Magazines in the movies – Cover Girl 2

In Cover Girl Killer, pin-up models from Wow! magazine are bumped off

A recent post about the Cover Girl movie featured a musical from 1944. But there have been several films about cover girls.

The first was Cover Girl Killer from 1959. The plot was neatly summed up by a publicity poster: ‘First you’re a COVER GIRL … then you’re a CORPSE!’

In this British film, a pin-up model from the fictional Wow! magazine is found dead and is soon followed by others. The police twig that in each case the bikini-clad corpse is arranged in a similar position to her pose for the magazine. There’s a clever serial killer on the loose!

Harry H. Corbett has a starring role as ‘The Man’ with a very strange hair cut and bottle-bottom glasses. This was three years before playing Harold in the long-running TV series Steptoe and Son. Felicity Young plays June, the next model in peril.

Not a good look for Harry H Corbett

Wow was an American pin-up magazine in the 1950s

Although Wow! magazine did not exist in Britain, there was a US title around the time called Wow, which featured bikini-clad women on its covers, though they were illustrations. Since then, several publishers have used the title. They include WOW, an IPC comic from 1982 and, in 1999, WOW – World of Wrestling – launched. In 2019 there was The WOW, a women’s lifestyle and fashion magazine that featured Asian women. Finally, 100% WOW is a comic for teenage girls.

As for other cover girls on the big screen, Cheryl Hansson: Cover Girl came out in 1981 and That Cover Girl is a Malaysian TV series broadcast since 2023.

>>Film and TV magazines at Magforum
>>Cover Girl Killer at IMDB

Magazines in the movies: Cover Girl

Rita Hayworth gets a big chance with the fictional Vanity magazine in the film Cover Girl

Cover Girl was a 1944 Hollywood musical starring Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly. Hayworth’s character is a chorus girl working with Kelly who is tempted by a chance at stardom as the cover girl of a prominent magazine. She hopes to become the Golden Wedding Girl for Vanity, a fictional magazine published by a fictional Coudair Publishing.

The movie was a big hit – and undoubtedly a marketing boost for the magazines involved.

One of the dance numbers features cover girls representing 15 actual US magazines. They were listed in the film’s credits. Screen grabs of the 15 are shown below. There are plenty of references to the forces – a sign of the WWII times.

American – Jean Colleran

American Home – Francine Counihan

Collier’s – Helen Mueller

Coronet – Cecilia Meagher

Cosmopolitan – Betty Jane Hess

Farm Journal – Dusty Anderson (a World War II pin-up model in a 1944 issue of Yank, a magazine produced by the US army)

Glamour – Eileen McClory

Harper’s Bazaar – Cornelia B von Hessert

Liberty – Karen X Gaylord

Look – Cheryl Archibald

Mademoiselle – Peggy Lloyd

McCall’s – Betty Jane Graham

Redbook – Martha Outlaw

Vogue – Susann Shaw

Woman’s Home Companion – Rose May Robson

>>Women’s glossy magazines at Magforum
>>Magazine cover design at Magforum

Odd details in Boy’s Own masthead

Looking at copies of the Boy’s Own Paper recently, I noticed a couple of odd details in the masthead. Look closely at the book in the middle – there’s an expanded image below – and you can make out the word ‘ALBUM’. Perhaps not strange in itself, except for the fact that it’s on the back cover of the book.

Second, the handle of the cricket bat falls behind the letters in ‘boy’s’, yet the rabbit’s ears are in front of ‘own’. The result is to make the middle word look farther away. This effect is exacerbated by the ‘s’ in ‘boy’s’ being slightly too big.

This is the first version of the Boy’s Own title. It is credited to Edward Whymper (1840-1911), though there is no signature. Whymper was an accomplished engraver who had achieved fame not for his skill with a block of wood but as the first man to climb the Matterhorn, the tallest peak in the Swiss Alps, in 1865.

