Coddington

Grace Coddington has a book out so the publicity interviews with US Vogue‘s model-turned-creative-director have been all over the supplements.  The Observer Magazine has an interview by Eva Wiseman, while Janet Maslin provides for the New York Times. But they diverge on the facts. Wiseman writes:

‘While Wintour is painted as a terrifying ice queen … Coddington never wears make-up…’

Maslin writes:

‘Abruptly she mentions the ghastly car accident that severed one of her eyelids. The injury was miraculously repaired, but it sidelined her for a while and pushed her to affect dark and heavy eye makeup. Today, still a provocateur who prefers extremes to the dull middle, she lightens the area around her eye sockets to achieve what she calls “that pale, bald Renaissance look.” It’s a look that sends a spooky message to the conventional beauty world.’

Take a look at the Observer photographs by Danielle Levitt or the many other profiles and see who you believe.

Julie Kavanagh’s 2011 profile in Intelligent Life is a much closer portrait, but then Kavanagh was her assistant in the 1970s.

Also, Vogue has put up a Coddington timeline, videos of interviews and an excerpt from the book and shows Coddington as the model for Vidal Sassoon’s Five Point Cut.

Vogue profile

 

 

Heroism behind romantic fiction

Romantic fiction in some people’s eyes (usually people who have never read one) is a lower form of literary life. But a 5-part series on BBC Radio 4 last week put the life of Mary Burchell, who worked as a writer from the 1930s into the 1980s in a new light.

Burchell was the pen-name of Ida Cook and in ‘The Righteous Sisters’, Jane Purcell told the story of how Ida and sister Louise not only campaigned for Jewish refugees but travelled around Europe as opera buffs to help smuggle money and goods and help people escape from the clutches of the Nazis in the years running up to World War II. The fees from Ida’s writing paid for their exploits.

In the 1950s, Mary Burchell’s stories appeared in Woman’s Illustrated and then Woman’s Day when the former closed. She wrote 125 novels for Mills & Boon into the 1980s. In an unusual move for the time, the magazine stories were illustrated by photographs, rather than illustration. It was always the same photographer – Follett. Anybody know who Follett was?

The Fantastic Fiction website lists her works and has a photograph. You can still hear the 5-part series on the BBC Radio 4 iPlayer.

Book review: Graphic design ideas

100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design

100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design has to be great book for starting arguments. Like all lists, it will divide, inspire, frustrate, inform and irritate its readers. Why’s that in? Why’s this out? You must be joking …

The authors propose 100 ideas, with a spread devoted to each: some technical (overprinting, Letraset, split fountain printing); others stylistic (expressions of speed, loud typography and white space); some objects (graphic design magazines, book jackets); and techniques (the grid, pixellation). And then set out why, arguably, the idea has been influential, with two or three examples as evidence.

So we have ‘body type’ – that’s type printed on flesh (what do you think of that one? Why isn’t it a tattoo?); self-promotional (vanity) publishing; manifestos along the lines of the Pre-Raphaelites’ Germ (though Marinetti’s 1909 article on Futurism is the first mentioned – and the blasting and blessing of the Vorticists’ Blast is far more fun, both to read and look at); and provocative gestures (what, no Churchill?).

Churchill’s V-sign

And no juxtapositions from Lilliput, an idea seen as much in the US and the UK? Or duotone, or printing poor pictures big, or CMYK, or integrated cover illustrations and text, or self-referential magazine covers, lenticular technology, or hand-drawn headlines?

Juxtapositions from Lilliput

Of course, there is also a danger here in repeating too many examples that have been wheeled out so many times before and on this point the book gets it about right.

The text belies the US-centric viewpoint of its authors, as in this commentary on a VW advert (1962): ‘The white page emphasized the undersized Beetle’. ‘Undersized’ – that could only have been written by a North American. These cultural differences are often overlooked by publishers and academics, yet they can make a big difference. For example, how many times has the New York Times printed the word ‘fuck’ in the past 30 years? Once. Even a comparatively reserved British paper such as the Financial Times has used it 430 times in the same period. (And what about censorship as an idea?) The editors could have been a bit more clever here.

