Country Life magazine has a nice feature this week about the animals – real and imaginary – of Alfred Leete. The writer, Nicholas Hodge, is a descendent of the Kitchener-Needs-You artist – his great-grandmother Dorothy was Leete’s sister.
Despite writing a book with Martyn Thatcher, Kitchener Wants You: The Man, the Poster and the Legacy, I still find it astounding how overlooked Leete’s work is, given that he created the 20th century’s most famous image, so it was great to hear that there’s a movement afoot to persuade English Heritage to mark his achievements with a blue plaque on what was his London home. The PG Wodehouse Society (Leete was the first illustrator of his books), the House of Illustration, the London Sketch Club, the Cartoon Museum (which displayed some his wartime work a few years ago), and the Artists’ Rifles Association have all backed the idea, says Hodge.
Opening spread of the four-page feature by Nicholas Hodge in Country Life
Time Out tribute to John Lennon from 12 December 1980
This post was meant to have been published in December, after I showed three newspaper front pages from John Lennon’s murder in 1980. So here, belatedly, are three magazines that covered the same horrific event.
First up is the London listings magazine Time Out. You’ll notice that the cover date is December 12, just four days after the killing. Getting this tribute out so soon would have been quite a feat at the time. The cover is straightforward, with a photo of the young Beatle, barely recognisable as the same person on the Daily Mirror‘s front page shown on the previous post.
Inside, the centre four pages of the stapled issue were printed on a heavier varnished paper to take colour printing on both sides (the magazine’s usual paper stock was newsprint). The text was reversed out of black on the four pages and told the story of Lennon’s life in diary-like entries illustrated with contemporaneous photographs.
Time Out’s colour centre pages to mark Lennon’s death
In New York, it took six weeks for Rolling Stone to produce its tribute issue, even though Annie Leibovitz had taken her photograph of a naked John Lennon curled up against Yoko Ono five hours before Lennon’s murder on December 8. Even so, it is Rolling Stone‘s most famous cover and made the career of Leibovitz.
Rolling Stone’s most famous cover: John and Yoko by Annie Leibovitz (January 22, 1981)
A few years before this, Dick Stolley, the founding managing editor of People, a weekly celebrity magazine in the US, had come up with a mantra for his cover images.
Young is better than old. Pretty is better than ugly. Rich is better than poor. Movies are better than music. Music is better than television. Television is better than sports . . . and anything is better than politics.
Lennon’s murder led Stolley to update the mantra, with an new final line:
… and nothing is better than the celebrity dead.
The 22 December 1980 tribute issue was People‘s best-selling cover at that time.
Best-selling People cover: John Lennon tribute (22/12/1980)
Michael Caine with Private Eye ‘Naked bunny picture!’ poster
In a recent ‘magazines in the movies’ post, I listed the many walk-on parts for magazines in the 1969 film The Italian Job and mentioned a Private Eye poster. The poster is on the wall next to a photographic montage of Bob Dylan in 1960, Marlon Brando with his Triumph motorbike in The Wild One from 1953, and an unknown man wearing glasses.
Having seen the film recently, it turns out the poster consisted of the Private Eye logo – created by Matthew Carter in 1962 using Letraset – with the hand-drawn words below: ‘Naked bunny picture!’ I wonder how that came about? The posters are on the walls of the Michael Caine character’s flat in the film.
In another scene, imprisoned gangland boss Mr Bridger, played by Noel Coward, visits the Wormwood Scrubs governor (John Le Mesurier), and two Vanity Fair chromolithograph caricatures are seen on the walls. The upper print is of Frederick Edwin Smith from Vanity Fair magazine of 9 August 1911 (captioned ‘No Surrender’ by Frederick Drummond Niblett, ‘Nibs’); the other is of Henry JR Dawson-Damer (‘Port’, by Sir Leslie Ward, ‘Spy’, 24 August 1878). Smith was a Liverpool politician, lawyer, and orator who became Baron Birkenhead and as lord chancellor reformed the judiciary and helped negotiate the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. Dawson-Damer, the third earl of Portarlington, was an Irish landowner and hereditary peer.
Bridger and the governor with two Vanity Fair caricatures
Later in The Italian Job, the royalty-obsessed gangland boss Mr Bridger is given a copy of the Illustrated London News (because there’s a photograph of the Queen in it) and reads it in his prison cell, which is lined with dainty crockery and pictures of the royal family.
Bridger reads the Illustrated London News in his cosy cell
Google has objected to one or more of the images on a page devoted to monthly women’s magazines. This page has been up for more than 10 years. Google keeps doing this and finding a new page every month to stop serving its adverts on. Each time I just take the Google ads code down and replace it with one of my direct advertisers or Amazon.
