50

di Francesco Franchi

143142 S W I N G E R S I N P R I N T

Jocelyn Stevens bought the once-pioneering society magazine Queen and relaunched it with an irreverent edge. Mark Boxer handled the design before Tom Wolsey arrived from Town. A typical cover in the 1950s would have been a floral display, but this cover photograph by Sandra Lousada folds out to reveal it is really an advertisement for Coty, with the cosmetics company’s Spring Fever lipstick and nail varnish punched out on the cover. David Hamilton was art director for the issue. Playing with the ‘Q’ of the title was a regular feature.

Stevens Press (240 × 318 mm, perfect bound, 102 pages)

Michael Heseltine and Clive Labovitch rechristened Man About Town after buying the magazine from Tailor and Cutter Ltd and increasing its frequency. It called itself ‘Britain’s only luxury magazine for men’. Heseltine was lampooned in a limerick by the Observer newspaper as a ‘Beau’ – and considered suing because he felt it portrayed him as a homosexual and he feared being labelled as a pornographer.1 Private Eye parodied About Town as about (for Pseuds’ Corner) and suggested that ‘Clive Brilliantine’ was one of the pacesetters of 1962. Art editor Tom Wolsey switched from illustrated to photographic covers and introduced an international design approach influenced by magazines such as Willy Flekhaus’s Twen in Germany and Look in the US. White space – a luxury to an industry still expecting to squeeze text on pages in a style dictated by post-war paper rationing – was used copiously on the features pages. Terence Donovan took the cover photograph of prime minister Harold Macmillan.

Type is used to spectacular effect for this opening spread of interviews with the Tory leadership by Godfrey Smith. Heseltine stood for Parliament in 1958 and 1964, and eventually became an MP in 1966, despite receiving criticism because of his relationship with Town. One selection committee questioned him about an article they saw as attacking the royal family; in reply he said he would act like Sunday Times owner Lord Thomson and appoint an editor ‘and let him get on with it’ (rather than Express owner Lord Beaverbrook’s approach, and ‘appoint someone and do the job yourself’). Heseltine appointed directors to run the company and took his name as publisher off the masthead.

1 Michael Crick, Michael Heseltine: A biography, Penguin, 1997, pp. 112-3

Cornmarket Press (234 × 318 mm, perfect bound, 82 pages)

The series ‘A very personal view of the British’ by US photographer Eve Arnold was inspired by her reading adverts in the personal columns of The Times (pp. 56–7). Note the very tight page margins. Other photographers in the issue included theatre specialist Zoë Dominic and Patrick Ward.

The ‘Last Word’ cartoon by Niky, who also drew for the New Statesman, gave an editorial lead into the magazine for people who read from the back. It will also have increased the value of the inside back cover position, because publishers charge more for adverts facing editorial matter.

QUEEN (27 March 1962)

ABOUT TOWN (March 1961)

151150 S H A K E - U P A M O N G T H E W O M E N ’ S W E E K L I E S

By now most magazine covers were photographic. The title here is drawn with a shadow to give a three-dimensional effect. As the decade progressed, the influence of international design became clear in such women’s weeklies, with white space and extensive use of sans-serif type, for both headlines and text, prevalent.

A dramatic spread of a bohemian Soho street by Liverpool-born Oliver Brabbins makes use

Odhams Press (256 × 350 mm, stapled, 76 pages)

Woman’s Mirror was launched in 1955 as a black-and-white tabloid newspaper and switched its format to become a news magazine to reflect what it saw as the ‘winds of change’ in the country: ‘The colour and richness which surrounds the Woman of the Sixties will now be mirrored, as never before, in the colour and richness we bring into your homes.’ The title was redesigned in 1962, abbreviated to WM in 1965 and then wm in 1967, before the magazine was merged with Woman.

Fleetway (238 × 330 mm, stapled, 72 pages)

of colour (only available on the right-hand page) for a serial thriller by crime writer Elizabeth Ferrars, who penned some 80 books. Woman’s large format and excellent colour printing allowed it to show off such graphic work – Michael Johnson illustrated another colour spread and there were black-and-white pages by Alex Ross and Tanat Jones. The spread reflects a trend towards grittier subjects in magazines’ editorial content, in terms of both fiction and features.

As befits its heritage and tagline – ‘The news magazine for women’ – Woman’s Mirror brought a more topical pace, in terms of both content and layout, to the weeklies. Fleetway had bought the serialization rights to the biography of Marilyn Monroe by US show-business writer Maurice Zolotow and gave it the full treatment, opening on page 3. The knitting pattern in the issue was for a jumper like Monroe’s. Following newspaper practice, there is no contents page and no staff list.

