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.
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
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.
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:
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
Several books on culture, gender and sexualisation quote Magforum’s pages on men’s magazines and women’s magazines, including:
by Sharna Olfman (ABC-CLIO, 2009);
by Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher (Cambridge University Press, 2010);
by Geoffrey Aquilina Ross (V&A Publishing, 2011); and
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
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:
by Daniele Albertazzi and Paul Cobley (Pearson Education, 2010)
by Jason Whittaker (Taylor & Francis, 2008)
by Lesley Bown (Hachette UK, 2010)
, edited by Tim Holmes (Routledge, 2008). Tim runs the magazine side of the postgraduate diploma in journalism at Cardiff University
by Yolanda Zappaterra (Laurence King, 2007), who teaches at Central St Martins in London.More eclectic users of Magforum include:
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
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)
Ralph Steadman cover for Johnny Depp interview talking about Hunter S. Thompson in Shortlist's 200th issue
Free city men’s weekly Shortlist is celebrating its 200th issue with a Johnny Depp article promoting a film adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary. On the cover is an exclusive (to all 523,665 copies) Ralph Steadman cover. Steadman was the Gonzo artist who illustrated several of Thompson’s articles and books, such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Man About Town magazine cover Autumn 1958
Man About Town, along with Queen, Nova and London Life was part of the revolution that changed the way magazines were edited and designed in the 1960. An email landed last week caused some disruption at Magforum.com. There’s a case study on Town magazine and a page of what I thought were all the Man About Town covers. But I was wrong. What I thought was January 1963 was, in fact, Christmas 1962 – a 13th issue for the year.
Man About Town cover - now known to be Christmas 1962
Dating issues at the end and beginning of a year can be ticky because the January issue will usually be published in December or even November, so the copyright for January 1963 will be 1962. If the year is not on the cover, confusion can result.
Anybody got a scan I could use of the January 1963 Town cover?
Split covers can be a devil to get right – when used well, they really stand out, but a publisher can be at the mercy of its printer, as demonstrated by this example of Bauer’s latest launch Outdoor Fitness.
Dummy cover for Outdoor Fitness from Bauer
Cover of Outdoor Fitness, as it should look
Matching colour is one problem but then register is another. Joanathan Manning, editor, and art director Mark Tucker will have been spitting at this result from the presses at Polestar Chantry.
Outdoor Fitness split cover ruined by poor registration and/or binding
The colour effect is deliberate (I assume!) but the register or binding is way out – a good 2-3mm. Hopefully, it only affected part of the run, but in this case it was all the copies in WHSmith at Euston I could see.
Still, Outdoor Fitness is a rare launch these days, attempting to segment the men’s health and fitness sector so dominated by NatMag/Rodale’s quarter-of-a-million-selling Men’s Health. In this case, carving out ‘Middle-Aged Men in Lycra’, apparently known as MAMILs.
Port magazine launch issue
Jeremy Leslie at Magculture has reviewed new men’s mag Port. Like all his posts, it’s well worth reading. Particularly worth noting the reference to typographer and Eagle designer Ruari McLean‘s book – OUP described it as the world’s first book about magazine design when it came out.
This post is being written in Pages on an iPad and pasted into WordPress. Why? Because when I type in WordPress I see nothing! Previews OK though. Weird. Any solutions out there? As a writer I find the iPad frustrating – forever switching between keyboards. And who would have thought the navigation arrows we so important? Wayheyhey – there’s an app for that. Thanks Sarah at the FT!
In a report on PC sales, IDC has said ‘Growth steadily slowed throughout 2010 as weakening demand and competition from the Apple iPad constrained PC shipments’.
The FT backs this up with a Gartner study, saying: ‘IDC and Gartner, in separate reports issued on Wednesday, said total shipments were less than previous projections.’
IDC estimates that about 17m tablets were shipped by manufacturers in 2010, most of them from Apple, and that figure is expected to reach 44m in 2011, alongside 385m PCs.
Poynter is showing a house ad for Rupert Murdoch’s Daily iPad-only newspaper, which was to be launched by Murdoch and Apple’s Steve Jobs, says Roy Greenslade, but today’s Guardian says the launch as been set back several weeks. Some wag is bound to dub it ‘The Daily delay’ if this carries on
And Monday’s Media Guardian analysis of iPad trends made disappointing reading for publishing seeking another revenue stream. ‘iPad apps – still more dash than cash’ by Jemima Kiss said:
Figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations in the US show average monthly downloads slumping by the end of 2010. Only two publishers were brave enough to share their figures.
Conde Nast and Rodale revealed that:
- Wired US iPad magazine sold 73,000 copies through the app in its first nine days in May 2010 but that fell to 23,000 in November
- Vanity Fair sold 10,500 in October but 8,700 in November
- GQ’s average fell from 13,000 in October to 11,000
- Men’s Health fell from 2,800 monthly shortly after the iPad launch to 2,000.
