Useful eBay searches for magazines

I’ve added this section on useful eBay searches to my Magazine Collecting page. It’s about creating a basic search and building up the targeting. Just click on one of these links and it’ll take you to eBay and do the search for you in a new browser window:

• live listings: Magazines on eBay UK only (this includes overseas sellers who have put their listing on ebay.co.uk);
• completed listings for magazines on eBay UK so you can see what actually sold.

The trick is to narrow down the numbers – from 404,000 live listings in this case – to focus on what you want. If the magazine has a unique name, it’s easy:

• Just 54 results for Web User.

It’s tricky if your title is part of other titles. Take Today, a general interest weekly from the 1960s, for example:

• results for Today in Magazines on eBay UK.

There are 1,000+ results for this because of all the titles with ‘Today’ as part of their name: Yachting Today, Today’s Golfer, History Today, etc. So, remove those words using a minus sign:

• results for Today -yachting -golfer -history -railways -knit -heritage -sew in Magazines.

No doubt you can see ways to improve the search based on the results that you don’t want. Be careful though, because you will also remove results for your target magazine that use that word in the description.

There is a Categories menu on the left column in eBay that can narrow down a search. However, I find this unreliable. Today, the News & Current Affairs category had 5 results – and no copies of Today were there, but there was a book about bears!

Once you’re happy with it, save the search so you can repeat it later.

It’s worth bearing in mind that sellers listing magazines can get things wrong – or perhaps list an issue in, say ‘Collectables’ rather than as a magazine. Again, Empire might be found in ‘Films & TV’. So, step out of your focused search occasionally to see what might be coming up elsewhere. Also, watch out for alternative spellings and errors: Car Week or CarWeek, Today’s Golf or Today’s Golfer or Todays Golfer.

Popper and the illustrated magazine

Paul Popper photo on cover of Eve’s Journal

Magazines just go on and on. Quite how many titles have been published in the past 300 years I don’t know and Eve’s Journal, discovered by Jane Audas in the National Ar Library is yet another new one on me. Jane reckons the cover is by Paul Popper – the Czech photographer who founded Popperfoto  (now part of Getty).

By coincidence, the magazine below came up on my eBay searches. At first I thought it was an annual from Weekly Illustrated  (run by another European emigre Stefan Lorant, who would go on to found Lilliput and Picture Post) but in fact this was published by Hutchinson – and edited by Paul Popper.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mayfair first issue fetches £434 on eBay

Mayfair men’s magazine launch issue cover from 1966 with Raquel Welch

A copy of the 1966 first issue of Mayfair has just sold on eBay for £434 with 43 bidders. The men’s magazine’s cover has a single cover line below a picture of Raquel Welsh wearing a pink leotard inside a male symbol (derived from the shield and spear of the Roman god Mars): ‘The incredible revolution of sex in the sixties.’ It was the year she appeared clad in an animal skin bikini in One Million Years BC.

Mayfair profile

Buying and selling magazines on eBay

IPC and the dangers of writing about Hitler

IPC has sent our press releases pushing the latest issue of NME, with the following at the bottom:

Please note, conditions apply to using the NME covers; the photographer and NME must both be credited, along with the copy ‘NME, on sale now’.

The company is on dodgy ground with such an approach. Who’s going to use the picture with that proviso? What happens next week when the issue’s no longer on sale?

The attitude of IPC was held up to ridicule after it claimed copyright over images of Hitler’s house from Homes and Gardens‘ November 1938 edition that the Guardian’s Simon Waldman had written about. IPC’s claims were exposed as spurious. The 1938 article, ‘Hitler’s mountain home’, by Ignatius Phayre describes the Berghof as ‘quite a handsome Bavarian chalet, 2,000 feet up on Obersalzberg amid pinewoods and cherry orchards’ with the funds coming from Hitler’s ‘famous book’ Mein Kampf, a ‘best-seller of astonishing power‘.

Ignatius Phayre wrote 5 pieces for the Catholic Herald in 1938-9 and did a profile of Edgar Wallace for Pictorial Weekly (‘Edgar – the amazing! A Henry Ford of fiction’, 16 Feb 1929). Amazon lists 6 books by that author, dating from 1911-33, with one being reprinted this year, America’s Day Studies in Light and Shade. The British Library gives his real name as William George FitzGerald.

Philsp.com has Phayre writing ‘War-Work of the King and Queen of Spain’ in The Girl’s Own Paper and Woman’s Magazine in Oct 1916.

A company like IPC has commerical rights to protect, but its business is built on journalism – and the rights of journalists need protecting too.

IPC profile

Naked, booted Katy and the Dalek live on

Naughty girl: naked, booted Katy Manning – Jo Grant in Dr Who – wrapped around a Dalek for a Girl Illustrated cover

‘Katy Manning, a Dalek and a cup of cold sick‘ about an eBay sale of Girl Illustrated is one of the stranger headlines on this blog, but a popular one.  And, for the Dr Who actress who played Jo Grant, the image of her naked in boots and wrapped around a Dalek is never going to go away. The Radio Times has just done an interview with the Dr Who girl that refers to the Girl Illustrated magazine  cover. The post, ‘I’ve been a naughty girl‘ reveals that the boots were given to the young actress by Derek Nimmo:

I did it for a laugh. It was a lot of fun and it was my idea. Derek Nimmo [co-star in the West End farce Why Not Stay for Breakfast?] was furious because he’d given me those boots for my opening night. Then I wrapped them round a Dalek.

