National Geographic Monthly Magazine

The first issue of the National Geographic Magazine was published on September 22, 1888, nine months after the Society was founded. It was initially a scholarly journal sent to 165 charter members, currently, it reaches the hands of 40 million people each month. Starting with its January 1905 publication of several full-page pictures of Tibet in 1900 01, the magazine changed from being a text-oriented publication to featuring extensive pictorial content, and became well known for this style. The June 1985 cover portrait of the presumed to be 12-year-old Afghan girl Sharbat Gula, shot by photographer Steve McCurry, became one of the magazine's most recognizable images. National Geographic Kids, the children's version of the magazine, was launched in 1975 under the name National Geographic World. In the late 1990s, the magazine began publishing The Complete National Geographic, an electronic compendium of every past issue of the magazine. It was then sued over the copyright of the magazine as a collective work in Greenberg v National Geographic and other cases and temporarily withdrew the compilation