Red-faced at Time

The US magazine Time is celebrating 90 years since its founding, which the managing editor describes as ’90 years inside the red border’ on his Editor’s Desk page. But Time did not introduce its red border until 1927. So much for accuracy. Before that, the earliest issues had ruled boxes, reminiscent of the British magazine Pall Mall 20 years earlier.

Pall Mall magazine from 1905

The first Time cover from 1923

In between, Time experimented with both a red and a green strip down the left side, the red being a ‘warm’ red as used by Pall Mall and the green similar to that used by Tit-Bits.

Green stripe Time magazine cover from 26 April 1926

There’s a video showing the progress of Time’s covers.

 

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.

Jeremy Leslie working on a book

It’s five years since Yolanda Zappaterra’s Editorial Design was published, and now I’ve just noted that Jeremy Leslie is working on one with the same topic, to be published next year. So, that’s why Magculture has been quiet recently. I know the feeling: mine on the history of magazine design for the V&A is now in production and will be ready next year too. In the meantime there’s a Magforum relaunch coming up at the end of the month – and hopefully a bit more blogging.

Baskerville gets a society

To many it’s a typeface, but Baskerville was the name of an 18th-century Birminngham printer, John Baskerville, and Wednesday, 7 November 2012 seeks the launch of a society devoted to him and his eepontmous face at the Arts Building, University of Birmingham.

The mark the event, the Baskerville Society will include talks by Caroline Archer of the Typographic Hub at Birmingham Institute of Art & Design and Malcolm Dick at the Centre for West Midlands History at Birmingham University; and a performance of Hic Jacet or The Corpse in the Crescent, a play about the ‘thrice-buried printer’ which was written by Neville Brendon Watts and broadcast by the BBC in 1947.

Laid back and simple at the Economist

Came across this post from Neelay Patel about the Economist’s iPad strategy. It reminds me of the advice from typographers when DTP came in (John Miles made a similar plea at the time):

We also agonized over what not to include. We didn’t want any bells or whistles, or anything that would distract our readers from doing what they wanted, to finish reading their Economist each week.

With 600,000 unique devices accessing the apps each week and over 125,000 digital-only subscribers (and that was back in May), who could argue?

Digital magazine development

 

 

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.

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

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.

 

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)

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.