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.

Time pulls out of Meredith talks

Time Warner’s talks to merge its magazines with those of Meredith have broken down. Intsead,  the Time Inc and IPC magazines are to be spun off as a new public company by the end of 2013.

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.

 

IPC likely to be part of Time Warner sale talks

Reports in the US early today suggested Time Warner was in talks to sell some of its magazines to Meredith Corp. The sale would probably include IPC Media, the UK’s second-largest magazine publisher, with titles such as Marie Claire and NME. IPC has sold about 20 titles over the past few years and announced job cuts of 150 staff last month.

Meredith publishes 14 magazines, including Family Circle, Ladies Home Journal and Better Homes & Gardens, as well running TV stations.

Time, the largest magazine publisher in the US, with titles such as Time, Sports Illustrated and People, could fetch $2bn-$3.5bn.

IPC profile

Hearst tests out online shops

Hearst International president Duncan Edwards has described the various online shopping experiments the company is running to the FT’s Vanessa Friedman. There have been many such attempts by publishers, Happy, for example was a shopping magazine and website from Northern & Shell in 2005.  

• ShopBazaar in the US is a website linked to Harper’s Bazaar that allows uses to buy products mentioned in the monthly fashion magazine. Condé Nast has competing efforts from Lucky and Allure.
• In Japan, there is an Elle magazine shop. This is independent of the magazine and has broken even after about two years. Monocle has its own shops selling branded goods as well as a website.
• In China, Hearst has an Elle site that links to different vendors, but brings buyers back to a common check-out.

Edwards reckons that ‘On average, of the 1,000 users who visit an esite from a magazine, only one converts into a buyer.’

These experiments in ‘monetising’ magazine brands leave Friedman feeling ‘queasy’ because of the blurring of the lines between editorial and commercial activities but some would argue the line was crossed many years ago by the big fashion magazines.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spectator speaks out on Press control

Spectator magazine cover

A day before the Leveson inquiry report is published, the Spectator has set itself against any statutory scheme to control the press apart from self-regulation:

‘If the press agrees a new form of self-regulation, perhaps contractually binding this time, we will happily take part. But we would not sign up to anything enforced by government.’

Magazines have been given little coverage in the controversy, but several were called to give evidence to the Leveson inquiry, including Hello!, Heat and OK!

The Spectator has lived under government control – it was founded in 1828 – and Stamp Duty, which was used to control distribution of newspapers and magazines, was not abolished until 1855.

This change created a free Press, enabled expansion and a way of meeting demand for reading material from the public – it’s easily forgotten that the works of many of the great Victorian writers were first published in magazines, from Dickens to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. In the newspaper world, the Guardian went from twice weekly to daily publication.

The fortunes made by the magazine magnates – Alfred Harmsworth and Arthur Cyril Pearson – built on the invention of the New Journalism in magazines to found the popular daily press – the Daily Mail, the Express and the Mirror.

Sam Delaney, a former editor of Heat, has warned that Leveson could end up muzzling the celebrity magazines:

‘Brace yourselves. By 2013, every title on the newsstand may well feature a gushing profile of Nancy Dell’Olio, lounging on a chaise longue “inside her beautiful home”.’

As the leaders of the political parties pore over the six copies of the Leveson report that were delivered to parliament this afternoon, the whole of the media awaits the next stage of the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal.

UK newspapers: Times readers run the country

Magazine timeline

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

 

 

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

Magazines push digital back issues

Paid Content has commented on the Gramophone launching its back issues in digital format with Exact Editions – which has also put the 20- year archive of Dazed & Confused on the Apple Newsstand.

Every one of the 1,000 back issues of  Gramophone will be  available to all digital and App subscribers on PC, Apple and Android devices for £3.99 a month or £39.99 a year. The archive is based on the North American edition of Gramophone, which includes all the UK pages plus a 16-page supplement in each issue, “Sounds of America”. This details musical developments in the US and Canada and reviews specialist American releases.

Music magazine profiled

Developments in digital magazines