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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 led to a surprising find – it was drawn by John Charles Dollman, a famous Victorian artist, when he was just 17! Dollman (1851-1934) was born in Hove, the neighbouring borough to Brighton. He left for London to study at South Kensington and the Royal Academy Schools before establishing a studio in Bedford Park. His paintings were shown at the Royal Academy until 1912 and he worked as an illustrator for The Graphic. He often painted animals and ‘A London Cab Stand’ (1888) is one of is most popular paintings.

The cover declares that Jack o’ Lantern was ‘published occasionally’, ‘for the Brighton season’ by John Beal at 55 East Street in the town. There is also a motto, ‘Lux e pessimis moribus’, meaning ‘Light out of the worst morals’. The cover shows a winged Jack o’ Lantern character helped an bespectacled, beared and gowned man in a skull cap – indicating a scholar – shining light on the word ‘truth’.

Behind the ancient man is a barrel with two fishes marked on the side, though it may be that they were meant to be dolphins – the symbol of the town on its coast of arms. Brighton was still a fishing port, though the arrival of the direct train line connecting the town to London Bridge in 1841 was turning it into a seaside destination for day-trippers from London and tourists. They followed the influence of George IV, who had begun building the Royal Pavilion as a seaside retreat in 1787, long before he became king in 1820.

The townscape illustration is centred on the West Pier with Regency Square behind. The arches under the promenade are shown and the balconied Grand hotel with its flanking towers is to the right. The Grand had opened four years before and the Metropole would not be built between the two until 1890. Comparing the grand with an engraving at the Regency Society website suggests that Dollman got the proportions correct, even though it is a sketchy illustration.  

The name Jack o’ Lantern is a variant of Will-o’-the-Wisp, which was the title of a satirical magazine published for two years from 1868 in London. Frontispieces to the bound volumes show a variety of characters shining the light from a lamp to illuminate ill-deeds, including a winged cherub and an impish character with pointed ears (and with and without wings). Although there is a decade between the two titles and 50 miles between London and Brighton, the content and publishing strategy of Will-o’-the-Wisp suggests the possibility that it may have inspired the naming of the later title. But that’s a topic for another day.

>>John Dollman and other artists’ signatures

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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 & Home – and the character played by Diana Rigg in The Avengers.

Woman – no relation to the Odhams weekly of the same name launched in 1937 – had first appeared in 1888. The editress in the Edwardian era was credited as Mrs CS Peel on the cover. Constance Dorothy Evelyn Peel (née Bayliff) styled herself as ‘Mrs C.S. Peel’, taking her husband’s initials. The cover design for this ‘high class penny paper for ladies’ was by Septimus Bennett, the youngest brother of the writer Arnold Bennett. Arnold was editor of Woman from 1896 to 1900.

As well as being a top-flight editress, Mrs Peel was a campaigner, establishing the British Housewives’ Association in 1926. Steven Woodbridge from the history department at Kingston University also reveals that she was editor of the women’s page of the Daily Mail from 1918 to 1920.

Another weekly Mrs Peel ran was Hearth & Home, ‘an illustrated weekly journal for gentlewomen’. It cost 3d. This was published by Beeton & Co at 10-11 Fetter Lane in London. The company was run by Mayson and Louie Beeton, the son and daughter-in-law of Samuel Orchard Beeton and Isabella Mary Beeton (née Mayson) – the power publishing couple behind Beeton’s Book of Household Management, which spawned the Mrs Beeton brand after her death and his commercial collapse. Samuel Beeton had also launched the upmarket society weekly The Queen, where Mrs Peel’s sister worked as an illustrator forty years later. Like the Beetons, Mrs Peel wrote books about cookery and household management.

As for the high-kicking, gun-toting spy Mrs Emma Peel in the 1960s, she was played by Diana Rigg, who was named a dame in the 1994 Queen’s birthday honours. The Christmas 1965 Avengers episode included a nice touch of name play. In ‘Too Many Christmas Trees’, Peel and her colleague John Steed (Patrick Macnee) read the messages in his Christmas cards:

Mrs Peel: ‘Best wishes for the future. Cathy’ 

Steed: ‘Mrs Gale! How nice of her to remember me. What can she be she doing in Fort Knox?’

