Also on the fashion front, the very lovely ASOS magazine hit the CMYK doormat yesterday. Nice typography, glimmer of silver ink on the cover, and three very different covers of some great up-and-coming actresses, and their relative cities. Mine is Emma Stone and New York, but the Bonnie Wright/London cover is great too. ASOS is free, and has hardly any ads, but it gives newsstand fashion mags a real run for their money.

Another free mag from a fashion emporium, is the Aubin & Wills ‘magalogue’. This is a great mix of fashion available in store, plus great editorial. Combine that with a typographic cover from the mighty Alan Kitching and you have a winning mix. Did I say it was free?

Ahhh, I miss working on fashion magazines. Still, I can get my fix from Ugly Betty (new series just started).

Then I remember what it was really like…

San Francisco Zine Fest kicks off on 4th September 2010. It’s a free two-day event that has been going since 2002.

With Tesco about to enter the consumer magazine market, I’m thinking Waitrose may not be far behind.

Take these offerings in print from a recent visit to the upmarket supermarket chain. Waitrose Kitchen, now up to issue two, doing what I thought Waitrose Food Illustrated was supposed to do. Then a tabloid newspaper called Waitrose Weekend, with the future king on the front. Most people would happily pay £3 for Waitrose Kitchen, it’s as good as any commercial food mag out there, but it’s only a quid – and free to John Lewis card holders!

I guess the winners are companies like ours – CMYK – who are happy to publish magazines on other people’s behalf if the price is right. John Brown do all the Waitrose titles, having successfully sold their ailing Food Illustrated title to them some years back. Looks like a newly founded company Catmags Communications will be producing the magazines for Tesco. Not sure why the supermarkets don’t do what Jamie Oliver did, and start their own publishing company. Only a matter of time I guess.

This story reminded me of a 1996 Loaded spin-off – Eat Soup – a lad’s mag about, er, food. Needless to say, it didn’t last long. Wonder if IPC Media still own the rights to the name…

Why it’s cool to cook, by Michael Caine

This is more like the Loaded we know. A feature on cannibalism!

Then a more straightforward piece on foodstops on Route 66.

I love this one from Ideal Home from the sixties. An interview with Liberty window dresser, Roy Gentry. Is his home as nice as his window displays?

More from Ideal Home.

Great one from Oz in the seventies about drug misuse, with illustrations from the “lovely” Peter Till.

Another from Oz, and an article from the late, great John Peel.

Up to the eighties now, and Blitz.

Some fashion from Blitz. It’s all coming back I’m told!

See earlier post for the covers.

Some more hotel magazines to look at, courtesy of HotelChatter.com. Makes us want to go on holiday. Now.

So, Vintage at Goodwood kicks off today, and our trip down magazine memory lane comes to an end in the 80s, with a copy of Blitz magazine.

Wrongly accused as a pale imitation of The Face, Blitz was a great reflection of the time, as this Frankie Goes to Hollywood cover testifies. First published in 1980, the magazine closed in 1991. This issue is from 1984, the year I moved to London to study design at the London College of Printing. Blitz, the Face and ID magazines were all very much part of my life then. Looking through this copy, I am amazed at the amount of mono pages – we just take full colour printing for granted now. Jeremy Leslie took over the design soon after this issue, and he now writes one of the best magazine blogs around – magculture.com

Enjoy Vintage at Goodwood! I will post up some spreads later from the magazines featured throughout the week.

Nearly there. Vintage at Goodwood starts tomorrow, and our countdown of magazine covers through the decades continues with Oz from 1972.

This is the fifth anniversary issue, and the list of contributors is amazing: John Peel, Auberon Waugh, Robert Crumb and Peter Till. Sadly, the magazine was on a downward spiral, having been through the courts on an obscenity charge which became the longest in legal history (for the time). Felix Dennis, one of the men behind Oz came out reasonably unscathed, forming Dennis Publishing in the eighties and tapping into the new computer market. Today, Dennis talks of its publications as “brands” rolling them out as franchises in different countries and also online.

Last vintage post tomorrow – and it’s the eighties. Plus, a sneaky look inside some of the magazines.

We continue our countdown to Vintage at Goodwood on Friday, and today is the turn of the sixties.

Homes and furniture was a massive part of the 1960s, with new designers like Charles Eames and Terence Conran shaping the way people lived. Ideal Home magazine was one of the biggest selling titles at the time. Published since the twenties, it is still around today, and recently had a redesign. Some of the furniture in this issue from October 1964 wouldn’t look out of place in today’s copy!