, written by George Orwell.