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A tent for Roosevelt the hunter

June 28, 2026

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Roosevelt’s tent, as supplied by Benjamin Edgington: advert in Travel & Exploration magazine

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. From its premises at 2 Duke Street on the south side of London Bridge, it equipped Britain’s – and the world’s – campers. The company had a stand at the Great Exhibition in 1851 and made an enormous marquee – 185 by 80 foot – for the Stockton and Darlington Railway’s Jubilee celebrations in 1875. It adopted the lightweight, A-frame ridge tent designed by mountaineer Edward Whymper in 1862, a design that carried on into the 20th century.

In 1898, SW Silver and Co. of Cornhill and Benjamin Edgington Ltd of London Bridge merged and carried on supplying governments as well as travellers. The Meade tent, a development of the Whymper design, was made of lighter fabrics and was used in the 1924 and 1933 British attempts on Everest and for the first successful ascent of Everest by Hillary and Tensing in 1953.

>>Let’s go on a teddy bear hunt
>>Grace’s Guide: Benjamin Edgington history
>>The Meade Tent
>>The rise and fall of the travel magazine

Leete’s Kitchener cover: the meme lives on

June 23, 2026

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Anniversary favourite: Flagg’s 1917 Uncle Sam (top left) and Leete’s ‘Your Country Needs You’ Kitchener cover (top right)

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 1955.

The Sunday Times Magazine is marking 250 years since the US declared its independence from Britain.

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Leete’s Kitchener cover for London Opinion became a recruiting poster

Leete’s images started life as a London Opinion magazine cover in 1914 before being used as a recruiting poster by the magazine, and then by the British official recruiting effort.

Flagg based his image on Leete’s design, but used his own face as the model for his version of Uncle Sam. Like Leete’s artwork, Flagg’s was published first in a magazine, Leslie’s, a popular illustrated weekly, and went through several versions:

  • 1916: cover of July 6 issue of Leslie’s. Below the image was the turgid cover line ‘What are you doing for preparedness?’
  • 1916: black-and-white advert for a book publisher in the July 13 issue of Leslie’s.
  • 1917: Leslie’s cover again on February 15 with the cover line ‘I want you’, this time copying the words of the British recruiting campaign as well as Leete’s image. The US joined the war against Germany after more than two years watching on in April.
  • 1917: Leslie’s again with Flagg’s Uncle Sam this time pointing a gun rather than a finger (December 29).
  • 1917: recruiting poster for the US army with Flagg’s Uncle Sam above the words ‘I want you for the US army’
  • 1917: recruiting poster for the US navy with the copy ‘I want you’ below Flagg’s Sam.
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Flagg’s Uncle Sam was thrice a Leslie’s cover, and an advert, before it was a poster

The 1916 advert was for the book The Great Republic. The British MP Sir Charles Dilke had referred to the US as ‘the great republic’ in the 1870s (Winston Churchill adopted the description in his speeches and as the title of his history of the country in 1958). The advertising includes the phrase ‘Do You Believe in Unpreparedness?’ and the copy promotes the need to educate voters for the US presidential election in November, which was won by Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic incumbent. Wilson declared war against Germany in 1917.

Flagg was appointed official artist for New York state in 1917.

Leslie’s was launched in 1855 and soon built up a large circulation of 100,000 copies a week by pioneering topical wood engravings. Sales reached close on 400,000 in 1914 but fell after World War I and Leslie’s was absorbed by Judge in 1922.

>>London Opinion – the most influential cover

Shedding light on truth in Brighton

April 24, 2026

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Jack o’ Lantern first issue cover by John Charles Dollman published by John Beal in 1868

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.

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Brighton seafront with the West Pier in the centre. Note the JC Dollman signature

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

Mrs Peel: editress and TV Avenger

April 13, 2026

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Mrs CS Peel in 1917; Woman in 1904; Diana Rigg in The Avengers

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.

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Hearth and Home cover from 1902 (September 11)

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.

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Mrs Peel evades an evil Father Christmas in a hall of distorting mirrors

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

The first Guinness press advertising

April 3, 2026

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First Guinness colour adverts: Illustrated London News of 4 May 1929

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.

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First Guinness adverts: Illustrated London News of 9 February 1929

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.

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Photography was used to promote John Gilroy’s ‘Guinness for Strength’ posters in 1934

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.

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Guinness goes downmarket: aiming for fish-and-chip lovers, rather than the oyster set

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

This Keira Knightley Vogue cover is the stuff of nightmares

April 2, 2026

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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

A world of magazines at the V&A

March 27, 2026

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Screenshot of a page from the V&A’s global magazine sampler 

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!

Holiday magazines: from buckets and spades to the Kaiser

February 26, 2026

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The Family Herald special seaside number dated 23 June 1883

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.

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The Family Herald title in detail. The artist’s credit is ‘C. Eade’

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.

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Quiver November 1898: the German emperor Wilhelm II with his family

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

The rise and fall of the travel magazine

January 30, 2026

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US edition of Cook’s Excursionist from 1888 costing 10 cents; it was one of six international editions

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

A crafty cover design from the FT’s supplement

January 25, 2026

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FT Weekend supplement: note the chopped-off title (24 Jan 2026)

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.

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Detail of the chopped-off masthead

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


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