Tripewriter genius of Private Eye at the V&A

The world of print is dragging my time away from the online side at present, delving into the archives at the National Art Library at the V&A for a book on the history of magazine design (1840 to today) and a section on magazine history for The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Also, moving a collection of several thousand magazines has really tested my back in the past few days!

But I note that the V&A is hosting a 50th birthday celebration exhibition for Private Eye in October. There’s one not to be missed. Great journalism (with all its carbuncles), biting cartoons – and at the cutting edge of technology using Letraset, typewriter-produced text [though its enemies might describe it as tripewriter] and offset-litho printing in 1961. Its mode of production would be adopted 15 years later by the Punk fanzines. The magazine has its own page on the event, Private Eye at 50: Making an exhibition of ourselves.

The displays will no doubt focus on the cartoonists – Willy Rushton, Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe to name three – and Private Eye’s bubble covers. But will it give a chance to air photos of old men wearing white vests? Dust off the Fergus Cashin rug? Will Gnitty become a household name? And one for a BBC Radio 4 series – how would the magazine landscape have looked if Private Eye had taken up the offer to write the news pages for Michael Heseltine’s Town?

You know something is doing well when it is hated as well as loved. Such was the venom with which the Eye is (or was) held that the likes of Jeffrey Bernard, Derek Jameson, Clive Jenkins, Ken Livingstone, Spike Milligan, Austin Mitchell, Michael Parkinson, Lady Rothermere and Mary Whitehouse backed the criminal Robert Maxwell in Not Private Eye and his fight to bring Richard Ingrims and pals down. Yet thousands of people rode to the rescue when court fines in losing libel cases to St Jammy Fishfingers and the Bouncing Czech threatened to bring it down.

There’s always someone writing ‘why I’m cancelling my subscription’ (there’s a typical one in Gerald Scarfe’s Drawing Blood, though it might be about a cartoon in the Sunday Times) or ‘why I don’t read you any more‘ letters. And that’s exactly as it should be.

Thumbs-down for Kindle in colleges

Seven US colleges ran a trial using Amazon Kindle book readers but they got a thumbs-down from about 80% of the students for their studies – although 90% said they were fine as personal reading devices.

The results of the college trial, reported in the Financial Times (‘E-books fail the classroom test‘), come as other organisations try out such devices in workplaces – the FT reported on Saturday that insurance brokers at Lloyd’s of London are using iPads (‘Lloyd’s brokers weigh up iPads‘) – and college trials are being set up on iPads.

The US trial reported that the Kindle ‘could be clinky. You can’t  move between pages, documents or charts simply … compared with paper.’

Other studies seem to show that people read books much faster on paper than on the Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPad, but there’s little surprise in this because the devices only show one page at a time, rather than a spread, and carry fewer words to the page.

Rotten Apples and a skiing(?) dog

Rotten Apples - a food culture magazine

Well this certainly looks different. A dog standing (skiing? trampolining) on beefburgers.

Rotten Apples magazine is a new title about ‘the extremes of Food Culture’.

Thankfully, says editor Ed Vaughan, ‘We are not suggesting that the funny little Pup is in any way a delicacy or should be eaten a la cheeseburger’. (Simon Winchester once wrote about eating dogs in the Far East and we had strrange phone calls asking for his phone number for months afterwards.)

Rotten Apples is published in Bristol and costs £3.95 (about the price of a pint, says the editor, but then beer’s expensive in Bristol).

Independent magazines at Magforum.com

Underground literary magazines

Popshot - Independent favourite

Monday’s  Independent has a double-page spread on independent literary magazines. Pen Pusher, Litro, Popshot, Five Dials, The Drawbridge, Stingray, Gutter and Ambit all get mentions. There are half-a-dozen covers shown.

Independent magazines

Where the Wild Things meet the end of the world

Two titles come to my notice with eye-catching graphics on a single theme, but very different agendas.

Little White Lies comes out six times a year and glories in what’s happening in the film world; the Nov/Dec issue is devoted to the forthcoming Where the Wild Things Are from cult director Spike Jones (Being John Malkovitch). Magculture points out that the cover is designed to sit alongside sister title Huck.

Otaku is a very different beast for fans of manga – Wikipedia reckons the word means ‘people with obsessive interests’. The theme is, cheerily, the end of the world.

