Alfred Leete, creator of the Your Country Needs You poster of Kitchener, had a distinctive signature for his work, as did one of his artistic contemporaries, Lawson Wood, the creator of the Gran’pop chimpanzee character. Both were famous illustrators and in both cases, the signature evolved over time.
Richard ‘Dicky’ Doyle’s monogram from Punch
Other illustrators and cartoonists used a monogram, a graphic device made up of their initials. A great example of this was the Punch illustrator Richard Doyle. He used a reversed R to share the upright of the D, with a bird on top to symbolise his nickname, Dicky Doyle. Monograms seem to have become less popular in the 20th century, but Simon House has a spread of Victorian examples in his book, The Dictionary of 19th Century British Book Illustrators.
Leete’s and Wood’s signatures are easy to make out, whereas Doyle’s is a rebus. However, some cartoonists’ signatures seem perverse in their illegibility – Gilbert Wilkinson being a prime example with his covers for Passing Show and Illustrated weekly magazines.
To help get my head round them all, I’ve started a page of signatures and monograms on Magforum with 100 examples. Another illegible example is East on a Health & Efficiency cover – pointers as to what it says or in identifying some others would be appreciated!
Illegible signature for part of ‘East’
To see almost 500 magazine covers and pages, look out for my book, A History of British Magazine Design, from the Victoria & Albert Museum, the world’s leading museum of art and design
Delayed Gratification: the first issue with its Shepard Fairey cover
Delayed Gratification. What a magazine. Last night, its editors gave a great talk at the London College of Communication about its latest issue with contributions from investigative journalist Heather Brooke, James Montague and Locke actress Kirsty Dillon.
For those with longer teeth, Brooke will be known for her NUJ courses and her book, Your Right to Know about the Freedom of Information Act, but her great claim to fame is the MPs’ expenses expose with the Telegraph. Montague has had astounding access to places such as North Korea as a football writer (though how he can describe Icelanders as ‘reserved’ is a mystery in my experience). Dillon gave her experience on the extent of the knowledge among British actresses of Weinstein’s excesses (can it really be true that Judi Dench had his name as a tattoo on her bottom?).
Has there been any magazine as innovative as Delayed Gratification in the past 50 years with its quarterly look back at the news, groundbreaking infographics and great illustration and photography? Town? Private Eye? Nova? Cosmopolitan? Loaded? Grazia? Monocle? The answer does not matter; it’s up there with them.
When it first appeared I doubted Delayed Gratification could survive. It was an independent magazine and, although its roster of Time Out veterans was a good sign, that was no guarantee. It was one of four titles I identified as pointing to the future of magazines in my book covering covering the past 170 years of British magazine design. Since January 2011, it has kept to its last and thrived.
To see almost 500 magazine covers and pages, look out for my book, A History of British Magazine Design, from the Victoria & Albert Museum, the world’s leading museum of art and design
220 Triathlon magazine cover from April 2018. Published by Immediate Media (Bauer)
Jeff writes:
Hi, I have a ton of Triathlon (2000-2015) and Cycling (2000 to the present day). They are about to go in the recycling because I need the space. Do you have any ideas or know anybody interested?
Some suggestions:
Ebay is the obvious place. Put them up as several bundles grouped by year. The going rate in bulk for the monthly 220 Triathlon seems to be about £1 a copy + post/free pickup. Cycling Weekly is bit less. They probably fit nicely in A4 photocopy paper boxes. Make sure the box weight and size is within a postal price band.
Contact one of the traders on my Collecting Magazines page, or identify an eBay trader who specialises in cycling magazines.
Cycling Weekly magazine cover from 10 August 2017. Published by Time Inc UK
Or give them to an impecunious teenager with the time to list them on Ebay. They have a one in four selling rate in the past 3 months. The ideal price seems to be £4.99 each for Triathlon, inc postage (£1 cheaper for Cycling). Selling price range has been 99p+post to £8.50 inclusive for a single copy. There are also lots of people around who do such selling for others and share the proceeds. Ask around.
Post a note and put the word around at the sports centre where you train. Ask the staff as well.
Give them to a charity shop. They collect them at depots and sell them on Ebay.
To see almost 500 magazine covers and pages, look out for my book, A History of British Magazine Design, from the Victoria & Albert Museum, the world’s leading museum of art and design
Verner Panton’s yellow kitchen photographed by Querin Leppert for the Sunday Times Home supplement (4 March 2018, pp20-21)
The Home supplement of the Sunday Times ran an interview on March 4 with Carin Panton, daughter of the danish designer Verner Panton. ‘Red, yellow and pink and blue’ showed photographs by Querin Leppert of the colour-themed rooms Panton had designed for a house in Bavaria.