The photograph on page 4 of the spread is by Cecil Beaton. The black edge around Monroe’s bosom is sharp compared with the rest of the image, suggesting it may have been altered.

Pages 8 and 9 run newspaper-style advertising shapes and layouts.

WOMAN (16 July 1960)

WOMAN’S MIRROR (1 October 1960)

149148 T W O C L A S S Y N U M B E R S

London Life was launched by editor Mark Boxer as a reworking of the 60-year-old Tatler. Boxer assembled a high-profile editorial team that included David Hillman and model Jean Shrimpton alongside less-established names such as David Puttnam, but the high-rolling budget – paid for by Lord Thomson, who ultimately owned both the Sunday Times and Tatler – bankrupted the title after six months. Its stated aim was to be a ‘comprehensive guide to the entertainment scene: films, theatre, restaurants, night life, music, sport’, but at 2s 6d it was expensive. The cover of Tony Bennett for a profile by Benny Green was by Ian Dury (who later became famous with the Blockheads), who was studying at the Royal College of Art. The cover style was carried

Illustrated Newspapers (240 × 316 mm, stapled, 60 pages)

David Bailey’s New York shoot with Jean Shrimpton established him as an international fashion photographer. He had been catapulted into the public eye in 1960 by his Daily Express photograph of the model Paulene Stone – who had won a 1958 Woman’s Own competition to find a cover girl – kneeling down to kiss a squirrel. The contents page on issues of this size would be on something like page 95, with a ‘well’ of editorial content in the middle of the magazine. Vogue also ran cut-out-and-keep recipe cards by Robert Carrier.

Condé Nast (220 × 288 mm, perfect bound, 210 pages)

through onto a spread inside with a joint illustration by Alison Armstrong, Ian Dury and Stan Steel. Alison (now Alison Chapman Andrews) explained: ‘Ian, Stan Steel and I studied together at Walthamstow Art School and went to the RCA at the same time to study painting. The final-year painting studio was divided into individual spaces; Ian and I shared a space, Stan was the next one. Because Ian worked at home, Elgin Avenue in Maida Vale, this wasn’t a problem. He did the London Life cover and other work for Mark Boxer from home. The costumes [on the spread] are in coloured pencil, as is the background in Tony Bennett, but Ian got very strong colours from them. The heads are in black pencil and the background may have been paint.’

David Bailey’s first cover for the monthly fashion glossy with his muse and first supermodel Jean Shrimpton.

Condé Nast (220 × 288 mm, perfect bound, 142 pages)

This issue was held together by three staples and structured with an outer 16 pages of letterpress on newsprint to carry listings for the week at the front and classified adverts at the back; 24 pages of gloss coated paper, eight in colour, mainly used for advertising; a middle 16 pages on matt stock devoted to features, half in colour. The centre spread in this issue was a colour photograph poster by Terence Donovan, the ‘London Life pin-up’, of Barbara Windsor, in a Plantagenet dress for Lionel Bart’s musical Twang!!

This issue featured Twiggy (by Ronald Traeger) on the cover for the first time, though she had been a regular on shoots for a year and was following in the footsteps of Jean Shrimpton as a supermodel. Twiggy also appeared inside the magazine, photographed by Cecil Beaton posing in his house as ‘Cosmic Ariel’. Fashion journalist Deidre McSharry – who had worked on Woman’s Own and would go on to help launch Cosmopolitan and then take over as editor for 13 years – had christened Twiggy ‘The face of 1966’ in the Daily Express (23 February) with a Barry Lategan photograph. Twiggy was just 16 years old and painted her eyelashes on.

Condé Nast (230 × 308 mm, perfect bound, 144 pages)

LONDON LIFE (6 November 1965)

VOGUE (April 1962)

VOGUE (June 1962) VOGUE (October 1967)

Juan Jerez@juanjerez

LA “BRITANNICA” DELLA GRAFICA EDITORIALE BRITANNICAA History of British Magazine Design è una ricerca esaustiva condotta da Antho-ny Quinn, giornalista del Financial Times, che ha raccolto il meglio degli ultimi 170 anni di grafi ca editoriale britannica. La sua principale fortuna è stata quella di poter accedere agli archivi londinesi del Victoria and Albert Museum, che conserva miglia-ia di copie di oltre 8.000 testate di tutto il mondo e della National Art Gallery. È un libro ricco di riferimenti visivi, ma non ri-servato solo ai grafi ci. Le analisi di Quinn mostrano come i cambiamenti nel design delle riviste siano stati condizionati da fat-tori commerciali, tecnologici e, spesso, an-che dai movimenti artistici. La ricerca arri-va fi no ai magazine indipendenti di oggi.

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