Cathy Gale, played by Honor Blackman, had been Steed’s partner in the first series of The Avengers. She went on to star as Pussy Galore in the Bond film Goldfinger, which was released in 1964. That featured, of course, a dastardly plot to irradiate the US gold reserves held in Fort Knox.

Patrick Macnee had his own outing in a Bond film, the 1985 A View to a Kill. He joins Roger Moore as 007 doing battle with the dastardly duo of Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) and May Day (Grace Jones). This time, the villain’s plan is to destroy Silicon Valley and control the world’s supply of computer chips.

>>Women’s weekly magazines at Magforum
>>Woman magazine, a ghost and an omelette

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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 are two of those early adverts, from the Illustrated London News of February 9 and then May 4 – the latter a very early example of Guinness advertising in colour. The ILN was one of the world’s most famous magazines and its strategy as an upmarket weekly news magazine since the 1840s was widely copied. John Gilroy’s toucan and the rest of his menagerie would not appear for six years.

Advertising also appeared in mass market magazines in 1929, including the text-only ‘Guinness for holidays’ in John Bull in August that year. An early example of front cover advertising was the text-only ‘Guinness for Strength’ in the same title in October. After that, Guinness was a frequent advertiser on John Bull covers, with photography used by 1934 to link to poster advertising. This was when the famous John Gilroy ‘Guinness for Strength’ image of a man carrying a girder single-handed was first used.

A different approach before then was linking Guinness to oysters – a food associated with Aphrodite, the Greek godess of love, since Roman times. Oyster bars in Britain dated back to the 1700s and were for wealthy clients. Pubs across the country had their own oyster rooms, particularly by the coast near oyster rivers. The Jolly Sailor in Orford, Suffolk, still had an oyster bar in the 1980s and the Oyster Inn is a few miles inland at Butley.

Guinness carried on with the oyster link for the rest of the century, as this Sunday Times Magazine advert from 1969 demonstrates. It’s a shame that pubs don’t stock the deliciously bitter bottled Guinness any more – and those oversized Wellington glasses, known as ‘ladies’ glasses’ have disappeared too.

>>Guinness advertising history
>>History of the Guinness toucan
>>John Bull magazine at Magforum

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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 film star of the day on the cover.

Just the sort of issue from the publishing house of Condé Nast to thrill the fashionistas reading this leading glossy women’s monthly.

What could possibly be wrong?

Take a close look.

Answer below –

>>Women’s glossy magazines at Magforum
>>Secrets of magazine cover design at Magforum

ANSWER: the spelling of Keira Knightley’s name is wrong

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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, with the Netherlands, Dubai and Japan among the countries covered. Some titles you’d expect, – Illustrated London News, Wendingen, The Studio, U&lc, Picture Post, Twen, Nest – but not Chapman & Hall’s Journal of Design and Manufactures, or Enter and its girlie CD-Rom, or Kokka.

Each is accompanied by an excellent scan, and these are well worth blowing up to see, for example, the illustrator’s mark on the wood blocks. Zooming into the Twen spread is also revealing – see the Zeitgeist lifestyle of 1969 with Elvis records, wire shelving and a 1932 Aston Martin 1.5-litre roadster artfully parked on the drive to be seen through the window (copies of Twen are under a side table; I do like a self-referential image).

But Kokka is clearly worth a visit to Kensington on its own – its reproductions ‘put to shame those in any European art periodical’ said the Burlington Magazine in 1904. It is Japan’s longest-running art magazine, having been founded in 1889. And Gazette du bon ton – so good that Condé Nast bought it up to create Vogue – still sets the benchmark for beautiful lifestyle magazines.

I had a very hard time chopping down the images and titles for my History of British Magazine Design for the V&A, so how Marc, the Serials Librarian, did it for the National Art Library’s global collection, I don’t know!

The Family Herald is one of 153 magazines I cite in a 27-page research paper being published in Print and Tourism by Peter Lang. The subtitle expands on its broad contents: ‘Travel-related publications from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.’ The editors are Catherine Armstrong and Elaine Jackson.