In pride of place on the spread was the yellow dining room and kitchen. I thought the poster on the wall was a straight blow-up of a cover from Slimming magazine, then published by Emap. An odd, but ironic, choice I thought.
Sylvie Fleury’s ‘Slim a soup’ artwork based on a Slimming magazine front cover form October 1993
In fact, it’s an artwork by Sylvie Fleury, a Swiss pop artist. The photographic poster in the Panton house kitchen is called Slim a soup and is based on the October 1993 cover of Slimming. It comes complete with a WH Smith price label stuck on the title, so it was probably bought at an airport overseas.
To see almost 500 magazine covers and pages, look out for my book, A History of British Magazine Design, from the Victoria & Albert Museum, the world’s leading museum of art and design
Barney Bubbles redesigned New Musical Express for the punk era
NME is to close. The 66-year-old old music magazine will no longer appear as a free weekly but will remain as an online brand. The owners, Time Inc UK, describe the decision as an ‘initiative’ that will ‘expand its digital-first strategy’.
New Musical Express was launched in 1952 and was selling 300,000 copies a week from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s. It saw off its ‘inkie’ rivals as the tabloid music papers – Melody Maker (the grande dame of the sector, lasting from 1926 to 2000), Record Mirror, Disc and Sounds – lost out to the colour A4 magazines such as No 1, Smash Hits and The Face.
NME celebrated 60 years in print in 2012 with eight different covers of the September 26 issue showing bands and musicians holding past copies. Sex Pistol John Lydon is on this version
The title was abbreviated to NME for the issue of 2 December 1978. A few weeks before, Barney Bubbles had redesigned New Musical Express with a colour punk cover, but the publishers (then IPC) had feared too much change, and not wanted to used the NME moniker on that issue (7 October 1978)
It followed the trend to become a full-colour magazine, though it has outlived the A4 magazines that led that trend.
Time Inc is itself in the throes of change, having been bought up by a private equity group, a fate that IPC, then Britain’s biggest publisher, suffered before it was brought up by Time Inc to become the UK arm of the US company.
To see almost 500 magazine covers and pages, look out for my book, A History of British Magazine Design, from the Victoria & Albert Museum, the world’s leading museum of art and design
Title from the first issue of men’s monthly Loaded in 1994: for men who should know better
My mention of Private Eye editor Ian Hislop included his editorial philosophy on the satirical magazine. He sees his job as to:
Make jokes about what people know and then tell them things they don’t know.
Simplifying an editorial strategy to a few words is a great skill. Today, companies have their ‘mission statements’ but magazines have been coining these for centuries. What is the magazine about? What is it about a magazine that is different from its rivals?
A Tit-Bits cover from 1955
For James Brown’s Loaded, it was ‘For men who should know better’; for the science fiction weekly Scoops in 1934, ‘Stories of the wonder-world of tomorrow’; FHM‘s mantra coined by Mike Soutar was ‘Funny, sexy useful’.
Sometimes, the title goes a long way to saying it all: Answers to Correspondents, Men Only, Motor, Woman, Razzle. But even in these cases, differentiation is needed from rivals.
Harmsworth’s Home Chat from 1895
Think of the woman’s weekly Home Chat. The name dates back to an Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe) launch in 1895. Would House Chat have been as good? Or Home Talk? Or Fireside Chat?
Probably not, and certainly Home Chat lasted until 1959, when it became a victim of new technology in the form of television. The word ‘chat’ was resurrected for the weekly Chat by ITV/IPC in 1985, though by that time the word ‘home’ was a no-no for a woman’s magazine.
A rival to Home Chat was Home Notes (1895-1958) from C. Arthur Pearson. This carried a line of poetry on its cover: ‘The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world,’ by the US poet William Ross Wallace. This summed up the influence of the mother, but today it has sinister connotations.
Charing Cross magazine took its name from a famous place in London in 1900
Many Victorian publishers took their titles from fashionable places in the world’s greatest city. Examples include Cornhill, Pall Mall, The Strand, Charing Cross.
In doing so, they spread the fame of these thoroughfares and places even farther around the world, in a way that song lyrics would do in the 20th century (Ferry Across the Mersey, Wichita Lineman, Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa) and TV does today (Jersey Shore, The Only Way is Essex).
Many magazine titles have changed the meaning of words, or at least influenced our perception of them, such Punch, Eagle and Delayed Gratification.
