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.
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.
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.
Colophon of George Routledge & Sons shows King Lud and Lud Gate
A discussion about a colophon – those graphic devices that used to be printed on the title pages of books – used by George Routledge & Sons had me delving into my archive this weekend. Like most Victorian publishers, George Routledge launched his own monthly magazine. The year was 1867. This was a popular idea among publishers: they could advertise their catalogues each month and try out new authors by serialising their works. The popularity of a serial was a gauge for the first print run of the collated book.
The company was more imaginative than many when it came to the title. No Routledge’s magazine for them; unlike Chambers’s (1832), Macmillan’s (1859) and Longman’s (1882). Instead, they followed the fashion for naming magazines after London streets or places and chose The Broadway with the subtitle ‘A London Magazine’.
The title might today bring to mind New York’s theatre district, but the magazine was published from the George Routledge office in the Broadway, a street near St Paul’s Cathedral off Ludgate Hill. This area was the centuries-old home to London’s book publishers until it was flattened in the London Blitz in 1940. They also had a New York office at 416 Broome Street, just off West Broadway, since 1854. Broadway fitted on both sides of the Atlantic. So, Broadway it was.
The company clearly had a sense of place, which was further demonstrated in their colophon. This was introduced in 1903, according to Book Collecting World, which has several posts about Routledge, including one on dating the publisher’s books.
The sense of place comes from the building seen below the decorated ‘R’ of the colophon. This is Lud Gate, the medieval entrance to the City of London that once stood between Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill; more or less where Ludgate Circus is now. The Grub Street Project has a much more detailed image of Lud Gate. The colophon image of a king may well be Lud.
Headline for CRB Barrett article in The Ludgate Monthly (May 1891)
A four-page article by CRB Barrett in the first issue of a later magazine, The Ludgate Monthly (May 1891), gives a history of the gate and shows three views of the building. ‘Ludgate and its memories’ points to the discrepancies between the first two – though the gate was rebuilt several times – and the third engraving looks to have been taken from the same source as the Grub St Project’s.
Ludgate during the Great Fire of 1666
The first Lud Gate was built by the Romans as part of their London wall in the second century; it was rebuilt after the Great Fire of London in 1666 and demolished in 1760.
Lud Gate in 1670
Photographs often show the Old King Lud, a Victorian pub that once occupied the north-west corner of Ludgate Circus but now, sadly, is a cafe.
The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, cover by Gilbert Rumbold
This cover of The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, the Bank of England’s staff magazine, is from March 1953. The magazine takes its name from a nickname for the bank dating to 1797. Back then, the prime minister, Pitt the Younger, was trying to get the money to fund a war with France. Thomas Gillray portrayed the bank as an old lady sitting on a trunk of gold to keep her suitor at bay. The satirical cartoon was titled ‘Political Ravishment, or the Old Lady of Threadneedle-Street in Danger!’
The bank’s address is in Threadneedle Street in the City of London, a 3.5-acre site it still occupies, bounded by Bartholemew, Lothbury and Princes streets. It was founded in 1694, making it the second-oldest central back, after Sweden’s.
The Old Lady nickname was dusted off in 2003 for Jessie Bonner-Thomas, the scourge of banking ‘fat cats’. The Sunday Times Magazine supplement of July 20 photographed her as the face of the activists attacking the City’s overpaid bankers. A few years before, she had come to fame at the age of 88 for taking the chief executive of Barclays to task at the bank’s annual meeting. She had castigated Matt Barrett, ‘the Montreal mauler’, for a ‘scrooge’ rise in her widow’s pension of £1 while he was given a ‘£1.3m hello’. Furthermore, Barclays had closed hundreds of branches and ‘wasted £15m’ on an advertising campaign featuring film stars such as Anthony Hopkins.
Watch out fat cats: Jessie Bonner-Thomas in the Sunday Times Magazine
The 1953 Old Lady magazine cover design was by Gilbert Rumbold. It was used from at least 1941 to 1959. It shows the courtyard of the bank building, which cannot be seen from the surrounding streets, in about 1760. Rumbold was a prolific book illustrator, famed for his art deco illustrations in barman Harry Craddock’s Savoy Cocktail Book of 1930. A signed first edition sold for £3,250 in 2021.