I hand over to the editors to explain more:

Otaku magazine wishes to spread survival methods and plans for after the cataclysm. The end of the World started a long time ago, said Edward O. Wilson and others, it has already begun as a great extinction of living species, probably similar to what happened at the end of the last ice age. All the mega-fauna had disappeared and humans started to practice agriculture. The estimations for the number of small and huge extinctions that marked life history on Earth vary from 5 to over 20. The last one, of meteoritic proportions, had crushed the Earth exactly when dinosaurs were the big and mighty creatures of the time.

Great images but, being an international collaboration, don’t expect the English to match!

 

Martin Sharp and Oz at it again on Ebay

Oz 3 poster by Martin Sharp

A copy of the third issue of Oz – the underground trippy title that brought Felix Dennis to fame – from 1967 is zooming up the Ebay charts with 10 bids reaching £122 – with 6 days to go. Expect a flurry at the end.

This issue has a three panel fold out poster by Martin Sharp and Souvenir Century, the seller, lists the the contents as:

Revlon Invents Wet Lipstick on the reverse. Beautiful Breasts competition. Mike McInnerney graphic, and ‘Tripping and Skipping They Ran Merrily After the Wonder Full Music…’ – Warren Hinkles on Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters and the Acid Tests. ‘Last Exit to Brewer Street’ – article on publisher John Calder. ‘Why Politics is Giving Everyone the…’ – girl-on.-toilet-on-Parliament 2 page photomontage, and ‘An Address to politicians’. Protest Postcards to politicians. Pop and Drugs sections. ‘In Praise of Ugliness’ by Colin MacInnes. Magnificent Failures. Frisco Speaks – Sharp cartoon.

They don’t make them like that any more.

Pearce Marchbank launches website

Oz cover by Pearce Marchbank

Pearce Marchbank has launched a website for his Studio Twenty company. The site shows examples of his work for magazines ranging from Friends, Time Out and Oz to Hali and Marxism Today.

Oz set sells for $5,700

Larry Viner of the Advertising Archives tells me that the Oz complete collection went for $5,700 in New York (estimate $4,000-$6,000). So anyone who paid the £9,999 asking price for an Ebay buy-it-now over here would be feeling really hard done-by!

Collecting magazines

Hippies come out of the underground to buy Oz

The hippies are really coming out of the woodwork as the media celebrates 1968 and all that. Prices for underground magazines such as Oz are going through the roof. A copy of issue 5 from July 1967 sold for £561.30 on Ebay in May last year. A February 1967 first issue sold for £560 in September (one cost just £360 in 2006).

In December in London, a complete run made £3,600 and an almost complete run of International Times, fetched £3,000. That looks cheap compared with what’s on offer on Ebay at the moment – £5,999 starting bid for a set of Oz, £9,999 for a buy it now – and he wants £29.95 for the postage!

Probably better to fly to Bonhams in New York, which is auctioning a complete set on May 16 with a guide price of $3,000 – $6,000 (that’s about £1,500-£3,000, so for £10K you could bag the lot and have a good holiday).

It’s part of a collection put together by fashion designer Peter Golding. It’s worth taking a look at at his Inspirational Times 3D exhibition.

Jarvis Cocker on fanzines

A good point came up in Jarvis Cocker’s history of fanzines on Radio 4 this week (you can still listen to the second part if you’re quick). It was pointed out that the sort of people who produce these magazines wouldn’t be seen dead doing it on MySpace, so feeding the profits of the industrial-military complex in the form of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Of course, many people are happy with blogs and social networking sites and some have gone commercial – Viz growing from Chris Donald’s bedroom to a million sales an issue in the late 1980s (and first issues now fetch £950). Private Eye could be described as starting out as a zine too. However, the Luddites prefer paper with its intimacy and sense of personality that they feel cyberspace can’t give. Distribution is through art bookshops or hawking them around wherever will sell them.

The programme goes back to the 1980s in the days of cut and paste and Cow Gum driven by enthusiasm for punk. A mate of mine – Alan Pipes – did one in Guildford called Barbed Wire (The Vapours were the big local band then). Liverpool’s Mercy and Sheffield’s Go get a good mention from Cocker.

The survival – and even growth – of fanzines and non-commercial titles – enthusiastically covered by Jeremy Leslie at Magculture – may well be a sign of a backlash at the increasingly corporate nature of magazines. It’s also where a lot of the fun is being had in terms of freedom to write and design – just as Oz did 35 years ago. Handmade, argumentative, quirky and personal as they are, zines are not going away.

British Library pages on fanzines.