A copy of Razzle is going on eBay with bidding at £21! What is going on? What can possibly be in issue 49 (probably from 1953)?

Copies of Razzle, a pocket men’s monthly, typically sell for less than £5 including postage. Its big feature was a ‘dream girl’ colour illustrated pin-up by George Davies on the centre spread, the rest was timeless, humorous articles and cartoons featuring leggy girls.

Razzle’s big claim to fame today is that it inspired the flipside of ‘Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll’ by Ian Dury and the Blockheads.  The lyrics to ‘Razzle in my Pocket’ (1977) are about trying to steal a copy of Razzle from a newsagent (Dury was born in 1942):

‘In my yellow jersey, I went out on the nick.
South Street Romford, shopping arcade
Got a Razzle magazine, I never paid…’

Could it be this is the issue he was trying to nick (he’d have been about 11)?

Like many of the big-selling men’s magazines of the 1950s, the title lives on as a top-shelf magazine published by Paul Raymond (since 1983).

The BBC has been told to cut back its commercial activities with its Worldwide arm being banned from mergers and acquisitions. Also, it will be forced to sell off any of its operations that are not ‘in keeping with the BBC brand’.

Under these rules, Worldwide would not have been able to take over Redwood in the 1980s – which launched almost all today’s BBC magazines – or its Bristol-based Origin division, or Lonely Planet, probably its most controversial move.

In 2005, Worldwide was forced to sell women’s monthly Eve because it did not fit with the BBC’s aims.

BBC profile

In a comment piece on marketing to the young, Mike Skapinker in the Financial Times quotes Carol Phillips, a marketing academic, who has done research  on how people respond  when reading Vogue.  The findings showed that younger people concentrated on the design, colour and font, whereas older readers focused on the content.

The way youngsters now take in information is so different that  the English lord chief justice said recently that lawyers might have to provide evidence on screens so that jurors could take it in better because they eree no longer used to sitting and listening.

Profiles of women’s magazines

Lloyd’s List publisher Informa has begun talks about taking over German rival Springer Science and Business Media. The idea was sparked by UK private equity groups Candover and Cinven trying to sell a stake of as much as 49 per cent in the German group for about €400m, says the Financial Times.

Then two groups have been the subject of merger speculation for several years with Informa, as one of the world’s largest organisers of conferences, being an ideal fit with Springer.

Chris Gregory has come up trumps with what appear to be the final two images to complete the set of Town covers at Magforum.com.

Here they are: February and March 1966, neither of which I’ve even seen before. But this raises the question: is the set really complete? The years 1961-67 have 12 issues of the men’s magazine that rode the wave of the Swinging Sixties and made a reputation for Michael Heseltine’s Haymarket, but 1963 had an extra Christmas issue: were there any other extras? Hopefully, someone out there will let us know.

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!

The Sun has laid into Gordon Brown with a ‘Don’t you know there’s a bloody war on?’ campaign, culminating in attacks over the PM’s alleged spelling errors in a handwritten not to Jacqui Janes.

The FT reports a poll yesterday suggesting the Sun’s campaign coud backfire:

Some 65 per cent of respondents to a PoliticsHome poll characterised the tabloid’s coverage as “inappropriate” rather than legitimate journalism and 48 per cent said they were more inclined to defend the prime minister as a result.

But this isn’t the first time the Sun would have called the public mood wrong on a big issue. The biggest error was probably the attacks on the Queen after the paper published the text of her Christmas speech before it had been broadcast. The paper ran its own phone poll – which the Queen won hands-down. Six months later, editor Kelvin McKenzie had left.

New Scientist and Variety publisher Reed Elsevier’s share price has taken another hit – down 3% today – on news that its chief executive is parting company. The Telegraph says Ian Smith’s ‘shock departure’ was down to a lack of experience of the media industry during a recession.

The publisher’s shares are down 11% over the year, while rival Pearson’s have risen 40% in the same time.

I’ve been meaning to put these images up since I bought this copy of Der Spiegel in the week before Germany’s elections last month. It’s the best use I’ve seen of a lenticular cover. Titles such as NME , Sleaznation, Top Gear, Empire and Shine have all used lenticular covers before but this one has a very strong editorial logic behind it rather than doing it for the effect or a celebration issue (Rolling Stone celebrated 1,000 issues with a lenticular cover to give a 3D effect).

As you tilt the cover, the stuck-on sheet shows either Angela Merkel or her then rival for the German chancellorship Frank-Walter Steinmeier in the seat of of power.

Underneath the lenticular sheet is an illustration of the two, who had been sharing power in a coalition for the past few years – which the German news weekly is clearly fed up of.

The words at the bottom translate as a plea to the voters: ‘Please, not again. Germany before the election.’

Tech Radar has list of cover innovations.

How original was this?

Jeremy Leslie has had a go at repetitive covers and SPD has picked up on him. There’s a similar selection of other people’s ideas at Magforum. And here’s another pair:

Art deco weekly London Life from 1935