A Gilbert Rumbold illustration for Harry Craddock’s Savoy Cocktail Book
The Old Lady magazine was printed by Hunt, Barnard and Co at the Sign of the Dolphin in Aylesbury. It was a quarterly staff magazine published from 1921 until 2007. Frank Dancaster was editor for eight years from 1952.
Strangely enough, the Bank of England played a role in establishing the formula for weekly popular magazines in Britain more than 100 years ago. In October 1889, Alfred Harmsworth’s recently launched Answers magazine offered a prize of one pound a week for life to whomever could guess the amount of cash in the Bank of England on a given day. The competition was a sensation – 718,000 postcard entries, each signed by six people, were received. The prize-winner’s estimate was within two pounds of the actual amount, and when the competition was over the circulation of Answers was about 100,000. An amazing example of social marketing.
Town Talk based on a drawing by Charles Dana Gibson
Nice reference in this Town magazine logo (April 1963) to the US artist of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, Charles Dana Gibson. His ‘Gibson girls’ rivalled those of William Barribal, Raphael Kirchner and Suzanne Meunier in portraying beautiful women of the age. These artists’ illustrations appeared in magazines and on posters and postcards on both sides of the Atlantic for decades – and surely Rachael, the replicant played by Sean Young in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, was styled on a Gibson girl 80 years later.
The Town Talk column talked about photographer John Bulmer, Belgium trying to retrieve her name in the Congo, a shortage of Wilkinson blades – even in its Pall Mall showroom, and the merzwerk (giant collage) artist Kurt Schwitters.
Town magazine’s ‘least’ list: magazine and film titles are underlined
The January 1964 issue of Michael Heseltine’s men’s monthly Town ran this ‘Least of 1963’, to ‘wing out the old’ year. Tracking down the who, what and why of this anti-person-of-the-year list turned into a fascinating exercise. I’ve added links to websites that should explain the significance of each entry (be sure to open up the extended captions on photo agency websites). The list is dominated by the Profumo Affair – which brought down Harold Macmillan’s Conservave government – but brings in a host of other characters, including the Great Train Robbery, the future King Charles III and a leading fascist – at a time when the nature of Britain’s own character was changing and the Swinging Sixties were under way. It was also the year that Britain’s consumer magazine industry became a near monopoly under Cecil King’s Mirror Group – soon to evolve into IPC, the ‘Ministry of Magazines’. Makes 2025 look boring. As for the seventh item on the list – surely that’s me!
Early colour magazine cover: Illustrated London News of 1855
This is one of the earliest colour magazine covers. The Illustrated London News dated Saturday 22 December 1855 is also regarded as having set an trend for using colour at Christmas and for special issues, an idea later copied by magazines as varied as John Bull and the Radio Times.
The image comes with the caption ‘While shepherds watched their flocks by night — All seated on the ground’, from a carol dating back to the 18th century. The drawing of the angel appearing before the shepherds is by [Sir] John Gilbert, who did thousands of images for the Illustrated London News.
Colour printing using wooden blocks: yellow, blue, red and black
The printing was by George C Leighton of Red Lion Square. The Leighton Brothers – Charles, George and Steven – were pioneers of colour printing using wooden blocks; yellow, blue, red and black were used for this illustration.
Fireworks at Versailles for Victoria’s visit to France
The issue carried several other coloured images and some double-page engravings, including this one of fireworks at Versailles for Queen Victoria’s visit to France.
Bring on the clowns: Christmas for London Life (24 December 1966)
The cover line for London Life – ‘A last-minute look at Christmas’ – was probably inspired by the fact that this 1966 issue was published on Christmas Eve. This weekly listings magazine was – incredibly – a 1965 relaunch of Tatler under magazine wunderkind Mark Boxer, who had made his name on Queen and then by launching the Sunday Times Colour Section, which evolved into the Sunday Times Magazine. London Life did not survive long, however, like two other famous Swinging Sixties magazines, Town and Nova, it thought money grew on trees. The following issue was the last.
Peter Cook as a cobbler elf and Dudley Moore as his bitchy fairy wife
A photograph inside showed satirists Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in costume for a charity event. They were kitted out for a grown-up take on fairy tales as ‘a cobbling elf married to a bitchy little fairy wife.’ Their dialogue included the lines:
And Tinker Bell told me about that pathetic pass you made at her down at the fairy-ring last Midsummer’s Eve when you asked her back here to see your last. She laughed so much she broke her bell and couldn’t tinkle for six months.