And she’s not the only starlet to have wrapped herself round a Dalek. Kylie did it for Dr Who magazine in 2007 when she appeared in the Voyage of the Damned episode. Kylie’s waitress costume worn in the Christmas special fetched £3,120 at Bonham’s in 2010.

Exterminate! Kylie Minogue with a Dalek to celebrate her appearance in a Dr Who Christmas special with David Tennant

Men’s magazines A to Z

£1,019 for a copy of OZ

Oz issue 1

That’s right. A grand  – £1,019.01 to be exact – for a copy of the first issue of OZ on eBay! That’s almost three times what one fetched in 2006 and pretty much double what a copy of issue 5 from July 1967 sold for (£561.30 on Ebay in May 2007). A February 1967 first issue sold for £560 in September 2007 and another for £360 in 2006.

Two years ago, a complete set of OZ  went for $5,700 in New York.

Jackie from Crazyaboutmagazines alerted me to this. But what other British magazine would fetch more?

Profile: underground magazine Oz

Collecting magazines

More on Man About Town

Man About Town 1959 spring cover, probably by Maurice Rickards

Five more covers from the 1950s incarnation of Man About Town have gone up at Magforum.  Look through them and you get the impression that there were opposing design forces at work.

Man About Town 1957 autumn cover -  commissioned by Rickards, but more influenced by Taylor?

Most of them are traditional examples of illustration and then there is the Maurice Rickards design of Spring 1956. This clearly comes from a different root.  Rickards – regarded as the father of the idea of ephemera – worked as art editor on the magazine  for at least some of the time in this period.

Rickards did the Autumn 1958 cover design and, I assume, the next two abstract works. But the staff were not usually credited.

I can imagine John Taylor, the ex-RAF editor, liking the usual portrayals of the mustachioed man about town. And as one of the most influential men in world when it came to style for men – a fact agreed upon by the Daily Mail, the Guardian, Time and the New Yorker -  who could argue with him?

And who could argue with this tweet from Top Gear editor Conor McNicholas recommending Magforum – ‘Horribly designed but horribly well-informed’? The site was originally built by hand in HTML – that’s coded by hand – 12 years ago with the layout done as tables. There’s always a balance between design and content and the latter has always won out. It then moved on to the free page tool in Netscape, some time with Hot Dog, and then Dreamweaver. The code occasionally gets tweaked from an IPad. The thought of pulling it all part – about 160 pages – and putting it back together is horrendous and projects such as writing a book on magazine design have got in the way.

But the nettle is being grasped with the help of Max at the ever-so-cool Broken Culture, with a target relaunch date of October. Suggestions and comments welcomed.

Town rides again, and again

First, there was Man About Town:

Man About Town autumn 1958

Then, it became About Town:

About Town september 1961

and then, Town:

Town magazine June 1964

which enlivened the sixties but was too expensive to survive. But then, in 2007:

 

Man About Town cover as part of Magculture review

Man About Town now lives again, from Wonderland publisher Creative Talent, and this month we have London quarterly, Town from Brave New World Publishing:

Town summer 2012

 See how they all compare with the 1950s/60s variants.

 

Collecting magazines on eBay

OZ issue sold on eBay

The Collecting Vintage Magazines page is one of the most popular on Magforum and the popularity of the hobby is reflected by the growth of magazine sales on Ebay. I’m just doing the latest analysis, which includes the following findings:

• June 2012, number of live listings in the UK: 148,950
• Dec 2010: 98,095
• Mar 2007: 29,425

So, in the past 18 months, the number of magazines listed has jumped by half.

Of the top 50 most expensive items, only 3 actually sold. The dearest was a near-complete set of Motor Racing for £560 – it had 25 bidders. The most expensive single magazine was issue 4 of OZ.

I’ll be updating be Magforum page next week.

Eagles, comics and magazines at the V&A’s NAL

Comics blog Cor Blimey! has visited the Eagle-era comics exhibition at the V&A and his review starts off cool but warms up.

The Eagle exhibition was mounted by Marc Ward of the National Art Library, which is housed at the V&A – but, despite its size, is easy to miss! The NAL has a very easy to search catalogue - you can just search on periodical names for example – which is useful not only for planning what to see but also for checking dates, publisher (even if they do not have a particular item).

They have complete runs of magazine such as Vogue and while it’s biased towards fashion and design titles, has issues across a range of areas, including international titles It’s a reference only collection but worth becoming a reader if they’ve got what you want.

As an example, I was in there a few weeks ago to look at Dazed & Confused. I could check what the NAL holds and a search on the main V&A website showed that Nick Knight had donated a selection of his photographs and I could look at them too – including prints of Aimee Mullins from the Fashion-Able issue. Tip: search on the surname. And, of course, the NAL holds a copy of last year’s Dazed history published by Rizzoli by Jefferson Hack with Kate Moss on the cover.