PUBLISHING PREQUELS

 

This was the cover of my grammar school magazine. It would be impossible to convey what a radical break with tradition it represented.

My last two years at school were quite bizarre. I wonder how much that influenced my trajectory in life. In theory my time was devoted to "double maths and art" in part because physics, maths and art didn't fit the constraints of the timetable.

In practice I encountered Mr Wood, a maths teacher with a difference. There were four of us, I think, doing the double. He had come through a rough school in Sheffield as I remember and embraced a radical approach to education of his own devising. The class who took roll call in his room were allowed to rearrange their desks!!!

Anyway, we covered the syllabus of maths and further maths in about three hectic weeks. Thereafter it was up to us to set our agendas and ask for his help where we needed it. The result was that I spent most of the next two years in the art studio, painting.

We also did photography and a couple of us were introduced to magazine layout (cut and paste in the original, literal sense)

Page layout stayed with me as a side interest and motivated my early adoption of digital methods. But that will be another post. In 1968, I had no idea what the digital transition was going to do to my life and to the human story. I was a precocious teenager, soaking up the visual arts and exploring the palpable spirit of freedom that was in the air.

 

Schoolboy pranks are generally harmless. I was a pretty quiet kid, but towards the end of my school career that morphed into "quietly rebellious" Blame Spike Milligan and John Lennon if you like.

So, as one of the main layout artists for the new style school magazine, I was able to slip in a fictitious member into the team credits. This was Brian Butchinson, an obscure in-joke. It got me into trouble, as did the decision of two of us to walk around the cross country course in protest. (Most boys ran the first and last hundred yards, in a show of conformity) We walked the whole thing.

You could call it "late onset teenage rebellion" perhaps. I opted to study architecture in London because that's where all the exciting new ideas seemed to germinate, grew my hair long and generally started to believe that we were creating a new and better social order. Make love, not war, all that kind of thing.

The magazine layout experience came out in various ways. One of them a publication called ACDC (amateur cake decorators chronicle) which lampooned architecture as little more than icing to disguise the property developer's nefarious agenda.

The technology used was a spirit duplicator (Banda machine) It was a bit like making carbon copies but using waxed paper and highly concentrated inks. You could run off fifty or so multi-coloured copies.

 

I hung around in London after my first degree, even though I had opted out of the next part of my "training" When did I tell my parents that I had abandoned the professional track in favour of some vague revolutionary zeal? Our world views had drifted apart with remarkable rapidity, with me doing all the heavy drifting.

The small scale printing and publishing theme continued to crop up. David Gestetner was a Hungarian Jew who set up shop in Victorian London with a breakthrough technology for office duplication. Faster than hand copying, simpler and cheaper than sending it out to the local typesetter and printer. In the sixties, Xerox copiers emerged, but by 1972, were not yet viable for larger runs.

The technology that caught my attention was the electrostencil. You put a paper original and a Gestetner stencil side by side on the drum and it produced a distinctive, slightly grainy stencil with both text and images. This is what we used for a subversive "coarse guide" handed out to new students entering the Bartlett.

The message is naive in retrospect, but I'm still quite proud of the drawings and layout.

 

During my "subversive year out" I got to know Roger, who was squatting in Islington and set up a small offset litho operation in the basement, branded as a "free press"

I was also exploring "free school" and "deschooling" ideas. I bumped into a group of teenagers who wanted to publish a magazine and decided to work with them. So this was another iteration of my layout /illustration/ ideological journey.

My views on the school system have oscillated over the years and I'm not sure there is a simple answer, or a one size fits all answer to education. For my own children I was happy for them to go to a government school with a fairly traditional approach, because there was a lot of positive energy, a diverse population and high standards. This was in Zimbabwe, and I wanted them to be prepared to deal with the realities of life there.

I have some concerns about ideological capture of schools in the west in recent years. Hopefully my grandchildren will not be too impacted, but I am conscious that my generation laid the foundation for some of the craziness that is taking place now.

But that's another story 🤔

 

 

After the school magazine in 1968 (and a few subversive student pamphlets) my next big venture into the world of page layout came in 1980, when Nick Wates and Caroline Lwin invited me to illustrate a book about squatting. We had all been students at the Bartlett school of architecture (school of environmental studies) and had squatted in the Tolmers Square area.

 

I just loved to draw. Fundamentally that's been a core motivation for almost 70 years now. The tools have changed, but the appeal of taking a blank sheet and letting my instincts go at it, that's been there since before my first day at school.

 

 

While working on "Squatting, the Real Story" from their home-office in Limehouse, I became aware of the looming digital incursion into the world of page layouts, newspapers, magazines and books. I had no access to computers yet, but I had done enough painstaking manual rework to understand the potential.

Strange to look back on those days of innocence...