The big issue is whether the book is true to itself. What is the underlying logic and narrative the authors set out? Here, it ultimately fails. Idea No 1 is ‘The Book’. Fine. But then it jumps several centuries to focus on the 20th. The Victorian is mainly treated as a form of nostalgia, rather than as the source of so many more of the ideas than the book gives credit for. The book itself gives no hint of selection, though the blurb in the press release does, talking about the ‘best examples’ from the past 100 years. So how does ‘The Book’ get in!

Yet, as long as you mentally insert the phrases ‘from a US perspective’ and ‘of the 20th century’ in the title, Steven Heller and Véronique Vienne provide plenty of irritation/inspiration value to inspire late night arguments among students and professionals alike.

• 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design by Steven Heller and Veronique Vienne, Laurence King (2 April 2012), 216 pages (paperback; colour throughout) £19.95

Books about magazines

When you’re writing a book, you end up researching and reading a lot of books. One place I looked is Google Books to see who might be quoting Magforum.com and so writing about magazines.  A search for “Magforum” suggests that no fewer than 73 books mention the site. However, like most Google searches these days, this one does not do what you want it to do and seems to return some results because they are books mentioned BY Magforum or are also about magazines!

Nevertheless, I know the following mention Magforum, some because I’ve lent them magazines for photography or provided quotations; others list Magforum as a general resource; and others quote from Magforum as a reliable source of evidence or to build an argument.

Among the many nice things said is this quote by Branded Male: Marketing to Men by Mark Tungate (Kogan Page, 2008): ‘The splendidly comprehensive Magforum.com’ in his chapter on men’s magazines.

Several books on culture, gender and sexualisation quote Magforum’s pages on men’s magazines and women’s magazines, including:

• The Sexualization of Childhood (Childhood in America) by Sharna Olfman (ABC-CLIO, 2009);
• Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918-1963 (Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories) by Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher (Cambridge University Press, 2010);
• The Day of the Peacock: Style for Men 1963 – 73 by Geoffrey Aquilina Ross (V&A Publishing, 2011); and
• Women’s Work, Men’s Cultures: Overcoming Resistance and Changing Organizational Cultures by Sarah Rutherford (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

And the property magazine pages on Magforum are recommending for global investors: ‘Magforum lists all magazines published in the UK, together with circulation figures and some pithy comments on reliability. The site is put together by hand and the editor, Tony Quinn … processes everything’, says Colin Barrow in The Global Property Investor’s Toolkit 2007-2008: A Sourcebook for Successful Decision Making (John Wiley, 2008). Obviously a man who recognises the results of a lot of hard work.

Of course, Magforum is a big source for people in the magazine industry, academics and students. Some of the books that use it as such are:

• The Media: An Introduction by Daniele Albertazzi and Paul Cobley (Pearson Education, 2010)
• Magazine Production (Media Skills) by Jason Whittaker (Taylor & Francis, 2008)
• Get Your Articles Published: Teach Yourself by Lesley Bown (Hachette UK, 2010)
• Setting Up a Successful Photography Business: How to be a Professional Photographer (Setting Up Guides)  by Lisa Pritchard (A&C Black, 2012)
• Mapping the Magazine: Comparative studies in magazine journalism, edited by Tim Holmes (Routledge, 2008). Tim runs the magazine side of the postgraduate diploma in journalism at Cardiff University
• Editorial Design by Yolanda Zappaterra (Laurence King, 2007), who teaches at Central St Martins in London.

More eclectic users of Magforum include:

• Magic Moments: Life-changing Encounters with Books, Film, Music… by John Sutherland (Profile Books, 2008), former Booker prize chair, Desert Island Discs subject and  former  Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London – the name of the founder of Answers and the Daily Mail lives on in that title
• Personal Reputation Management: Making the Internet Work for You by Louis Halpern and Roy Murphy (Halpern Cowan, 2009)

Finally, I don’t know what this means, buy, heh, it must be good! I’d be grateful for a translation:

Bewertung crossmedialer Verflechtungen im Medienkonzentrationsrecht: Eine rechtsvergleichende Untersuchung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Deutschlands, Großbritanniens sowie der Entwicklung in der EU by Harald Bretschneider (Peter Lang, 2010)

Brooker’s Dark Mirror

Great piece in today’s Guardian G2 from Charlie Brooker on his drama series, Dark Mirror.  Here’s a sample:

Just yesterday I read a news story about a new video game installed above urinals to stop patrons getting bored: you control it by sloshing your urine stream left and right. Read that back to yourself and ask if you live in a sane society.