The first issue of the BOP appeared in 1879, so Whymper will have been 39 and an experienced craftsman. Of course, the sketch of the image and the wood carving will have been done back-to-front for letterpress printing, but it’s difficult to imagine him making a basic error, yet strange that he should have added such an incongruous detail on the book.

Even so, the publishers must have been happy with the design because it was used for the next 25 years.

Edward Whymper added the word ‘ALBUM’ on the back of the book

>Boy’s Own Paper: more than a mishmash
>Edward Whymper: the first man to climb the Matterhorn

Magazines in the movies: Thunderbirds Are Go

Alan Tracy reading Riviera in the 1966 film Thunderbirds Are Go

Thunderbirds Are Go featuring Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s puppets on strings was one of the hit movies of 1966. The film was a spin-off from the British TV series Thunderbirds and featured the exploits of International Rescue, a secret organisation with incredible aircraft and rocket ships hidden on a remote island.

The organisation was run by Jeff Tracy, a former astronaut, and the craft were flown by his five sons: Scott, who flew the scout ship Thunderbird 1; Virgil (Thunderbird 2 transporter); Alan (Thunderbird 3 space rocket); Gordon (Thunderbird 4, an underwater craft); John (Thunderbird 5, an orbiting satellite).

In one scene, the youngest of the Tracy boys, Alan, is lounging by the pool at the Thunderbirds’ island base reading a copy of Riviera. This was a fictional magazine mocked up for the film; a similar idea was used by Stanley Kubrick two years before for Dr Strangelove. The Riviera cover showed a woman in what looks like a knitted swimsuit and just one cover line: ‘girls, girls, GIRLS’. The back cover is an advert for ‘Tans’ sun tan oil.

The film sparked coverage in women’s magazines, music magazines and Sunday supplements.

Opening page of Woman’s Own feature about Sylvia Anderson

Opposite page of ‘The shy tycoon who loves dolls’ feature

The IPC weekly Woman’s Own ran an article ‘The shy tycoon who loves dolls’ by Max Caulfield. This focused on Sylvia Anderson. It opened with a colour spread showing Sylvia with two of the ‘dolls’ that had made her a tycoon: the ‘glamorous Lady Penelope and chauffeur Parker’ in their pink Rolls Royce.

Other pictures show the Tracy family at a restaurant with beards and moustaches as disguises. On the best table are Lady Penelope and Alan right in front of the band – puppet versions of Cliff Richard and The Shadows.

The band released a 45 rpm extended play (EP) disc with four tracks from the film: ‘Shooting Star’, ‘Lady Penelope’, the ‘Thunderbirds Theme’ and the ‘Zero X Theme’. Zero X was a Mars spaceship that has to be rescued by the Tracey boys.

The puppetised Cliff and The Shadows was front-page news for Record Mail

The EP was front-page news for the monthly Record Mail published to promote EMI records. The cover picture caption read:

It can’t be – it must be – it is! Cliff and The Shadows have been puppetised for a new film – Thunderbirds Are Go! They have recorded an EP of four numbers from the film on Columbia SEG8510.

Cliff Richard and The Shadows soundtrack

The copy on the back of the EP ran:

After the tremendous success of the Thunderbirds television series. Gerry and Sylvia Anderson decided to produce a full-length version for the cinema.
One of the many new ideas that was incorporated was to use puppet replicas of Cliff Richard and The Shadows. The experiment proved to be a great success. Infinite care was taken to ensure that the puppet characters were as true to life as was possible.
Firstly, Cliff and The Shadows were photographed from all angles and then the Century 21 sculpting team went to work. Many heads were rejected before a satisfactory result was obtained.
Thunderbirds are Go is a thrill-packed adventure story, but the introduction of the Swinging Star night club sequence, in which Cliff and The Shadows feature, provides the romantic interlude necessary to give the film good balance.