As mentioned last month, my chapter, ‘A whirlwind tour of tourism in magazines: 1851 to 2020‘, examines the symbiotic relationship between magazines and travel over 150 years. Print and Tourism should be out by the middle of the year. In the meantime, I’m putting up pages from some of the titles listed.

This Family Herald title is worth looking at in detail. The artist’s credit is ‘C. Eade’ and there is a date – 1874 – on one of fishing boats. The design was used for several years so the date suggests that was when it was first used. The issue cost two pennies, twice the normal weekly issue.

Eade shows a plethora of activities and details: children exploring rock pools; a castle atop the cliffs; a sailing ship and a paddle steamer on the horizon; a couple under a parasol above a bay; starfish; anchors; shells; crab pots; fishermen; bathing huts; and a seaside town complete with lighthouse. At the centre of it all is the magazine’s usual logo – the majestic figure of Britannia. with her trident, Union flag shield, resting lion, and symbols of peace, trade and prosperity.

Marking a very different sort of holiday is this November 1898 cover from Quiver, a monthly from Cassell’s that described itself as suitable for Sunday reading. The cover photograph by J. Baruch of Berlin shows the German emperor Wilhelm II with his family. The cover marked the kaiser’s visit to the Holy Land on a trip organised by Thos Cook. By the end of the century, the company had taken 12,000 people to Palestine.

In May 1904, a headline in Pearson’s described Thomas Cook & Son as ‘The patron saints of modern travel.’ The article by Marcus Woodward was illustrated with elephant rides in India and boat tours on the Sea of Galilee. Woodward describes the scene at Cook’s Ludgate Circus headquarters:

At the head office is stationed an army of four hundred servants awaiting the traveller’s bidding, ready at a moment’s notice to supply him with a ticket to anywhere, to plan any tour, from the grand first-class trip round the world at £450 including everything, to a guinea day-tour from London by rail and coach through the choicest of rural England … To Cook’s all this is simply their business; to the wondering traveller it is pure magic.

The previous post describes Cook’s organising trips for Muslim pilgrims to Mecca at the behest of the Indian government. The British also used the company services. Woodward reports that 120 British sailors had recently been taken by train from London to Genoa to crew two Italian-built cruisers sold to Japan. These will have been the Nisshin and Kasuga. This was during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 when the Japanese navy was mainly equipped with cruisers and dreadnoughts built in Britain. Some of Queen Victoria’s trips were organised by Cook’s and 18,000 troops were taken down the Nile in the 1884 attempt to relieve General Gordon in Khartoum.

>>Print and Tourism will be the seventh volume in the series Printing History and Culture
>>Holiday and travel publishing
>>Travel magazines part 1: A whirlwind tour of tourism in magazines: 1851 to 2020

I’ve just been reading the proofs of a research paper I’ve written that will soon be published published in Print and Tourism by Peter Lang. The volume editors are Catherine Armstrong and Elaine Jackson, and the subtitle expands on its broad contents: ‘Travel-related publications from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.’

My chapter is ‘A whirlwind tour of tourism in magazines: 1851 to 2020’. It starts with Thomas Cook’s first rail journey, ends with the travel company’s collapse, and sets out the symbiotic relationship between magazines and travel. The chapter started as a conference paper delivered in July 2020.

Thomas Cook knew the power of magazines for marketing. He launched his own magazine, Cook’s Excursionist, in 1851. The strategy’s success led to editions in New York and Bombay. In 1867, these had a circulation of 58,000; by 1892, there were six international editions with a circulation of 120,000 copies. Above is of a specimen copy of the US edition dated June 1888.

The cover at the top left shows a journey down the Nile by dhow with the Pyramids in the background. At the top right is a Cook’s Tours train. And the buildings on either side of the globe are the company’s offices on Broadway in New York and at Ludgate Circus in London. The masted steam ship at the bottom right is marked Cook’s Tours at the prow while the steam cruiser alongside is Pilgrim. This may be a reference to Thomas Cook & Son having been chosen two years earlier by the Indian government to take Hajj pilgrims from Bombay to Jeddah on their way to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

Thomas Cook’s son, John Mason Cook, wrote a privately printed book about the Muslim pilgrimage. He describes how half of the pilgrims had come from Central Asia and Afghanistan, and were passing through India en route to Mecca. Many of the 8,000 to 12,000 pilgrims every year will have travelled thousands of miles overland before they even reached Bombay or Calcutta to board a ship. The crossing from Bombay to the eastern Red Sea port of Jeddah was a distance of 2,000 miles.