Its bots send messages saying: ‘Adult: Sexual content’ and ‘Some advertisers are choosing not to advertise on your page because of issues relating to some of your content.’
What could this be? A 110-pixel wide magazine cover with Cate Blanchett in a red dress? Does someone not like Kylie Minogue? Or Michael Caine? Even with all their clothes on?
Such arbitrary censorship reminds me of the story told by Nobel Prize winner Sir Harry Kroto in the mid-1990s. He said that his emails were being blocked because of their sexual content. What was that? His email address ended @sussex.ac.uk – it had ‘sex’ in the address!
December 1907 cover of Royal – a milestone in the history of periodical production
This, the last of 12 covers in a magazine version of The Twelve Days of Christmas, is a milestone in the history of periodical production. It is the December 1907 cover of Royal. What marks it out as special is that it is the first cover I’ve seen that looks as if it was printed from a colour photograph.
There were lots of examples of magazines colouring black-and-white photographs, but these usually used just a second process colour with the black, such as on Quiver and The Million. Unfortunately, this copy of Royal is a rather grubby example and there is a fair bit of type show-through from the re
verse side, but this would have been a spectacular image on the bookstands, the like of which would not become common for another 30 years.
The printing of photographs in magazines had only started in 1885; and the application of colour to illustrations, at first from wooden blocks, dated back to 1855. True photographic colour separations and printing did not materialise until the mid-1930s.
So this is a very early and very skilled example of colour cover printing using a photograph. It gives a very punchy result, but was not achieved easily. It was probably printed using two-colour process engraving (red and blue) with additional solids for red, blue and yellow. Some ink squash at edges of the red working suggests this is relief-printed. The design style with the white background is familiar to us today from Dorling Kindersley book covers of the 1980s.
The ‘string’ by which the teddy is holding up the Japanese doll is printed tone using the warm red used for the post box and sock with some yellow.
Detail from the cover showing the letterpress dots on the box of crayons and part of the blue R in Royal
The Royal was published by C. Arthur Pearson, whose offices were in Henrietta Street in London’s Covent Garden. It was printed by Horace Cox, at Bream’s Buildings, which is a street between Chancery Lane and Fetter Lane, just north of Fleet Street in London.
For more Christmas covers, take a look at the selection from 2019.
Hair singer Marsh Hunt on the 1968 Christmas cover of Queen magazine
The Queen dated back to the pioneering days of Mr and Mrs Beaton as a society weekly, but was reinvented for the Swinging Sixties by Jocelyn Stevens, who bought the magazine for himself on inheriting a fortune at his 25th birthday. He later turned into a toothy Fleet Street management bully (hence his Private Eye nickname, Piranha Teeth).
The American model and singer Marsha Hunt is on this 1968 cover, complete with Christmas-tree-style decorations. Her breakthrough was in the West End production of the seminal rock musical Hair, in September that year. She brought the afro into fashion – just like it is now – with Justin De Villeneuve’s iconic silhouette photograph of Hunt used for the show’s publicity. That led to a nude picture taken by Patrick Lichfield for US Vogue and the be-baubled Queen cover. Hunt was the muse for Mick Jagger’s song ‘Brown Sugar’ and mother of his first child.
This is the penultimate of 12 Christmas covers in a magazine version of ye olde English counting song The Twelve Days of Christmas.
‘Oh No! It’s the Millennium Bug!’ is the plaintiff cry from Father Christmas as his sledge plunges earthwards towards London’s Millennium Dome. That was cartoonist Nick Newman’s take for Private Eye on the software peril that the computer industry feared could bring the world to a halt at the start of 2000.
It may seem ridiculous now, but the worry was that there was a lot of software around that had not been written ever expecting to reach the end of the century, and so it was expecting all dates to begin with the numerals 19. Millions were spent searching for the bug, but in the end the catastrophe never came to pass.
Notice that the issue covers the two week-period over Christmas and New Year – a common strategy for weeklies, including Radio Times, the Economist and the Spectator.
This 1945 issue of Woman promised Christmas Specials! But this was just six months after the defeat of Hitler, so it was a thin issue – paper rationing was still in place until 1952. Among the special features were a romantic fortune-telling game and the ‘loveliest jumper in colour contrast’. Top of the bill though – as was typical in women’s weeklies for a century – was fiction, in this case by Mary Howard and Dorothy Black, who between them wrote more than 150 romantic novels spanning most of the twentieth century. Alongside writers such as Ida Cook (Mary Burchell), they were stalwarts of the Mills & Boon style of fiction.
Black, writing under what was her maiden name, worked as a journalist before becoming a novelist in 1916. She was a vice-president of the Romantic Novelists’ Association. The association gave its annual award to Howard three times between 1960, its founding year, and 1980.
This is the ninth of 12 Christmas covers in a magazine version of ye olde English counting song The Twelve Days of Christmas.
A coloured cover for the 1903 Christmas double issue of The Strand
Most British magazines were slow to introduce colour covers, but many made an exception at Christmas. The Strand followed the trend – set by the Illustrated London News in 1855 – with a 1903 double issue and a coloured version of George Charles Haité’s iconic rendering looking eastwards along the famous street from the bottom of Southampton Street. (The first version was from the bottom of Burleigh Street, but this was updated by just changing the street sign when the George Newnes office moved a couple of streets farther west.)
The ‘grand Christmas double number’ also doubled the price to a shilling (12 pennies).
A&F Pears, the soap maker, tended to take the back covers for these issues. For the Christmas 1904 issue of the Strand, it used the famous ‘Bubbles’ painting, which had first been published as an advert almost 20 years before.
‘Bubbles’ on the back cover of The Strand in 1904
This is the eighth of 12 Christmas covers in a magazine version of ye olde English counting song The Twelve Days of Christmas.
Pictorial Comedy was a monthly magazine of ‘stories, humorous pictures, varied reading’. Each issue typically ran to 32 pages plus the covers. At a shilling a copy, it was expensive. The Strand, for example, was sixpence – half the price – as was the society weekly the Queen.
Pictorial Comedy aimed to depict ‘the humorous phases of life’ through the eyes of eminent artists. Prominent among its roster was Charles Dana Gibson, an American artist renowned for portraying beautiful women. Its pages were slightly larger than A4, and many images were printed full-page, or across a spread, so many will have been mounted and framed.
The printer and publisher was James Henderson at Red Lion House in Red Lion Court, just off London’s Fleet Street.
The striped effect visible on the cover is caused by the impression of the letterpress type on the reverse of the page coming through.
This is the seventh of 12 Christmas covers in a magazine version of ye olde English counting song The Twelve Days of Christmas.
Tom Browne’s drawing shoe incredible attention to detail; he could do so much with so little
Town magazine and the`Girl in Red Water up to her Charlies’ cover from September 1965
Tatler magazine’s front cover in 1901
Leader magazine led the world in putting Marilyn Monroe on its cover in April 1946
John Gwynn’s poem ‘A Death Mask’ in the Strand magazine appears to have been inspired by a drowned woman in Paris
A Heartfield montage on the cover of Picture Post dated 9 September 1939
Winnie the Pooh appeared exclusively in colour in six 1928 issues of Home Chat
Blighty pin-up cover for the popular men’s weekly by MB Tompkins in 1958 (16 August)
Beautiful Britons glamour magazine first issue cover from November 1955
Billy Fury? James Dean?
The first Sunday Times colour section from 4 February 1962 (though the cover is not dated)
Cute cover-up: Naomi Campbell on the cover of GQ in April 2000
Adrian Flowers took this Nova cover (July 1971)
New Statesman 1993 jan 29 John Major Clare Latimer
Girl Illustrated front cover with Dr Who girl Katy Manning and a Dalek
New Illustrated starts to change its name to Record Weekly in 1920 (January 17 issue)
Madonna rides again on the cover of Cosmopolitan with its May 2015 issue
Look, spring 2009
Kate Moss in Corinne Day photograph on cover of the Face in July 1990
Chilprufe advert from Queen magazine in 1961
A whacky contrast in all senses of the word from the previous week
Germany’s leader, Kaiser Wilhelm, with his flamboyant moustache and military uniform, at the start of World War I. He is described as ‘The Ravager’
Margaret Banks drew this charmer for Home Chat magazine in 1938. Note the baby is wearing reins
HMS Queen Elizabeth super dreadnought by Harry Hudson Rodmell on the cover of New Illustrated magazine (18 October 1919)
The pointing man from an advert in London Opinion magazine, 17 September 1910
Woman’s Own liked clean cover designs in the 1930s with few cover lines – but notice Ursula Bloom promoted her for a special article (30 July 1938)
Ronald Searle’s cartoon glossary to printers’ jargon
José Ferrer as Cyrano de Bergerac on this Everybody’s magazine cover from 10 October 1951. The design has a 3D effect, with the nose appearing to stand proud of the page
Cover of Le Petit Journal of 25 June 1916
Detail of Helena Christiansen’s face from the Vogue cover
This cat with its amazing, lip-licking tongue is from a Whiskas advert of 1964
One of Miss Fish’s drawings of Eve, from the popular Tatler column
Opening of 5-page article on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey with sketches by Clive Arrowsmith in Town magazine
The Kitchener poster shown in the third part of the Great War partwork in 1933
Cover of BOAC’s inflight magazine Welcome Aboard in 1970
Strand magazine front cover from March 1891 by George Charles Haité
Karl Marx as the Uncle Sam derivative of Kitchener
Home Chat cover from 19 September 1914 with a front cover story about supporting the Queen’s Guild, which had been set up as a way for women to back the war effort
FHM June 2004. But what’s happened to the nipples on Abi Titmuss?