>>Other Magazines in the Movies posts
>>The Queen and Lady Penelope
>>What’s a magazine worth?: Lady Penelope
>>All about Thunderbirds at GerryAnderson.com

Boy’s Own paper – more than a mishmash

Boy’s Own Paper from 1885 showing a printer’s composing room

The serial Reginald Cruden: A Tale of City Life shown on this frontispiece is about the adventures of two brothers who are taken out of school to work when their parents are imprisoned. It’s typical of the stories written for the Boy’s Own Paper by Talbot Baines Reed (1852-93). Reed created a genre of school stories that was widely copied well into the next century.

The idea for ‘BOP‘ came from George Andrew Hutchison (1842-1913) and he persuaded the Religious Tract Society to publish it. The magazine lasted from 1879 until 1967. Its aim was to combat the negative influence of penny dreadfuls on young male readers. Hutchison produced a magazine that ‘appealed to boys and not their grandmothers’. The BOP‘s Latin motto was Quicquid agunt pueri nostri est farrago libelli – politely translated by one academic as ‘whatever boys do, is the manifold subject of our little book’, but more like ‘whatever our boys get up to makes up this mishmash magazine’ in my reading.

The idea was not new – it followed in the footsteps of Boy’s Own Magazine (1855-62) produced by Samuel Beeton. But whereas Beeton lacked financial discipline and went off the rails after the death of his 28-year-old wife Isabella – Mrs Beeton of cookbook fame – the Religious Tract Society was a solid publisher.

However, Hutchison apparently had battles with the society to prevent them introducing too much po-faced material, which he knew would turn his readers off.

Compare Alfred Pearce’s type case engraving with the images below

Instead, the stories put across their moral and educational messages in subtle ways. Anyone reading this instalment of Reginald Cruden will have been introduced to life in the type composing room of a printing house. And children love the jargon of printer’s devils, upper case, lower case and composing sticks. Also, note the accuracy of Alfred Pearce’s illustration: compare it with the photograph and case diagram below.

Note the layout of the type cases (credit: Villa and Rose printing tray artworks)

Layout of the letters (credit: Ned Batchelder blog/Printing Types, Updike, 1922)

The reason for the accuracy was that Reed was not just a writer of Boy’s Own yarns but an expert on typography. His family’s business was a typefoundry and he wrote a classic book, History of the Old English Letter Foundries.

Reginald Cruden: A Tale of City Life was published in book form, with illustrations by Pearse, in 1894 by the Religious Tract Society. The British Library catalogue lists 46 results for Reed, most of them the books based on his Boy’s Own stories, but also his History from 1887 (which was revised by Alfred Johnson, deputy keeper of printed books at the British Museum and author of the Encyclopaedia of Typefaces, in 1952). Other entries include ‘Old and new fashions in typography’, a paper he read at the Society of Arts in London in 1890.

Pearse was a prominent supporter of the suffragettes and produced posters and illustrations to support their cause.

>Profile of Alfred Pearse at the Look and Learn website
>Pearse suffragette poster at the V&A
>Reed’s books at the British Library
>Elizabeth Penner, ‘The squire of boyhood: GA Hutchison and the Boy’s Own Paper, Victorian Periodicals Review (Winter 2014), 631-647

It’s another sad day for the Guardian in sacking veteran cartoonist Steve Bell

The sacking of Steve Bell by the Guardian after a row over a Netanyahu cartoon says more about the problems at the newspaper than it does about the veteran cartoonist.

The Guardian’s page for the award-winning Steve Bell today

The Guardian lost the plot two decades ago with the massively expensive decision to switch from its broadsheet format into the smaller Berliner size, halfway between tabloid and broadsheet. It threw money at the redesign and the typography, and in buying full-colour presses that no-one else wanted to use.

Next, it was the online dog wagging the physical paper, with a sharp drop in the number – and particularly the breadth – of the stories. The newspaper simply became not worth buying. After 40 years of buying the Guardian, I found myself holding my political nose and buying the Times. And it’s the same on Sundays as well, with the Observer having become a weekend version of the daily Guardian.

