Reading · Art for Ad's Sake

I can’t stand it when you go to a book store that has all the hallmarks of Black Books –it’s an absolute tip– but the books are priced absurdly high.

I encountered two on a recent trip up north, where some incredible rarities were priced in the triple figures despite being strewn about the place like the celeb rags in a waiting room.

And it’s always nice to find some classic old Advertising Annuals in a book shop, or an op shop, or in one of those little community libraries, or in a bush along with the pornography left there by the Sixth Former’s for the younger boys to find.

Of course we’d find it and examine it, and that would be that. There would be more of course. There was a time when you were as likely to find pornography magazines in a shrubbery outside a Grammar School as you were on the top shelf of a newsagent.

This sort of thing has probably been going on since 1949 (attempted segue).

Of course back then it might have been a buxom vixen peeled straight from the fuselage of a B-52 Bomber and gunned into the eye sockets of some young whippersnappers who found a copy of “Less than Ladylike” outside the Gardener’s shed.

Whilst I, a Millennial born in the late 1980s, did not grow up in the totally lawless and visceral world of the 2025 Internet, where young people’s senses are torn apart within minutes of opening essentially any app. No, the stork dropped me off a little further back which meant that I did get a porno bush – but being that it was England in the late-90s, early-00s the content rotting in the sludge of damp leaves came with the kind of photographic intimacy and mood that both Jurgen Teller and Mike Leigh aim for, albeit for very different reasons.

Grim.

Anyway, here we are in 2025, and the reason I’m tapping away is because instead of paying an exorbitant fee* for some knackered old Advertising Annuals, I just snapped a bunch of pictures in the shop. Here’s some of my favourites from camera roll across some 1949, 1953 and 1963 annuals - in no particular order: