Verve magazine, 1937-1960

I hadn’t even heard of Verve magazine until the other day, when I was asked by Oxfam to value some early issues of the magazine which had come into the shop. I had a quick look at them and was gobsmacked by the content. I was looking at half a dozen of the early editions, from 1937-39, which had colourful covers by artists including Matisse and Bonnard. Inside were unique, beautifully-produced lithographs by the likes of Matisse, Braque, Klee and Kandinsky. These were contrasted with – say – brilliant black and white photos of nudes, medieval manuscript illuminations and texts (in French) by writers such as Hemingway, Joyce and Satre. We were talking a high-quality art journal whose content was a cornucopia of seemingly surreally random yet beautiful and striking imagery and text.

Published in an imposing size of 11x14 inches, the journal sought to showcase the works of modernist, surrealist and avant-garde artists to a wider audience. Only 38 issues were published between 1937 and 1960 and each one was obviously produced with loving care. Verve was the brainchild of Efstratios Eleftheriades, a Greek art critic and editor who moved to Paris in 1915 (actually to study law) and went under the more manageable nom de plume Tériade.
 
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Overheard in Oxfam
"I got the Apple Mac off my sister – she didn't want it anymore! She got a new one. The one I got has 27 functions! 27! I only know how to use two! My sister got a new one because she needed more than 27 functions!"

"Five years now, it's been five years since my daughter hung herself in the garage. She was 55. She had debts, which she could never be able to pay back. £1000. It's good to talk about these things, isn't it? My daughter never talked about what was wrong with her."

Radio (Bad) Times Covers

Once upon a time I lived in a house where the Radio Times was delivered through the door every week. I used to shudder every time I caught a glimpse of its cover lying on the kitchen table or sofa, and promptly turn it over. There are plenty of ugly magazines out there on the shelves, well, most of them actually, but there's something about the Radio Times, which has a long tradition of having lovely illustrated covers (mainly in the 1930s) and even has an awards night for them (apparently without irony) that makes their ugly covers especially hard to bear. There's also a £25 hardback book, The Radio Times Cover Story (official).

It's partly their complete lack of imagination and partly the nature of the beast: though still called Radio Times, it's mostly a TV-listings guide, and features horribly contrived, ugly TV characters on its covers. Famously, I don't own a TV (I know, I know, I could watch it online – but don't) and find it an ugly, overbright, overloud medium – facets the Radio Times echoes (when I did watch TV I admit to looking forward to the bumper Xmas edition). If you're forgiving them slightly for having to churn out a whole magazine on a weekly basis, then I direct to you Time Out magazine (also a listings guide) in the 1970s (even today it's not that bad), where designer Pierce Marchbank managed to turn out great designs every seven days.

Thankfully I'm not the only one thinking this: Mike Dempsey has a post about it in his Graphic Journey, which is mentioned in Modern Magazines are Rubbish by Martin Colyner, published in Varoom! magazine, Winter 2011/12, issue 17. Dempsey's highlights covers from RT's past, including beautiful covers by illustrators Frank Bellamy (1972), Peter Brookes (1973) and Ralph Steadman (1977). In 2012, RT went against its current grain and featured a David Hockney painting on its cover with no straplines. Oh Bliss!

Previously on Barnflakes:
Everything is four stars

Richard Branson in Vague

I don't throw bombs, I watch films
– Tom Vague

Sir Richard Branson on the cover of Vague No. 21 (1989) wearing a balaclava (is he a rapist or a robber? I guess the metaphor is the same either way). The cover was designed by Sex Pistols-designer and Branson-hater Jamie Reid, still an anarchist after all these years: as well as protesting against the Criminal Justice Bill and the Poll Tax, more recently he was seen at the St Paul's Occupy.

Though Vague magazine includes staples of 1970s DIY punk (or post punk) fanzines, by the 1980s it was a glossy-looking counter culture publication, and the first fanzine to be perfect bound. And it didn't just feature music, going off as it often did into other tangents, including cyber-punk, politics, situationism and psychogeography.