The Guardian had to admit defeat in its Berliner experiment and move to a tabloid size with an ugly redesign in 2017. Not just ugly, but boring too.

The next retreat was from its King’s Cross offices in London back to Manchester.

So it may come as no surprise that the Guardian and Observer have kept their sales figures secret for the past two years. Well, actually, it is. The Manchester Guardian‘s reputation was built on its openness and a unique ownership structure that removes the need for an interfering proprietor. It was a newspaper revolution when the Guardian started a corrections and clarifications column, and developed the idea of the readers’ editor commenting on its own journalism from 1997. At one stage, it even put its morning news lists online and encouraged readers to get involved in the news editing process. Its style guide has been online for decades.

What will the present readers’ editor have to say about the Bell row? Probably nothing. There doesn’t appear to have been column since 2018.

Sacking Bell after 40 years is an insult both to him and the Guardian‘s traditions. He’s a cartoonist with a sense of history that has come through his pen since he made his name on Time Out and City Limits. The visceral works of Hogarth, Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruikshank going back to the 1700s are grist to his mill.

I haven’t seen the unpublished cartoon that someone on the paper is supposed to have linked to Shylock and described as ‘Jewish bloke; pound of flesh; antisemitic trope’. But I can believe Bell’s inspiration coming from a David Levine image from 1966 of US president Lyndon Johnson showing a Vietnam-shaped scar – one that the Guardian website reproduces (very badly) in its 2009 obituary of the American cartoonist. I’ve even talked on this blog about his referencing earlier cartoonists who inspire his works.

Whatever the merits of the argument, the Guardian looks, again, to have shot itself in the foot.

>>Guardian‘s David Levine obituary
>>BBC: Steve Bell sacked by Guardian in antisemitism row over Netanyahu cartoon
>>Time Out and City Limits profile at Magforum

Magazines take centre stage

Flick through this weekend’s Sunday Times‘ Home supplement and there’s a page advert for The Stage, a new block of flats in London’s Shoreditch district. But look closely and see what’s on the coffee table – a copy of Jeremy Leslie’s book The Modern Magazine alongside a stack of actual magazines. Top of the pile is issue 6 of Friends on the Shelf, an independent literary title, with style guru Tyler Brûlé’s Monocle and two other titles below. Anyone recognise the bottom two?

Looks like magazines are back in fashion – and the stylist or photographer probably knows Jeremy’s MagCulture shop, which is about a mile west in Clerkenwell.

The name of the massive development comes not from The Stage magazine – which has its offices with The Bookseller on Bermondsey Street south of the Thames in SE1, but from the fact that the Shoreditch site includes the remains of Shakespeare’s Curtain Theatre.

>The Modern Magazine by Jeremy Leslie

>Magculture shop

>The Stage, Shoreditch, London E2

What do you do at the seaside?

Seaside activities shown in special Family Herald holiday number of 1877

A century ago, it was a bucket and spade for the kids. But a few days last week by the seaside in a converted Edwardian railway carriage has given me a different view of things. Buckets and spades were still in evidence but now many families had trolleys stacked with chairs, windbreakers, wakeboards, surf boards and paddle boards.

The special title of the 1877 seaside number of Family Herald above shows, from the left: children playing among rock pools; a couple under a parasol above a bay; fishermen; bathing huts; and a seaside town with its lighthouse. In the centre is the usual image on the Family Herald masthead, of Britannia sitting with her trident and Union flag shield defended by a lion.

Womans Life cover July 2, 1898, by Cecil Aldin

By 1898, the ‘grand double seaside number’ of Woman’s Life (July 2) shows that the idea of the bucket and spade was established, wielded by a child in front of a bathing hut on wheels. Another fashionable accessory is the parasol. The cover illustration is by Cecil Aldin, who would become famous for his hunting illustrations through magazines such as the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News and English Life in the next couple of decades.