The chapter really is a whirlwind tour with 152 other titles mentioned in 27 pages – Family Herald, The Butterfly, Tit Whits, Piccadilly, Oz and Travel Trade Gazette among them. The paper charts the expansion of magazines alongside the parallel growth of holidays. Overseas holidays for the typical family didn’t exist until the 1950s and yet almost 13 million Brits headed off across the water in 1993. The importance of travel advertising in the survival of the Sunday Times Colour Supplement is identified along the way.

In 1991 there were 2,434 consumer and special interest publications and another 4,608 publications classified as business and professional. Seventy consumer titles were listed as tourism-related and 140 of the trade titles. That was pretty much peak time for magazines, at least in terms of the number of titles, though the days of the mega-selling magazine were well over. In 1955, Radio Times claimed the largest sale of any weekly – almost nine million. By 1983, it was still Britain’s biggest-seller, though at three million copies. Even that number is unimaginable today.

Online media and phones took readers away and the demise of Thomas Cook coincides with the Covid epidemic – the final nail in the coffin for so many magazines.

Print and Tourism should be out by the middle of the year. In the meantime, I’ll put up pages from some of the titles listed.

>>Print and Tourism will be the seventh volume in the series Printing History and Culture
>>Holiday and travel publishing

This weekend’s FT magazine supplement employs an unusual tactic in cover design – it chops off half of the title. The result is intriguing – at first glance it looks as if there is a sheet of paper lying on top of the magazine. There’s an eye-catching factor there, but such tactics only work because of their rarity.

And there have certainly been many attempts at cover ‘special effects’ to boost sales. Many have worked as one-offs but most are too costly to do regularly, or soon become boring for readers. However, designs such as split covers – whether real or faked by clever design – do seem to come back into fashion every few years.

The images are collages made by Salih Basheer, a Sudanese photographer and Magnum Photos nominee. They are based on screenshots from videos posted on social media by paramilitaries. The cover feature by Henry Mance highlighted the global crisis in humanitarian aid.

Chopping off the masthead is something that only the bravest editor of a mainstream magazine would sanction because paid-for magazines rely on their covers for regular and casual sales in newsagents. Supplements, in contrast, are part of a package that depends on the main newspaper (though the success of the FT’s How to Spend It has made it a vital contributor to the paper’s profits).

Greater freedom for experimentation is a luxury enjoyed by newspaper supplements, and free magazines that are posted. Subscriber copies also enjoy more liberty, but consistently undermining a periodical’s branding is unlikely to be a long-term strategy for success.

>>100+ crafty magazine covers at Magforum
>>The secrets of magazine cover design

A discussion about a colophon – those graphic devices that used to be printed on the title pages of books – used by George Routledge & Sons had me delving into my archive this weekend. Like most Victorian publishers, George Routledge launched his own monthly magazine. The year was 1867. This was a popular idea among publishers: they could advertise their catalogues each month and try out new authors by serialising their works. The popularity of a serial was a gauge for the first print run of the collated book.

The company was more imaginative than many when it came to the title. No Routledge’s magazine for them; unlike Chambers’s (1832), Macmillan’s (1859) and Longman’s (1882). Instead, they followed the fashion for naming magazines after London streets or places and chose The Broadway with the subtitle ‘A London Magazine’.

The title might today bring to mind New York’s theatre district, but the magazine was published from the George Routledge office in the Broadway, a street near St Paul’s Cathedral off Ludgate Hill. This area was the centuries-old home to London’s book publishers until it was flattened in the London Blitz in 1940. They also had a New York office at 416 Broome Street, just off West Broadway, since 1854. Broadway fitted on both sides of the Atlantic. So, Broadway it was.