To see almost 500 magazine covers and pages, look out for my book, A History of British Magazine Design, from the Victoria & Albert Museum, the world’s leading museum of art and design
Type portrait of the royal family composed on a Monotype machine. Published in Newspaper World magazine in 1937
Moiré fringing is probably going to ruin this image, but it’s a type portrait of George VI with the royal family, ‘set up and composed on the Monotype [hot metal typesetting] machine by Battley Brothers Ltd, of Clapham Park’. The image was published in Newspaper World & Advertising Review, dated 15 May 1937. I associate such images with typewriters and computer printers, so it was a surprise to come across one from 80 years ago.
The skin tones on Princess Elizabeth in the type portrait are made up of the italic letters ‘e’ and ‘f’, with the § symbol and ‘g’ used for darker tones
The portrait was printed half-page size in Newspaper World, and it’s possible to make out many of characters used. The skin tones on Princess Elizabeth, for example, are made up of the letters ‘e’ and ‘f’, with the § symbol used for darker tones. That year – 1937 – marked the new king’s coronation after the abdication of King Edward VIII after the Wallis Simpson affair.
George VI royal family portrait with princesses Margaret, left, and Elizabeth, in 1937. This is probably the shot used for the type portrait
Newspaper World was published by Benn Brothers from Bouverie House off Fleet Street.
To see almost 500 magazine covers and pages, look out for my book, A History of British Magazine Design, from the Victoria & Albert Museum, the world’s leading museum of art and design
Argos catalogue No 6 from 1976 sold on eBay for £149
How did I miss this? An Argos catalogue from 1976. And it sold for a whacking £149 before Christmas.
As the eBay seller, Halcyontoys, noted:
From the mists of time comes this original and highly collectable Argos catalogue. Released for the autumn/winter 1976/77 season, it runs to 200 pages and is a fascinating ‘window’ into the lifestyles and technologies prevalent at the time.
From record decks to teas-maids and Evel Knievel toys – they’re all here in garish 1970s colour!
The catalogue has some age-related signs of wear, mainly handling/stress marks to the cover and some discolourisation to the back page. However, it remains in good condition and all 198 internal pages are present and correct with no annotations or creasing.
A very enjoyable, rare and historic publication.
Read and weep all ye who missed it.
The cameras spread from Argos catalogue No 6
To see almost 500 magazine covers and pages, look out for my book, A History of British Magazine Design, from the Victoria & Albert Museum, the world’s leading museum of art and design
Madonna strip cartoon of her life: The Story So Far
Hotspot-5 has 156 Madonna issues up on ebay at prices ranging from £4.95 to £24.95.
One of the earliest issues dates back to January 1986. It’s issue 2 of Look-In, the weekly TV magazine for teenagers, which carried a cartoon strip of Madonna’s life called ‘The Story So Far’.
To see almost 500 magazine covers and pages, look out for my book, A History of British Magazine Design, from the Victoria & Albert Museum, the world’s leading museum of art and design
Today’s relaunched Guardian comes in 3 sections. Sport returns to the back page – led by Liverpool’s thrilling victory over Manchester City. The 2012 redesign had Man City beating Wigan above its masthead. The paper was the Manchester Guardian until 1959 and moved to London in 1964
The Guardian downsizes today, switching from the Berliner format to tabloid. It’s the end of an experiment that began 12 years ago with a massive £80m investment, and has been forced on the paper to save money. Being the only British paper to use the Berliner format, it had to build new print halls in London and Manchester with specially commissioned presses.
The weekday paper now has three sections:
main section: news, politics, international affairs and financial news with sport starting on the back page;
a new, pullout opinion section called the Journal. This will carry the columnists, long reads, obituaries, letters and the cryptic crossword;
G2, the features-based section.
Promotional video for the new look by the Guardian
The Guardian claims a great design history, based on its breaking new ground in 1988 with an approach developed by David Hillman, a Pentagram founder who made his name on Nova in the 1960s. It had already dropped the ‘hang and drop’ approach favoured by the other Fleet Street broadsheets in favour of modular layouts. The other broadsheets’ focus was on getting as many stories and words on a page as possible. The Guardian wanted to differentiate itself for readers.
The 1960s newspaper design guru Allen Hutt gave way to Harry Evans and then Hillman introduced a grid system with lots of white space around the headlines at the Guardian. Alongside the white space, most striking element on the front page was the dual font title, with the ‘The’ in ITC Garamond Italic and the butted-up ‘Guardian’ in Helvetica Black. Nothing new for a magazine, but a first for a British newspaper.
The design industry liked it; the reaction in much of Fleet Street was: ‘art holes’! There was also a lot of negative reaction internally at the Guardian as fewer stories were carried and copy length was cut.
