As a magazine title, Vanity Fair has had several lives. There is, of course, the modern version on newsstands today, now celebrating its 25th anniversary and still a lively and influential periodical, both culturally and politically, noted for its in-depth journalism, memorable profiles and striking photography.

But as the impressive new book, "Vanity Fair Portraits: A Century of Iconic Images" by Graydon Carter (Abrams; $65) amply demonstrates, these traditions date back far beyond the magazine's rebirth in 1983 to the ultra-sophisticated journal edited by Frank Crowninshield from 1914 until its demise in 1935.

Francis Welch Crowninshield, widely known as Crownie, was born in Paris in 1872, the son of a mural painter. As a young man in New York he was a beacon of the social elite, a popular member of exclusive clubs — cultivated, elegant, worldly and witty. His 1947 New York Times obituary credited him with developing cafe society in America. When he was hired in 1914 by his friend Conde Nast, who had already had a great success with Vogue as editor of a magazine Nast had recently purchased called Dress & Vanity Fair, it precipitated a sea change in the look and tone of American publications.

Crowninshield had been the art editor of The Century, so his focus was very much on the visuals. He shortened the title of his new undertaking — there had already been three previous Vanity Fairs in the U.S and England — and changed its focus from female fashion to the arts, hiring the period's best and brightest artists, photographers, and writers. To quote the history of the genre, "The American Magazine," "Crowninshield set the standard for verve and intelligence."

He worked closely with the highly inventive art director Mehemed Fehmy Agha, whose innovations included dramatic two-page spreads. Agha introduced the American public to the works of Gauguin, Picasso and Matisse, as well as popularizing the celebrity portraiture of such master photographers as Edward Steichen, Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, Imogen Cunningham, Horst and Hurrell.

The writers whose words appeared in the pages of this early Vanity Fair were a veritable Who's Who of American letters of the period — Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, Ferenc Molnar, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes all appeared in a single issue in 1923, and the earliest works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker appeared on its pages. It was indeed the cultural chronicle of the Jazz Age avant-garde.

The new Abrams book manages to celebrate and capture the spirit of both the early and the current Vanity Fairs. Cleverly and effectively arranged so that apposite full-page illustrations face each other, it has, for example, Steichen's 1933 profile portrait of conductor Leopold Stokowski sharing a spread with Chuck Close's detailed 2001 Polaroid of composer Phil Glass, just as Amelia Earhart faces four astronauts. Other pairings include H.G. Wells and Tom Wolfe, Steichen's Colette and Irving Penn's Susan Sontag, Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson, Clark Gable and Leonardo Di Caprio, Jean Harlow and the 1996 Madonna — as beautifully art directed as any issue of the old Vanity Fair.

There is also a group of illuminating texts — author and journalist Christopher Hitchens on "Divine Decadence," National Portrait Gallery Curator of Photographs Terence Pepper on portrait photography in the early Vanity Fair years, VF editor David Friend on the modern incarnation, plus a charming Dorothy Parker poem called "Our Office: A Hate Song — An Intimate Glimpse of Vanity Fair."

The photographs in the book are impeccably reproduced, but for a closer look at the originals, they will be on view Oct. 26-March 1 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in an exhibition organized by London's National Portrait Gallery.

Linda Rosenkrantz has edited Auction magazine and authored 18 books, including "Cool Names for Babies" and "The Baby Name Bible" (St. Martin's Press; www.babynamebible.com). She cannot answer letters personally. To find out more about Linda Rosenkrantz and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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