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Battling through the Xmas post, two new volumes arrived here this week, from Black Velvet and Black Dog Publishing respectively. First up was Serpenti & Scale, the Italian edition of Snakes & Ladders by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. This has been available for some time in English, of course. The translated version features some of my artwork for the Moon and Serpent CDs by Alan and Tim Perkins in the lengthy interview section that precedes Eddie’s comic strip. Thanks to Smoky Man for that.

Inevitably overshadowing this was 100 Years of Magazine Covers which author Steve Taylor very graciously had sent to me. A heavyweight book in all senses of the word, with a solid cover, thick paper stock and tremendous design by Neville Brody. Taylor navigates the overcrowded field of 20th-century magazine design with great skill, managing to cover all the principal areas of magazine as news medium, fashion journal, literary forum and vehicle of cultural transgression, whether that be the Sixties’ underground, Seventies’ punk or the disparate worlds of gay life and feminism. Illustrations range from the elegance of early Collier’s and Vogue to the garish incoherence of today’s celebrity rags such as Heat. Given such a broad field of study there are bound to be omissions; I would have liked to have seen something from the New Worlds of the late-Sixties, for example, and maybe one of the Non-Format covers for The Wire. But they got Lilliput in there which is pretty impressive considering that magazine now seems to be largely forgotten. Essential stuff.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• It’s a pulp, pulp, pulp world
• A few thousand science fiction covers
• Vintage magazine art II
• Neville Brody and Fetish Records
• View: The Modern Magazine
• Vintage magazine art
• Oz magazine, 1967–73