These internal complaints from editors were exacerbated when the paper’s second section dropped from a broadsheet to a tabloid in 1992 – at a stroke, story lengths had to be cut by a third. That is not an obvious effect, but is the result of a number of factors: headline sizes stayed the same; pictures stayed the same size or even got bigger; each tabloid page needed as much margin space around the edges as each broadsheet page; more ‘signposting’ to features in the rest of the paper.
It has been a similar tale with every redesign since for all the papers since: more white space; bigger pictures; fewer stories, fewer words.
September 2005 saw the move under editor Alan Rusbridger and designer Mark Porter to the Berliner mid-size format – along with the need to buy a new set of expensive printing presses that were unique in Britain. The switch took three years and the paper described itself as a ‘factory’. In January 2012 the paper design and format was changed again ‘to reflect changes in news consumption’.
Today marks the Guardian giving up on its expensive Berliner experiment and following the Independent and Times down the tabloid route they took in 2003. Of course, the quality papers don’t like the ‘tabloid’ label, because it is associated with the more downmarket Sun, Mirror, Mail and Express, which adopted the format decades ago.
The other change alongside design is that the print agenda is now dictated by online data and readerships. What the likes of the Guardian don’t appear to appreciate as they quote digital readerships is that the online audience is heavily influenced by non-paying US readers. The news agenda becomes more US-influenced, moving the paper away from the home audience all the time.
Robert Harling, the long-serving editor of House & Garden and typographical adviser to the Sunday Times railed against the Continental modular magazine design approaches in the Times Literary Supplement with an article entitled ‘Poor old words’ (1972). His redesign of the cover for Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanack in 1938, with its Ravilious engraving of Victorian cricketers, is a typographic classic. For Harling, the likes of Hillman’s Nova was dominated by ‘pictures and type-patterns subduing the words on every page’. The approach was ‘a menace to the freedom of the printed word’.
A features spread in the Berliner format Observer. It could have come from a magazine 30 years ago. The picture is the size of a tabloid page and the text only occupies a quarter of the page area
Yet that approach became mainstream in magazines and Hillman brought it to the Guardian in a process of magazinisation. Photo-reduce many newspaper spreads today and they appear strikingly similar to the sort of designs in the 1960s in Town and Nova (which had been heavily influenced by Continental design, particularly Germany’s Twen). ‘Poor old words’ said Harling. Poor old readers too.
The Guardian‘s sister paper, the Observer, will go tabloid on Sunday. The switch was seen as step too far for the two papers in 2005, with staff fearing that changing to tabloid would damage the paper’s character. Those fears have been swept aside now as the need to save several million pounds a year bites.
The redesign features a new font, Guardian Headline by Commercial Type, the foundry that created Guardian Egyptian for the Berliner redesign. The main text font stays the same, no surprise given how much the 2005 relaunch cost.
And cutting costs is what has driven the changes. Expect to see lots of mentions of ‘150 million’ readers each month, but at the end of the day, most of these are browsers and bear no comparison in revenue or commitment to the value of a print reader. Money – getting enough of it is the big problem for the press.
To see almost 500 magazine covers and pages, look out for my book, A History of British Magazine Design, from the Victoria & Albert Museum, the world’s leading museum of art and design
FHM June 2004. But what’s happened to the nipples on Abi Titmuss?