Its creator, Tom Vague, originally a Wiltshire man, (born in Mere, I think, and went to art college in Salisbury. Vague describing a 'punk rock scene' in Salisbury is quite hard to believe… though it was the 1970s), is nowadays a prominent chronicler of Notting Hill (though rich and dull now, it's worth remembering this was the scene of the race riots in 1958 and, up until the 1980s, had a significant alternative and counter culture scene) and has been writing for over thirty years, producing fanzines, pamphlets and CDs.

The inside front cover of the magazine reproduces a leaflet handed out in a new Virgin Megastore in Glasgow (remember this was 1989):

'Hi, mugs!

Put all your money in a pokey bag and give it to me at the NEW
Virgin Hip Super Market

Hello suckers! Us wonderful people at Virgin have arrived in Glasgow! We call ourselves Virgin because we like to attract customers that are young and gullible (if they had any fucking sense they'd rip us off!). Who was it sang 'Do you think it's funny, turning rebellion into money?' Funny? We're laughing all the way to the bank!! And don't forget our new Virgin credit scheme… Be hip and impress your friends in easy monthly repayments!! Bring your giros, small change, your granny's pension book… We'll take it all!! Bring your rebellion and we'll sell it back to you!! ... Must go now… the Russians have got some kind of rebellion in Poland, and they want me to come over and package it and make it harmless…
See ya
Richard Branson'

Vague magazine was usually for sale at Virgin Megastores, yet issue twenty one mysteriously went missing.

In more recent news… Richard Branson has bought Northern Rock for a bargain price, half, in fact, of what British taxpayers have paid out for the ailing bank since 2007. Richard Branson has announced he'll be opening a new luxury game reserve in Kenya. Richard Branson has invited Kate Winslett over for Christmas at his Necker Island, to thank her for saving his 90-year-old mother from a terrifying inferno when the guesthouse caught fire after lightning struck.

Period Magazine

Following on from the Eric Gill post… Period magazine is a mock publication I made at college over a decade ago, which had features on Eric Gill and Hermann Zapf, creator of the typefaces Dingbats and Palatino. The magazine also had an article on Phaistos Disc, the clay disc from the Minoan palace of Phaistos in Crete. Apparently made almost 2000 BC, its symbols, purpose and meaning have remained a mystery ever since it was discovered in 1908.

In the States a period is a full-stop. Here in the UK it has connotations with women's menstrual cycle – a concept I played with on the title of the second issue, called Period Monthly.

I also started a magazine called ampersand (&), until someone else bought a magazine out with the same title. A quick look on the web shows there's loads of them now. But in the year 2000 I (thought I) was being quite original...

Previously on Barnflakes:
• Flaneur magazine

New David Carson magazine covers

It's just like buses. Nothing for ages (magazine-wise anyway) from graphic design legend David Carson, then suddenly he's designed two covers in a month: the latest issues of Huck, a skate & snowboarding mag, and Little White Lies, a great, quirky film title, both published by creative agency The Church of London.

Apparently there's a tradition for the two magazines to link their covers once a year. And though there are similarities between the two Carson covers (most obviously they're both black & white), last year the the link was rather more apparent – if they were stacked together correctly in the newsagent's.

Previously on Barnflakes:
Transworld Skateboarding Magazine Covers

Car Boot Sale Booty: Vintage Playboys

I got a bunch of vintage Playboy magazines from the 1960s and 70s at Battersea car boot sale last Sunday for £1 each. Usually, to be a true car booter, you need to get up at dawn and get there for 7am. Not Battersea, which starts at a very reasonable 1:30pm.

Although Playboy is perhaps the epitome of a porno mag, or the most famous anyway, what's great about the old issues are the covers (the examples above are not the best example, perhaps, but still pretty good) and the writing. I can't quite imagine moronic lads magazines such as Zoo, Nuts and Loaded publishing stories by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Vladimir Nabokov, Ian Fleming and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr – who all feature in the Playboys I bought.

The 1960s issues are very demure, showing breasts only. The 1970s go a step further and show pubic hair. The 1980s and 1990s were when porn got gynaecological – legs open and close-ups. Modern porn and its obsession with shaved pubic hair I find quite bizarre, a bit unsettling and somewhat prepubescent.

