The Lost World of the Magazine Rack

It was a funny looking thing, all white wire and red plastic feet, a classic piece of ‘atom age’ design that my parents must have acquired when setting up home together in the late 1950s. I neither noticed nor appreciated its retro asethetic: it was just part of the living room furniture, like the tall ashtray in red enamel and chrome where our dad stubbed out his cigarettes. But, over time, the magazine rack acquired a strange fascination. It became, in effect, a Sargasso Sea of print; for any item deposited therein was destined to remain there seemingly forever, escaping our mum’s weekly purges of printed ephemera: newspapers, magazines and comics were routinely left out for the dustmen (no one had heard of reycling back then). Being consigned to the magazine rack seemed to confer a special status on whatever was left there. Rather than the daily newspapers, or weekly periodicals like the TV and Radio Times, it became a repository of items that, I presumed, my parents wished to retain for slightly longer. Whether that was so, or whether the contents accrued there by random chance I never discovered.

The magazine rack tended to find its way into overlooked corners of the living room, such as the recess between a faux leather armchair and the 1950s coffee table on which stood our dad’s Bang & Olufsen hi-fi. On dull days, typically in school holidays or wet weekends, I would occasionally turn my attention to its contents.

I can still name some of that neglected ephemera in specific detail. There was usually an Embassy Cigarettes Gift Catalogue (our dad smoked the brand and collected the coupons which could be exchanged for household goods); a home-making magazine such as the ubiquitous Family Circle; an overlooked Readers’ Digest from several autumns gone by; perhaps a motoring magazine, and the ever-present Christmas edition of Punch.

Alongside this random selection one might find a few instruction manuals for hi-fi or tape recorders, but rarely anything recent. Only the Embassy Catalogue ever seemed to change, as each new edition was mailed out.

There’s one item that I haven’t yet mentioned, and it was the reason why I returned, with increasing frequency, to the magazine rack. Tucked away amongst the magazine survivors was a curious book printed ‘the wrong way round’ (ie. in landscape format), and with a single word daubed in white across a corner of the cover: GILES. This was my first ever sighting of the famous cartoon albums that had been an annual event since 1944, and which would continue onwards to the present day (depite the fact that Giles himself died in 1995). The book belonged to our dad, who had received it as a gift from his parents at Christmas 1967. From conversations I had with him later, I learned that the Giles Annual had been a yearly tradition, and that he’d been given every one since their first appearance. This was amazing! Where were they now? (By this time, I’d taken to collecting Giles in a big way). Unfortunately, they’d gone the way of all such perceived ‘ephemeral’ items. Before he left home, they’d been in his old bedroom, but had long since been thrown out. As for the others, a decade’s worth spanning the years 1957-66, our mum had taken care of them. As Basil Fawlty once said, ‘lucky old bin’.

The survivor dated from 1967 – our first year in our second home – and its cover depicted a croquet match taking place on the lawn of a lovingly-depicted manor house. The players are all reacting to the arrival of a fizzing bomb that has been hurled onto the lawn: the drawing continues onto the back cover where we can see the culprits: a band of football-scarf-wearing and rattle-toting young tearaways in the typical Giles manner. The front-to-back gag was a running feature of every Giles album, with some layed out in the manner of our example, whilst others offered ‘before and after’ versions of a comic scenario.

Giles annuals tended to end up in doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms, a fact acknowledged in at least one of his cartoons by Giles himself, so clearly we were not alone in considering them ‘disposable’, but how the 1967 edition survived whilst others did not is something I never quite fathomed. No further editions appeared at subsequent Christmases, and none of the earlier albums had survived the move from our former home in Lichfield. When I first came across the book, I had no idea that it was one in a series that went back over thirty years: it was simply a random cartoon album that belonged to our dad. But the fact that it contained cartoons lent it a special fascination.

At first, I was more than a little wary of looking inside. A few cursory glances had revealed the characters to be, for the most part, grotesques, and initially I didn’t much care for Giles’ take on the human race. He didn’t balk at depictions of nudity, either – one cartoon showed a naked Adam and Eve romping through the undergrowth while a knowing schoolboy observed them with a sly grin as his teacher looked on disapprovingly. I noted that each cartoon was dated, and also that many of them included references to topical events, some of which I could still dimly remember. The year 1966-7 included references to Soviet Premier Kosygin, the Aberfan and Torrey Canyon disasters, and, closest to home for me, Batman.

The more I returned to the annual, the more I began to appreciate the quality of Giles’ draftsmanship. These were not the crudely sketched cartoons one found in newspaper columns or the humour sections in TV21 Annual. These were nothing less than mini masterpieces. Giles’ draftsmanship outclassed all of his contemporaries and has never been bettered. His compositions were often audacious in their use of ‘empty’ space: some panels might consist principally of sky, a featureless expanse of wall, or virgin snow (Giles was arguably the best artist since Breughel at depicting snow scenes). Characters were often dwarfed by their surroundings: perhaps this was his way of showing how human lives are overwhelmed by the worlds we inhabit. One aspect of his work that I particularly admired was his ability to suggest depth in two dimensional space. Intriguingly, Giles was blind in one eye following a motorcycle accident early in his career: so was his gift a form of compensation for his inability to perceive depth, or did his monocular vision make it easier to render the world as he saw it himself, in two dimensions? Either way, his abilities went beyond any definition of the word genius.

By the autumn of 1973, I had become hooked on Giles, and in early January I used some ‘Christmas money’ to purchase that year’s annual, whose cover depicted the Giles family picnicing in the woods whilst, on the back cover, Grandma is entertained to tea (and beer) by the Mad Hatter. As yet, it had not occurred to me to seek out earlier editions of the books, and when I first discovered them, in a local second hand bookshop, it was more by accident than design. In doing so, I set myself a task that may never be completed, given that Giles collections continue to be published every year to this day. I now own copies of every annual up to around the year 2000, and random examples thereafter. Some of the earlier editions are facsimile reprints – curiously, Number 5 is rarer than Number 1 on account of many copies having been lost in a warehouse fire – but for the most part, they are the originals, sourced over many years from countless bookshops and book fairs.

It was at one of the latter that I saw my first Giles original. The size of it staggered me: fully four times larger than it appeared in the annual. The distinctive areas of grey dot-matrix tone that were such a feature of Giles in print were indicated on the original by a pale blue wash. This would disappear when photographed for the printing plate, whilst another artist applied the tone areas on an overlay, using the blue as a guide – I once met one of them and he attested to the fact that it was no easy task.
Our dad’s old Giles annual survives to this day, but the magazine rack is long gone. Its place was taken, some time in the 1980s, by a varnished wooden example, utterly lacking in the retro charm of the original. Nevertheless, it had the same effect on anything placed inside it… as, indeed, does the anonymous example I own myself. Perhaps all magazine racks are the same, jealously holding onto anything given into their custody.

In preparation for this piece, I did a Google image search for 1950s Magazine Racks and turned up a pristine example of the exact piece our parents had owned, for sale on Etsy... you can see it above, loaded with some typical vintage content: the aforementioned Giles annual, a November 1967 edition of Woman magazine, an October 1974 Exchange and Mart, an April 1978 Warwickshire & Worcestershire Life (a midlands lifestyle magazine), and two old hi-fi leaflets.