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.

 

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

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

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

Michael Caine and David Bailey in double act

The latest portrait of Michael Caine by David Bailey

Michael Caine is an icon – in part thanks to the photographs of David Bailey – and the pair interview each other in today’s Mail on Sunday Live supplement.

‘I don’t analyse,’ says Caine. ‘The trouble with being an icon is that you don’t know anyone who is an icon.  There’s no cafe where you can go and talk to other icons, there’s no lessons, evening classes or anything. You don’t know what to do, so I don’t do anything. I just relax.’

He does watch his stats though:

‘Jack [Nicholson] and I are friends and we’re the only guys nominated for an Oscar every decade for the past five decades. But he’s won three and I’ve only won two. So he’s beaten me.’

 

Mail on Sunday profile

 

Madonna on Vogue covers

Been hammering away on the book I’m writing about the history of magazine design and looking through some old Vogue covers. How’s this for the first cover (May 1989) of Madonna in the US edition:

Anna Wintour was told this Madonna cover would not sell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fashion Indie notes that editor Anna Wintour says she was told ‘[Madonna]’ll never sell’, but, in fact, newsstand sales rose 40%. Strange that Wintour hadn’t checked with Liz Tilberis, her successor at the British sister magazine – ‘Brogue’ – which had run this cover in February:

British Vogue beat the US edition in having a Madonna front cover four months earlier

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first cover under Liz Tilberis was of Naomi Campbell – her first appearance on the front of Vogue.

History of women’s glossies

British Vogue cover archive - search on date, model, photographer or editor, but not all covers are up

Nigella and Jolie take to magazine covers

Angelina Jolie pours salted caramel over her head for Stylist

Nigella Lawson resists the caramel option for the cover of Newsweek

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.