Magazines - their past, present and future by Anthony Quinn
. Lovely set of what are these days called emoticons and litter our online messages. They date from a Fry s Chocolate advert in a 1914 issue of London Opinion magazine (general weekly best known as the instigator of the Kitchener Needs You poster). And here s another one below, set within the letterpress of a 1930 [ ]
. I didn t expect to receive an art lesson from one of Scotland s great engineering companies but that s what I got from a copy of the M C Apprentices Magazine from December 1930. Mavor Coulson was founded in the 1880s and became a world-leading maker of underground coal mining machinery into the 1960s. And many [ ]
. Graeme James designed more than 2,500 covers for the weekly economics magazine. He was 65. The Economist s tribute identifies his own favourite cover as the one for the first anniversary of the attacks on the US of 11 September 2001: Two thin black rectangles stretch up in silhouette against a sunset. They are the twin [ ]
––– The bear-hunting activities of the US president Teddy Roosevelt were the subject of a post a while back. This advert from a 1909 copy of Travel Exploration magazine is for the Benjamin Edgington tents supplied for Roosevelt s Africa shooting expeditions. Benjamin Edgington is a legendary name in the world of explorers and hunters. [ ]
––– Alfred Leete s brilliant illustration of a pointing Lord Kitchener created one of the world s greatest visual memes. The combination image of two front covers above shows US artist James Montgomery Flagg s version on this week s Sunday Times Magazine and Leete s artwork used in a similar way for the Daily Telegraph s centenary celebration magazine in [ ]
. At the British Library I came across this issue of Jack o Lantern dated 24 October 1868. It has the feel of a modern-day zine but this was a professional publication from a Brighton stationer, John Beal. Exploring the cover shows it was signed by Signed by JC Dollman and Thompson . This to a [ ]
. At first sight there seems little chance of a connection between Edwardian women s weeklies and an all-action black-and-white TV series from the 1960s. However, there is: Mrs Peel. For that was the name of both the woman who served as editress of two upmarket weeklies in the early 1900s – Woman and Hearth [ ]
. The Guinness website makes great plays of never advertising for 170 years. Then, in February 1929, the first adverts from the Dublin-based brewer appeared with the slogan ‘Guinness is good for you’. The controlling Guinness family wanted the quality of the advertising as good as the quality of the beer. And it was. These [ ]
. It might not look it, yet this July 2004 Vogue cover is the stuff of nightmares. But why? Great photo by Tesh for a six-page interview inside by Justine Picardie; nice design; references to some of the Hollywood greats in the images behind; dayglo lettering punching out from a monochrome background; and the hottest [ ]
. Heavens knows why I haven t posted about this before, but the V A has a very fine A-Z sampler of magazines by Marc Ward to demonstrate the range of titles they host. The sampler is an eclectic selection with examples from the early 1800s to the 2000s; a third of them from outside the UK, [ ]