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
Debbie Harry and Blondie on the first issue cover of Smash Hits from November 1978
Popular Flying in 1934 when it was edited by Biggles creator WE Johns
Marc Jacobs 2014 Playboy special issue in perspex box
‘K of K’ – Kitchener of Khartoum – caricature by Will Scott on the cover of Drawing magazine in February 1916
A whacky contrast in all senses of the word from the previous week
Marion Jean Lyon in 1923
Beautiful Britons glamour magazine first issue cover from November 1955
The Kitchener poster shown in the third part of the Great War partwork in 1933
Weekly Illustrated magazine pioneered photojournalism (3 March 1936)
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
Margaret Banks drew this charmer for Home Chat magazine in 1938. Note the baby is wearing reins
Eddie Hapgood, the England and Arsenal captain, on the cover of Weekly Illustrated in 1934 with his son, Tony
Last issue of Rupert Murdoch’s Today newspaper (17 November 1995)
The return of the Daleks to Dr Who in 2005 sparked this gatefold cover for the Radio Times
Bovril advert of Hercules fighting a lion by Stanley Berkeley from Young Gentlewoman magazine of 1892
New Statesman 1993 jan 29 John Major Clare Latimer
The Penny Magazine shows itself being sold from what looks like a railway station stall in 1904
Chilprufe advert from Queen magazine in 1961
Madonna on the front cover of Cosmopolitan magazine in the US for May 1990
Kate Moss in Corinne Day photograph on cover of the Face in July 1990
53 Bedford Square in London’s Bloomsbury. This Georgian building is up for sale at £12 million
This 1946 holiday season cover from John Bull forecasts a web fate for the slumbering gent
Diana Rigg as The Avengers’ Mrs Peel on the cover of TV World in 1965
Madonna cover from i-D dated March/April 1984
Home Chat, a leading women’s popular weekly, from 14 May
A different look for the cover of Smash Hits, also in February 1984
Vivian Blaine from the London stage adaption of the musical Guys and Dolls on the cover of Picture Post in 1953
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’
Hand-drawn title for Drawing magazine, February 1916
Adrian Flowers took this Nova cover (July 1971)
Cover of BOAC’s inflight magazine Welcome Aboard in 1970
Look, spring 2009
Racy illustration by Oldham for the weekly magazine Woman
Opening of 5-page article on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey with sketches by Clive Arrowsmith in Town magazine
The first Daleks cover for Radio Times in November 1964
Anna Wintour was told this Madonna cover would not sell
Mussolini writes for the right-wing Britannia magazine in 1927
John Bull in 1917 – the magazine was used as a promotional tool for Horatio Bottomley’s financial schemes
Winnie the Pooh appeared exclusively in colour in six 1928 issues of Home Chat
Detail of Helena Christiansen’s face from the Vogue cover
The first issue cover for Carlos, an inflight magazine for Virgin in 2003
Madonna rides again on the cover of Cosmopolitan with its May 2015 issue
Lilian Hocknell artwork revived for Christmas 2014 Vintage View from Woman’s Weekly magazine cover
The Observer Magazine cover shows Alexei Sayle as the Hitler diaries forger in the 1991 TV series Selling Hitler
Tatler magazine’s front cover in 1901
Je Suis Charlie – Charlie Hebdo’s website after the murderous attack on its Paris office
Leader magazine led the world in putting Marilyn Monroe on its cover in April 1946
Blighty pin-up cover for the popular men’s weekly by MB Tompkins in 1958 (16 August)
Front cover title from Woman’s Own from 19 May 1955
Evil victim: Diana Rigg on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine, 28 February 1982
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)
This logo from the Daily Mail echoes the original masthead for Answers Magazine
Strand magazine front cover from March 1891 by George Charles Haité
The pointing man from an advert in London Opinion magazine, 17 September 1910
Raphael Sabatini’s Captain Blood brought to visual life on the cover of Pearson’s Magazine (1930) by Joseph Greenup
Racy French weekly Vie Parisienne from 1926
One of Miss Fish’s drawings of Eve, from the popular Tatler column
Marilyn Monroe on the cover of Blighty from 1956
New Illustrated starts to change its name to Record Weekly in 1920 (January 17 issue)
A letterpress flyer for the latest serial in Pictorial Magazine – could this 1902 image have sparked Alfred Leete’s imagination?
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
The glossy monthly Queen occupied the old Tit-Bits office in 1947
A Heartfield montage on the cover of Picture Post dated 9 September 1939
A colour cover for Crusoe magazine of January 1925
Town magazine and the`Girl in Red Water up to her Charlies’ cover from September 1965
Girl Illustrated front cover with Dr Who girl Katy Manning and a Dalek
Kate Greenaway painting called ‘Darby and Joan’ on Illustrated London News – or is this a pair of radical printers?
Billy Fury? James Dean?
Ronald Searle’s cartoon glossary to printers’ jargon
John Gwynn’s poem ‘A Death Mask’ in the Strand magazine appears to have been inspired by a drowned woman in Paris
‘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
The first Sunday Times colour section from 4 February 1962 (though the cover is not dated)
Karl Marx as the Uncle Sam derivative of Kitchener
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!
Woman’s Fair from January 1940 filled with content from the US, including a Jon Whitcomb cover illustration
This cat with its amazing, lip-licking tongue is from a Whiskas advert of 1964
Cover of Le Petit Journal of 25 June 1916
The first issue cover of John Bull from 1 April 1903
HMS Queen Elizabeth super dreadnought by Harry Hudson Rodmell on the cover of New Illustrated magazine (18 October 1919)
Tom Browne’s drawing shoe incredible attention to detail; he could do so much with so little
Cute cover-up: Naomi Campbell on the cover of GQ in April 2000
To see almost 500 magazine covers and pages, look out for my book, A History of British Magazine Design, from the Victoria & Albert Museum, the world’s leading museum of art and design