The company clearly had a sense of place, which was further demonstrated in their colophon. This was introduced in 1903, according to Book Collecting World, which has several posts about Routledge, including one on dating the publisher’s books.

The sense of place comes from the building seen below the decorated ‘R’ of the colophon. This is Lud Gate, the medieval entrance to the City of London that once stood between Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill; more or less where Ludgate Circus is now. The Grub Street Project has a much more detailed image of Lud Gate. The colophon image of a king may well be Lud.

A four-page article by CRB Barrett in the first issue of a later magazine, The Ludgate Monthly (May 1891), gives a history of the gate and shows three views of the building. ‘Ludgate and its memories’ points to the discrepancies between the first two – though the gate was rebuilt several times – and the third engraving looks to have been taken from the same source as the Grub St Project’s.

The first Lud Gate was built by the Romans as part of their London wall in the second century; it was rebuilt after the Great Fire of London in 1666 and demolished in 1760.

Photographs often show the Old King Lud, a Victorian pub that once occupied the north-west corner of Ludgate Circus but now, sadly, is a cafe.

>>Cecil Beaton photographs of destruction of book publishers: https://magforum.wordpress.com/2017/02/01/on-this-day-in-magazines-picture-post-1941/
>>Old King Lud pub history
>>History of Lud Gate

The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, cover by Gilbert Rumbold

This cover of The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, the Bank of England’s staff magazine, is from March 1953. The magazine takes its name from a nickname for the bank dating to 1797. Back then, the prime minister, Pitt the Younger, was trying to get the money to fund a war with France. Thomas Gillray portrayed the bank as an old lady sitting on a trunk of gold to keep her suitor at bay. The satirical cartoon was titled ‘Political Ravishment, or the Old Lady of Threadneedle-Street in Danger!’

The bank’s address is in Threadneedle Street in the City of London, a 3.5-acre site it still occupies, bounded by Bartholemew, Lothbury and Princes streets. It was founded in 1694, making it the second-oldest central back, after Sweden’s.

The Old Lady nickname was dusted off in 2003 for Jessie Bonner-Thomas, the scourge of banking ‘fat cats’. The Sunday Times Magazine supplement of July 20 photographed her as the face of the activists attacking the City’s overpaid bankers. A few years before, she had come to fame at the age of 88 for taking the chief executive of Barclays to task at the bank’s annual meeting. She had castigated Matt Barrett, ‘the Montreal mauler’, for a ‘scrooge’ rise in her widow’s pension of £1 while he was given a ‘£1.3m hello’. Furthermore, Barclays had closed hundreds of branches and ‘wasted £15m’ on an advertising campaign featuring film stars such as Anthony Hopkins.

The Sunday Times supplement’s cover her showed her in Thatcher-like attire with a London Stock Exchange prices page from the Financial Times – whose pink pages are often used as a symbol of the City – behind her. By the end of their exchange, Barrett ‘was hiding his head in his hands, ducking under a long table to shield himself from her tongue’, wrote the Guardian.

The 1953 Old Lady magazine cover design was by Gilbert Rumbold. It was used from at least 1941 to 1959. It shows the courtyard of the bank building, which cannot be seen from the surrounding streets, in about 1760. Rumbold was a prolific book illustrator, famed for his art deco illustrations in barman Harry Craddock’s Savoy Cocktail Book of 1930. A signed first edition sold for £3,250 in 2021.

The Old Lady magazine was printed by Hunt, Barnard and Co at the Sign of the Dolphin in Aylesbury. It was a quarterly staff magazine published from 1921 until 2007. Frank Dancaster was editor for eight years from 1952.

Strangely enough, the Bank of England played a role in establishing the formula for weekly popular magazines in Britain more than 100 years ago. In October 1889, Alfred Harmsworth’s recently launched Answers magazine offered a prize of one pound a week for life to whomever could guess the amount of cash in the Bank of England on a given day. The competition was a sensation – 718,000 postcard entries, each signed by six people, were received. The prize-winner’s estimate was within two pounds of the actual amount, and when the competition was over the circulation of Answers was about 100,000. An amazing example of social marketing.

>>Answers, a general weekly magazine
>>Bank of England: cartoons