Notice the line ‘… you asked her back here to see your last’. Another reference to ‘last’ after the cover line. Was this a reference to the last issue of the magazine?
A self-referential Christmas cover from Nova magazine in December 1971
Nova was a woman’s monthly launched in the Swinging Sixties that liked to do things differently, as can be guessed from the cover line – ‘Adultery, rape, eroticism, extortion – another jolly Christmas issue!’ It’s also a self-referential cover, an idea with a strong tradition in British magazines, including at Christmas.
Magazines like to give their readers a little something extra at Christmas and the last issue of The LondonIllustratedStandard before Christmas 1895 was no exception. The photograph shows ‘Clever ballet dancers of great ability who have recently come from Vienna’ who are having ‘a quiet chat during the “waits” at a london music-hall’. Taking and printing such photographs was still a challenge and if you look closely, you’ll see that the image has been heavily touched up in places. This includes the smoke swirling up from the women’s cigarettes.
To add to the Christmas cheer, the LondonIllustratedStandard‘s cover lines promote ‘More than one hundred pretty girls in this number’, and features about women card players, and Miss Ellaline Terriss.
Terriss was a popular singer and actress. She was interviewed by Roy Plomley on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs in 1952. Although you can’t listen to the episode, you can see her choice of eight pieces of music. The Grim’s Dyke Hotel, former home of the dramatist and librettist WS Gilbert who changed the face of popular opera with Arthur Sullivan, has a colourful profile of her.
New Statesman 1993 jan 29 John Major Clare Latimer
The first Sunday Times colour section from 4 February 1962 (though the cover is not dated)
Girl Illustrated front cover with Dr Who girl Katy Manning and a Dalek
Marilyn Monroe on the cover of Blighty from 1956
Raphael Sabatini’s Captain Blood brought to visual life on the cover of Pearson’s Magazine (1930) by Joseph Greenup
Madonna cover from i-D dated March/April 1984
Madonna rides again on the cover of Cosmopolitan with its May 2015 issue
Blighty pin-up cover for the popular men’s weekly by MB Tompkins in 1958 (16 August)
Winnie the Pooh appeared exclusively in colour in six 1928 issues of Home Chat
The Penny Magazine shows itself being sold from what looks like a railway station stall in 1904
An in-your-face spread from Loaded in May 1995
The first Daleks cover for Radio Times in November 1964
Cover of BOAC’s inflight magazine Welcome Aboard in 1970
Racy French weekly Vie Parisienne from 1926
Karl Marx as the Uncle Sam derivative of Kitchener
‘K of K’ – Kitchener of Khartoum – caricature by Will Scott on the cover of Drawing magazine in February 1916
Bovril advert of Hercules fighting a lion by Stanley Berkeley from Young Gentlewoman magazine of 1892
Kate Moss in Corinne Day photograph on cover of the Face in July 1990
Evil victim: Diana Rigg on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine, 28 February 1982
Anna Wintour was told this Madonna cover would not sell
Lilian Hocknell artwork revived for Christmas 2014 Vintage View from Woman’s Weekly magazine cover
Diana Rigg as The Avengers’ Mrs Peel on the cover of TV World in 1965
Racy illustration by Oldham for the weekly magazine Woman
This 1946 holiday season cover from John Bull forecasts a web fate for the slumbering gent
Margaret Banks drew this charmer for Home Chat magazine in 1938. Note the baby is wearing reins
Cover of Le Petit Journal of 25 June 1916
This is the cover for the relaunch of Woman’s Own in 1937 as a colour weekly. Note this is a true self referential cover because the woman is holding a copy of the magazine she appears on!
