LIFE 75 Years: The Very Best of LIFE

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 ten best war photos ever taken for LIFE; the ten best photo essays ever to grace our pages (including the works of Capa and Parks and Smith); the ten loveliest pictures from Hollywood (in fact, the ten best pictures of Marilyn Monroe ever taken by such as Halsmann, Eisenstaedt and her dear friend Milton Greene), the ten best sports pictures, the ten funniest pictures we ever ran. The ten best pictures from the space race, and the ten most significant pictures to the human race, including Lennart Nilsson's "Life Before Birth."

And, here, also, are our mistakes: Ten photographs the editors never ran. The photographs (including the sailor kissing the nurse!) that everyone thinks made the cover, but didn't.

LIFE is renowned for its photography, of course, but we will excerpt, as well, great words that appeared in our pages: the ten best contributions from Ernest Hemingway, Jacqueline Kennedy, John Steinbeck, Theodore H. White, John Updike, Elmore Leonard and others.

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.