Couldn’t agree more.Though the rest of G2 seems to have lost its way – 4 pages on Amazon’s warehouse! How many times have I seen that piece before? PR, pure and simple.

Someone even tweeted: ‘Charlie Brooker’s Dark Mirror has a twist that made them physically sick’.

Dark Mirror, Channel 4, Sunday 9pm.

Family life at Dazed & Confused

There was a pivotal moment this morning as Dazed & Confused founder Jefferson Hack and Emma Reeves were showing me round the Somerset House exhibition of the book celebrating 20 years of the magazine. Reeves was reeling off the names of celebrity portaits by Rankin (the magazine’s other founder – they met at the London College of Printing): ‘Michael Stipe … Beth Ditto…’. Then Hack breaks in ‘… and Kate’.

He meant Kate Moss, of course, his former partner and mother of their daughter. Moss is the face on the exhibition’s publicity and the cover of the Rizzoli book. The tour changed then. It was no longer just about a great magazine with images and ideas from  many of the greatest illustrators, styists and photographers of the past two decades (though the names drop thick and fast, Bjork, Taylor-Wood, Coldplay, Hirst, the Chapmans, throughout the exhibition). Instead, it was about family. And philosophy and technology.

Both Reeves and Hack talked of the magazine’s staff and contributors as family. And there are two rooms celebrating a lost member of that family: Alexander McQueen. The fashion designer and couturier hanged himself in February 2010 a week after his mother died.

I asked Hack what was the best-selling issue. He responded not with numbers, but the fact that the Fashion-Able cover (September 1998) is the most requested back issue. This led us into room 5 of the exhibition where Nick Knight’s fashion portraits of men and women without legs, or arms, are projected on three large screens – the shoot was the idea of McQueen with styling by Katy England. It is a great cover – a model, who on first glance could be Kate Moss, with prosthetic legs. Arresting.

‘That was the point were the magazine grew up,’ said Hack, taking us into the room. ‘With that issue we were on page two or three of the world’s newspapers. We realised that you didn’t have to be the best-selling magazine to have an influence on culture. That has been our philosophy ever since.’

Getting editors to talk about philosophy can be difficult; for many it is too ethereal, even sounding pretentious. But the best magazines have one. The Economist has a page on its philosophy: ‘We are international, we stress the links between politics and business, we are irreverent and we are independent,’ says John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief. Mike Soutar had a ‘mantra’ in 1997 at FHM – ‘funny, sexy, useful’. US satirical monthly Spy was ‘smart, funny, fearless’.

Many magazines have a family feel. Take Sir Luke Fildes, who was illustrating The Mystery of Edwin Drood when Dickens died half way through the monthly serial being written:

‘… at the request of the family, who wished me to fulfil the desire of the great writer, they asked me after the funeral to come and stay with them, and it was then, while in the house of mourning, I conceived the idea of ‘The Empty Chair,’ and at once got my colours from London, and, with their permission, made the water-colour drawing a very faithful record of his library; and stayed with them until they left the house prior to the sale.’

Woman’s weeklies have long talked about a family of staff and contributors, so Woman’s Own in the 1950s would discuss the lives of its writers and artists – showing a photograph of cover artist Aubrey Rix with his new baby for example, and discussing the roles and lives of young members of staff. And the promotion of the royal family in this era was a boon to magazine sales.

As for technology, Hack described a software installation by Nick Knight as ‘an app ten years ago’. Run your finger across the image to reveal layers of other images underneath. The software was developed for manipulating images – as in Knight’s cover for the Yohji Yamamoto exhibition for the V&A catalogue. And Reeves identified a watershed – eight years ago – for the switch to digital imaging at Dazed. Going back beyond then was ‘a nightmare’, she said. After that, the illustrators and photographers had digital archives of their work. Before then, ‘I’d end up at their mum’s house with a box in the garage.’

The free exhibition 20 Years of Dazed & Confused Magazine opens at Somerset House in London tomorrow. You can buy the Rizzoli book - a hefty 300-plus pages for £35 with more pictures than you can shake a stick at – at the exhibition or from the Dazed website.

Eat and drink nearby: American Bar at the Savoy; Gordon’s Wine Bar by Embankment Tube; and The India Club on the Strand.