A letterpress flyer for the latest serial in Pictorial Magazine – could this 1902 image have sparked Alfred Leete’s imagination?
Evil victim: Diana Rigg on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine, 28 February 1982
John Bull in 1917 – the magazine was used as a promotional tool for Horatio Bottomley’s financial schemes
Je Suis Charlie – Charlie Hebdo’s website after the murderous attack on its Paris office
Hand-drawn title for Drawing magazine, February 1916
Raphael Sabatini’s Captain Blood brought to visual life on the cover of Pearson’s Magazine (1930) by Joseph Greenup
Mussolini writes for the right-wing Britannia magazine in 1927
The glossy monthly Queen occupied the old Tit-Bits office in 1947
Diana Rigg as The Avengers’ Mrs Peel on the cover of TV World in 1965
Anna Wintour was told this Madonna cover would not sell
The first issue cover for Carlos, an inflight magazine for Virgin in 2003
Lilian Hocknell artwork revived for Christmas 2014 Vintage View from Woman’s Weekly magazine cover
Racy illustration by Oldham for the weekly magazine Woman
‘K of K’ – Kitchener of Khartoum – caricature by Will Scott on the cover of Drawing magazine in February 1916
Racy French weekly Vie Parisienne from 1926
Madonna cover from i-D dated March/April 1984
53 Bedford Square in London’s Bloomsbury. This Georgian building is up for sale at £12 million
The first issue cover of John Bull from 1 April 1903
Kate Greenaway painting called ‘Darby and Joan’ on Illustrated London News – or is this a pair of radical printers?
Popular Flying in 1934 when it was edited by Biggles creator WE Johns
‘Mother Christmas’ cover for Needlewoman magazine from December 1925
Acorn User magazine cover from December 1982. This issue would have been edited from the Bedford Square offices
A colour cover for Crusoe magazine of January 1925
Marc Jacobs 2014 Playboy special issue in perspex box
This is the cover for the relaunch of Woman’s Own in 1937 as a colour weekly. Note this is a true self referential cover because the woman is holding a copy of the magazine she appears on!
Front cover title from Woman’s Own from 19 May 1955
Madonna on the front cover of Cosmopolitan magazine in the US for May 1990
Home Chat, a leading women’s popular weekly, from 14 May
Marion Jean Lyon in 1923
This logo from the Daily Mail echoes the original masthead for Answers Magazine
A different look for the cover of Smash Hits, also in February 1984
Bovril advert of Hercules fighting a lion by Stanley Berkeley from Young Gentlewoman magazine of 1892
Vivian Blaine from the London stage adaption of the musical Guys and Dolls on the cover of Picture Post in 1953
Last issue of Rupert Murdoch’s Today newspaper (17 November 1995)
Eddie Hapgood, the England and Arsenal captain, on the cover of Weekly Illustrated in 1934 with his son, Tony
The Observer Magazine cover shows Alexei Sayle as the Hitler diaries forger in the 1991 TV series Selling Hitler
Weekly Illustrated magazine pioneered photojournalism (3 March 1936)
Debbie Harry and Blondie on the first issue cover of Smash Hits from November 1978
Marilyn Monroe on the cover of Blighty from 1956
An in-your-face spread from Loaded in May 1995
Peter Hack-Brookes cover for Oz from September 1971 – a copy from a US magazine cover by Peter Driben from 1949
The first Daleks cover for Radio Times in November 1964
The Penny Magazine shows itself being sold from what looks like a railway station stall in 1904
Woman’s Fair from January 1940 filled with content from the US, including a Jon Whitcomb cover illustration
The return of the Daleks to Dr Who in 2005 sparked this gatefold cover for the Radio Times
This 1946 holiday season cover from John Bull forecasts a web fate for the slumbering gent