These websites have it covered

In the upper right corner of each portrait's 'home page' is a thumbnail (which opens into a larger pop-in version on request) of the image as it appeared on Time. In a borderless text box to the right of the image is 'the story behind the cover,' as curator James Barber reveals details and decisions specific to each portrait - sometimes revealing more about the times than about the subject. (Witness the unexpected backlash in 1969 to what would now be considered a quite tame depiction of Raquel Welch.) Finally, in some cases a cover's page will also have a brief audio file, as when Duke Ellington appears to strains of "Sophisticated Lady," and Martin Luther King to a sample of his "I have a dream" speech.

In addition to the covers featured on the exhibition's main page, a handful of special collections take a more extensive look at such subjects as Sports, Civil Rights, Technology, some "Man of the Year" choices made between 1927 and 1962, and a feature dedicated to the person most frequently featured on Time's covers. Richard Nixon (surprised?) appeared 55 times between 1952 and 1994, and six of those portraits are on display here.

While "The Time Collection" mixes a bit of education with its entertainment, the collections at CoverPop.com are purely recreational. First launched in mid-October as a single page displaying covers from more than 3,400 science fiction novels, CoverPop has grown to include one-page collections of covers from Mad Magazine, graphic novels, mysteries, vintage pulp, and women's and science magazines, plus a world of Harry Potter jackets. (And if you want a break from the books, collections of 'nonliterary' subjects, such as musical instruments, board games, cereal boxes, and even "500 Gifts For Geeks" have also been compiled.)

In each case, the collection is presented as a seemingly random mess of thumbnail images filling the browser screen. (In fact, there is an order to the arrangements, and each page will point out any clues to such layout-dependent variables as vintage, or for collectibles, price.) Rest your mouse pointer over a thumbnail, and a larger version of the image rises out of the mass along with a line or two of information. Click on the new image, and CoverPop takes you to the original offsite source page.

And that's all there is to it. Like some sort of online flea market where the primary purpose is to just poke around and see what you find, CoverPop is the kind of site for which the term "idle curiosity" most fittingly exists. It's true that some of the links will take interested surfers to genuinely useful information, or even to dealers if they are so inclined, but the vast majority of visitors will be 'just browsing, thanks' - and that fits CoverPop's mandate just fine.

Cover Art: The Time Collection at the National Portrait Gallery can be found at http://www.npg.si.edu/time/ with CoverPop at http://www.coverpop.com/.

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