Dazed & Confused at Somerset House

Dazed & Confused magazine is to celebrate 2o years on the news stands with an exhibition at Somerset House in London and a book (shown above with Kate Moss on the cover).

‘Making It Up As We Go Along’ will run from 4 November 2011 to 29 January 2012 and is being curated by Jefferson Hack (who founded the title with photographer Rankin) and Emma Reeves in collaboration with Somerset House.

The exhibition features Dazed & Confused magazine’s ‘most infamous visual stories, legendary photoshoots, iconic covers, controversial editorial content and artwork from influential photographers, designers, and artists’.

Work includes commissions by Rankin, Nick Knight, David Sims and Terry Richardson, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Damien Hirst and Sam Taylor-Wood, Katie Grand, Katy England, Alister Mackie and Nicola Formichetti, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood and Gareth Pugh.

This exhibition coincides with a book on 20 years of Dazed & Confused published by Rizzoli.

The Dark Knight rises in a London library

On Tuesday, I was in the Gotham City Library, today I’m sitting in a vaulted Tudor room in Hadleigh trying to write a book. But it’s so distracting … there’s a cupboard door in the wall that I can open and admire the wattle & daub (one of those great terms that sticks to you like glue from history lessons). Hadleigh is where 5 of the men who translated the King James Bible came from, so an exhibition in the church of St Mary tells me, and I’m hoping for inspiration. Yesterday, the town beat off an attempted invasion by Tesco (been trying to destroy this ancient Suffolk wool town for 16 years apparently). In terms of seeing people off, the town has form - Guthrum, King of the Danes, is said to be buried in the grounds of St Mary’s, since being defeated  by King Alfred in the C9th.

And if Gotham City sounds far fetched, just look at these covers from 1904 and 1927 – don’t they put the much later Batman artwork  to shame:

Spring-Heeled Jack – could there be a film on the way? See http://www.springheeledjackmovie.com/

Tatler cover from summer 1927 (Advertising Archives)

The reason I was in Gotham City was for a meeting of contributors to the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (vol 7) at the University of London. It turned out the place was being used as a location for the next Batman film – The Dark Knight Rises – due out in 2012. Take a look the libraries page and you’ll see why. Apparently, an ‘evil ball’ had been seen in the building, some very strange plants, as well as Christian Bale.

Tripewriter genius of Private Eye at the V&A

The world of print is dragging my time away from the online side at present, delving into the archives at the National Art Library at the V&A for a book on the history of magazine design (1840 to today) and a section on magazine history for The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Also, moving a collection of several thousand magazines has really tested my back in the past few days!

But I note that the V&A is hosting a 50th birthday celebration exhibition for Private Eye in October. There’s one not to be missed. Great journalism (with all its carbuncles), biting cartoons – and at the cutting edge of technology using Letraset, typewriter-produced text [though its enemies might describe it as tripewriter] and offset-litho printing in 1961. Its mode of production would be adopted 15 years later by the Punk fanzines. The magazine has its own page on the event, Private Eye at 50: Making an exhibition of ourselves.

The displays will no doubt focus on the cartoonists – Willy Rushton, Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe to name three – and Private Eye’s bubble covers. But will it give a chance to air photos of old men wearing white vests? Dust off the Fergus Cashin rug? Will Gnitty become a household name? And one for a BBC Radio 4 series – how would the magazine landscape have looked if Private Eye had taken up the offer to write the news pages for Michael Heseltine’s Town?

You know something is doing well when it is hated as well as loved. Such was the venom with which the Eye is (or was) held that the likes of Jeffrey Bernard, Derek Jameson, Clive Jenkins, Ken Livingstone, Spike Milligan, Austin Mitchell, Michael Parkinson, Lady Rothermere and Mary Whitehouse backed the criminal Robert Maxwell in Not Private Eye and his fight to bring Richard Ingrims and pals down. Yet thousands of people rode to the rescue when court fines in losing libel cases to St Jammy Fishfingers and the Bouncing Czech threatened to bring it down.

There’s always someone writing ‘why I’m cancelling my subscription’ (there’s a typical one in Gerald Scarfe’s Drawing Blood, though it might be about a cartoon in the Sunday Times) or ‘why I don’t read you any more‘ letters. And that’s exactly as it should be.