Finally, on this August bank holiday weekend, the picture below shows a self-referential cover for the monthly Pall Mall magazine in June 1910. The woman in her first class carriage – just like the one I spent my holiday in – is waving a copy of the magazine she is depicted on. She’s off for the Whitsuntide holiday, which occurs on the seventh Sunday after Easter in the Christian calendar.

Self-referential cover for Pall Mall magazine in June 1910

The peregrinations of Victorian excursionists, as holidaymakers were known in the 1850s, were well recorded – and encouraged – by magazines, and the travel industry and publishers were symbiotic actors in creating today’s global travel industry.

>>Travel and holiday magazines at Magforum website

Roy Keane’s diamond-eye performance

Keane’s make-up brings to mind Chirgwin, a famous music hall act

Sky is running advertising for its sports coverage with the former footballer Roy Keane portrayed in theatrical make-up as part of the ‘greatest show on earth’. Commentators have described him as a clown, but the single, reversed-out diamond eye is more reminiscent of George Chirgwin, a famous Victorian music hall act.

Chirgwin in his signature costume on a Wills cigarette card

Chirgwin sang and played a banjo as ‘the White-Eyed Kaffir’. He had started as a black-face minstrel but has make-up developed into one eye painted white in a diamond shape. He wore a very tall hat and long white coat over a tight-fitting jersey and tights. The V&A Museum has a poster advertising a testimonial at London’s Oxford Music Hall in May 1911 to mark Chirgwin’s fifty years on the stage.

His trademark costume was parodied, as in the caricature of Lord Kitchener – who was well over six feet tall – by Tom Browne.

Lord Kitchener portrayed as Chirgwin by Tom Browne

>>Chirgwin testimonial poster at the V&A

>>Tom Browne, black-and-white artist

When Belfast ginger ale ruled the world

Cantrell & Cochrane’s Belfast ginger ale advertised on the back cover of the World and His Wife in 1909

Cantrell & Cochrane may not be a household name today, but it gained a royal warrant from Edward VII, who had just gained the throne, in 1901. It had become the largest soft drinks maker in the world by the 1880s, thanks to extensive use of posters and advertising campaigns like the one above.

This back cover colour advert is from the World and His Wife, a sixpenny monthly ‘for gentlewomen’ dated May 1907. The publisher was Amalgamated Press, and the issue was printed at its Carmelite House offices south of Fleet Street in London.

Cantrell & Cochrane had bottling plants in Dublin and Belfast. The Joyce Project points to references to the drinks in James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses. In the book, Leopold Bloom is wandering through Dublin on a hot day on his way to a funeral. He sees a poster for Cantrell and Cochrane’s Ginger Ale (Aromatic), and later in the same chapter he thinks of it as a ‘temperance beverage’ in relation to the use of wine in the Communion service. 

The priest was rinsing out the chalice: then he tossed off the dregs smartly. Wine. Makes it more aristocratic than for example if he drank what they are used to Guinness’s porter or some temperance beverage Wheatley’s Dublin hop bitters or Cantrell and Cochrane’s ginger ale (aromatic). Doesn’t give them any of it: shew wine: only the other. Cold comfort. Pious fraud but quite right: otherwise they’d have one old booser worse than another coming along, cadging for a drink.

Note that the advert mentions the London agent for Cantrell & Cochrane, Findlater Mackie & Todd on London Bridge. This was a famous wine merchant that traded from premises near London Bridge station for 102 years until 1967. Such was the prominence of the building’s Beaux Arts glazed façade that the area was known locally as Findlater’s Corner. The frontage, featuring a clock with a ceramic stag’s head, has recently been restored.

Although Cantrell & Cochrane may not be a big name today, its products certainly are. They include Magners and Bulmers Irish ciders, Tennant’s lager, the Scottish brewer Innis & Gunn, and the Chinese beer Tsingtao.

>>Women’s monthly magazines at Magforum