Home Chat, a leading women’s popular weekly, from 14 May
One of Miss Fish’s drawings of Eve, from the popular Tatler column
Popular Flying in 1934 when it was edited by Biggles creator WE Johns
The glossy monthly Queen occupied the old Tit-Bits office in 1947
Weekly Illustrated magazine pioneered photojournalism (3 March 1936)
53 Bedford Square in London’s Bloomsbury. This Georgian building is up for sale at £12 million
Chilprufe advert from Queen magazine in 1961
Acorn User magazine cover from December 1982. This issue would have been edited from the Bedford Square offices
Woman’s Fair from January 1940 filled with content from the US, including a Jon Whitcomb cover illustration
A whacky contrast in all senses of the word from the previous week
New Illustrated starts to change its name to Record Weekly in 1920 (January 17 issue)
John Gwynn’s poem ‘A Death Mask’ in the Strand magazine appears to have been inspired by a drowned woman in Paris
The Observer Magazine cover shows Alexei Sayle as the Hitler diaries forger in the 1991 TV series Selling Hitler
José Ferrer as Cyrano de Bergerac on this Everybody’s magazine cover from 10 October 1951. The design has a 3D effect, with the nose appearing to stand proud of the page
Eddie Hapgood, the England and Arsenal captain, on the cover of Weekly Illustrated in 1934 with his son, Tony
The first issue cover of John Bull from 1 April 1903
A letterpress flyer for the latest serial in Pictorial Magazine – could this 1902 image have sparked Alfred Leete’s imagination?
Last issue of Rupert Murdoch’s Today newspaper (17 November 1995)
This cat with its amazing, lip-licking tongue is from a Whiskas advert of 1964
The first issue cover for Carlos, an inflight magazine for Virgin in 2003
Kate Greenaway painting called ‘Darby and Joan’ on Illustrated London News – or is this a pair of radical printers?
FHM June 2004. But what’s happened to the nipples on Abi Titmuss?
A colour cover for Crusoe magazine of January 1925
Peter Hack-Brookes cover for Oz from September 1971 – a copy from a US magazine cover by Peter Driben from 1949
Hand-drawn title for Drawing magazine, February 1916
The pointing man from an advert in London Opinion magazine, 17 September 1910
Ronald Searle’s cartoon glossary to printers’ jargon
Detail of Helena Christiansen’s face from the Vogue cover
Germany’s leader, Kaiser Wilhelm, with his flamboyant moustache and military uniform, at the start of World War I. He is described as ‘The Ravager’
Home Chat cover from 19 September 1914 with a front cover story about supporting the Queen’s Guild, which had been set up as a way for women to back the war effort
A Heartfield montage on the cover of Picture Post dated 9 September 1939
Debbie Harry and Blondie on the first issue cover of Smash Hits from November 1978
Adrian Flowers took this Nova cover (July 1971)
Je Suis Charlie – Charlie Hebdo’s website after the murderous attack on its Paris office
Town magazine and the`Girl in Red Water up to her Charlies’ cover from September 1965
The Kitchener poster shown in the third part of the Great War partwork in 1933
Opening of 5-page article on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey with sketches by Clive Arrowsmith in Town magazine
Mussolini writes for the right-wing Britannia magazine in 1927
John Bull in 1917 – the magazine was used as a promotional tool for Horatio Bottomley’s financial schemes
Leader magazine led the world in putting Marilyn Monroe on its cover in April 1946
Woman’s Own liked clean cover designs in the 1930s with few cover lines – but notice Ursula Bloom promoted her for a special article (30 July 1938)
Marion Jean Lyon in 1923
HMS Queen Elizabeth super dreadnought by Harry Hudson Rodmell on the cover of New Illustrated magazine (18 October 1919)
Marc Jacobs 2014 Playboy special issue in perspex box
Strand magazine front cover from March 1891 by George Charles Haité
Tom Browne’s drawing shoe incredible attention to detail; he could do so much with so little
This logo from the Daily Mail echoes the original masthead for Answers Magazine
The return of the Daleks to Dr Who in 2005 sparked this gatefold cover for the Radio Times
Cute cover-up: Naomi Campbell on the cover of GQ in April 2000
Madonna on the front cover of Cosmopolitan magazine in the US for May 1990
Beautiful Britons glamour magazine first issue cover from November 1955
A different look for the cover of Smash Hits, also in February 1984
Look, spring 2009
Vivian Blaine from the London stage adaption of the musical Guys and Dolls on the cover of Picture Post in 1953
Billy Fury? James Dean?
Front cover title from Woman’s Own from 19 May 1955
‘Mother Christmas’ cover for Needlewoman magazine from December 1925
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