The magazine on the right features illustrations by Alberto Vargas, a famous illustrator of pin-up and glamour girls. In the 1930s and 40s he worked for Esquire magazine, and became world-famous; he also painted movie posters. By the late 1950s and throughout much of the 1960s he was working for Playboy, where his work became steadily more explicit (but not that much). In the 1970s he designed a few record covers including Candy-O by The Cars.

Magazine cover: Warhol's Interview, June 1973

Cover girl is Apollonia von Ravenstein. Photos by Chris von Wagenheim. Design by Richard Bernstein. Hair by Christian. Car boot sale find, 10p. Click on image to enlarge.

Transworld Skateboarding Magazine Covers

Top row, from left: June, August, October, December 1987
Bottom row, from left: February, April, June, October 1988

I was a hopeless sk8er during both UK waves – first in the 1970s, then in the 1980s. But at least the 80s had the cool brands, graphics, boards and magazines. I used to buy Thrasher occasionally but Transworld Skateboarding was far more rad – and I had to go all the way to Slam City Skates, downstairs from Rough Trade in Notting Hill, to get a copy, which made it seem more elitist (you could buy Thrasher in your local WH Smith).

I never knew at the time that it was art-directed (from 1984-88) by the hugely influential graphic designer (and professional surfer) David Carson – but it was always the visuals that appealed to me: bold use of photography (some taken by Spike Jonze), experimental layouts and funky typography. Not quite as experimental as Ray Gun (1992-95), the magazine for which he is famous, but a nice primer, perhaps. Typical, maybe, of Carson's unorthodox style, is the Bryan Ferry interview in Ray Gun. Carson found the interview boring and printed the whole thing in the typeface Dingbats – made up purely of ornamental icons, and hence unreadable. Now credited as the creator of grunge type, he has a lot to answer for.

His first graphic design book, The End of Print (1995), is the biggest selling graphic design book of all time (though, with only 200,000 copies sold, it's not really saying that much).

Previous magazine covers: Flaneur; Sight and Sound; Time Out

Flâneur Magazine

Travel magazines are such a dull affair – in fact, they shouldn't even be called travel magazines – tourist magazines would be a more apt description. More concerned with the best beach resorts, hotels and restaurants than anything about the country in question or its people, they are mostly bland affairs for people with money but very little imagination.

It's quite surprising there's been no 'edgy', interesting travel magazines on the shelves, so it's a pleasure to receive a few issues of Flâneur (a flâneur is someone who likes to wonder a city). Like a cross between Colors, Vice and Eye, it's a visually exciting as well as a fascinating publication, featuring a bewildering array of obscure features, graphic design and photo essays such as Arabic type faces, international cinema posters and cigarette packets, belly-dancing clubs in Cairo, chess in Kuta, oysters in New Orleans, Indonesian poetry and Mexican guerrilla dolls. And that's just the first five pages of issue one. 'Either everything matters or nothing does.' Interestingly, it has a different design and masthead each issue.

Flâneur magazine – 'A travel magazine for the discerning loafer' – is published quarterly, priced £6.

(Obviously I've just made this magazine up, but if someone wants to finance it for real, that would be great.)

Sight and Sound Covers

Sight and Sound magazine went even further than Time Out in the 1970s with its covers having no text at all other than masthead, date and price. I think they're great – I love them being two-colour (adverts on the back also had the same colour scheme – inside was all black and white).

The films featured, clockwise from top left, are: A Clockwork Orange; Bob Fosse in The Little Prince; Zardoz; Jeff Bridges in Bad Company

Time Out Covers

Time Out never used to be just a listings magazine. In the 1970s it was politically engaging, passionate about fringe arts and the cinema, and had great covers. Pierce Marchbank joined Time Out in the early 70s and promptly redesigned the TO logo (which is still being used today), then went on to produce brilliantly imaginative covers (on a weekly basis) for over a decade.

Nowadays magazines suffer from what Marchbank has called the 'Cosmopolitan disease' – the contents page splashed all over the cover. There's no sense of mystery as to what's in a magazine, and with many magazines featuring the same star of the month, covers all look identical.