la “britannica” della grafica editoriale

BASIS GROTESQUE di Colophon
Foundry. Disegnato tre anni fa
per il magazine di fotografia
Hotshoe. L’intera famiglia
tipografica è da pochi giorni in
vendita su colophon-foundry.org
di Francesco Franchi
LA “BRITANNICA” DELLA GRAFICA EDITORIALE BRITANNICA
A History of British Magazine Design è
una ricerca esaustiva condotta da Anthony Quinn, giornalista del Financial Times,
che ha raccolto il meglio degli ultimi 170
anni di grafica editoriale britannica. La sua
principale fortuna è stata quella di poter
accedere agli archivi londinesi del Victoria
and Albert Museum, che conserva migliaia 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 riservato solo ai grafici. Le analisi di Quinn
mostrano come i cambiamenti nel design
delle riviste siano stati condizionati da fattori commerciali, tecnologici e, spesso, anche dai movimenti artistici. La ricerca arriva fino ai magazine indipendenti di oggi.
Operazioni “meglio tardi
che mai”: esportare Munari
APPUNTAMENTI
Due mesi e
mezzo di follie
tipografiche
TYPO SAN FRANCISCO
dal 30 aprile al 1 maggio
2015. typotalks.com/
sanfrancisco
TYPO BERLIN
dal 21 al 23 maggio 2015.
typotalks.com/berlin
A HISTORY OF BRITISH MAGAZINE
DESIGN di Anthony Quinn (V&A
Publishing, 22 × 31 cm, 240 pp., 2015,
inglese, 30 sterline). vandashop.com
142
SWINGERS IN PRINT
143
QUEEN (27 March 1962)
ABOUT TOWN (March 1961)
KERNING
dal 3 al 5 giugno a
Faenza. Il più importante
appuntamento italiano
dedicata alla tipografia.
Una conferenza e
quattro diversi workshop
di due giorni. In inglese.
2015.kerning.it
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1
Cornmarket Press
(234 × 318 mm, perfect bound, 82 pages)
Stevens Press
(240 × 318 mm, perfect bound, 102 pages)
150
Michael Crick, Michael Heseltine: A biography,
Penguin, 1997, pp. 112-3
SHAKE-UP AMONG THE WOMEN’S WEEKLIES
151
148
TWO CLASSY NUMBERS
149
WOMAN’S MIRROR (1 October 1960)
VOGUE (April 1962)
WOMAN (16 July 1960)
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)
LONDON LIFE (6 November 1965)
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 blackand-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.
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.
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 showbusiness 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.
Fleetway
(238 × 330 mm, stapled, 72 pages)
La paghetta
si spende
in edicola
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 lessestablished 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)
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.’
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!!
VOGUE (June 1962)
VOGUE (October 1967)
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.
David Bailey’s first cover for the monthly
fashion glossy with his muse and first
supermodel Jean Shrimpton.
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
(220 × 288 mm, perfect bound, 210 pages)
Condé Nast
(220 × 288 mm, perfect bound, 142 pages)
Condé Nast
(230 × 308 mm, perfect bound, 144 pages)
La casa editrice Princeton Architectural Press ha
ripubblicato negli Stati Uniti e in Gran Bretagna il
volume I libri di Munari, curato da Giorgio Maffei,
studioso ed esperto di libri d’artista. Originariamente edito in Italia nel 2002 da Corraini Edizioni, è un
volume fondamentale che si propone di riordinare i
fili sparsi dell’attività editoriale di Munari, dalle prime
esperienze come grafico fino alle collaborazioni con la
grande industria libraria, passando per gli straordinari
progetti innovativi e per la serie dei “libri illeggibili”.
Il libro, per Munari, costituiva la forma privilegiata di
comunicazione, una forma d’arte che consentiva di
rappresentare idee e trasmettere suggestioni.
MUNARI’S BOOK di Giorgio Maffei (Princeton
Architectural Press, 17 × 24 cm, 288 pp., 2015,
inglese, 40 dollari). papress.com
TYPE@PARIS
dal 15 giugno al 17
luglio a Parigi. Cinque
settimane intensive di
workshop con Jean
François Porchez e i
migliori type designer.
typeparis.com
COSE
LUOGHI
NEW BALANCE C-SERIES
600 progettate a Tokyo
e pensate per il ciclista
urbano. newbalance.com
Quale miglior modo per assicurare
un futuro alla carta stampata se non
quello di addestrare piccoli lettori a
sfogliare magazine di qualità, belli da
vedere e da toccare? Nascono riviste
per imparare giocando, con grafiche
hipster e illustrate dagli stessi artisti che
lavorano per i magazine dei “grandi”.
E non sono letture per soli bambini.
DOT MAGAZINE, anorakmagazine.com,
trimestrale, inglese, 5 sterline
THE LOOP loop-the-loop.com,
trimestrale, inglese, 6 sterline
ANORAK anorakmagazine.com,
trimestrale, inglese, 5 sterline
OKIDO okido.co.uk, bimestrale,
inglese, 4 sterline
MILK milkmagazine.net, trimestrale,
francese e inglese, 8,20 euro
PAPIER MACHE papier-mache.com.au,
semestrale, inglese, 11,95 dollari
TYPOGRAPHICS
dal 8 al 18 giugno a New
York. typographics.com
INSTAGRAM
Juan Jerez
@juanjerez
MAGLIA ROSA NYC ha aperto
lo scorso novembre a Brooklyn.
Il bike café di Manuel Mainardi
ricrea l’atmosfera dei bar sport
anni 70. La macchina del caffè
è una Faema e61, lo sponsor di
Eddy Merckx. Gli ingredienti di
panini e dolci, e soprattutto le
biciclette, sono “made in Italy”.
magliarosanyc.com
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