Before Cosmo Became Cosmo

Cosmopolitan magazine was first published in 1886 as a family magazine, was later transformed into a literary magazine, and eventually became a single women's fashion magazine under Helen Gurley Brown in the late 1960s. Brown, of course, was author of the 1962 best-seller Sex and the Single Girl and, 10 years after that book came out, she put a nearly-nude centerfold of actor Burt Reynolds in Cosmo. The rest is history and legend.