Hello. My name is Rex Hammock and I’m a magazine geek.
How do I know? Well, on Thursday, when I found myself with 45 free minutes in Washington, DC, I passed up exhibits of works by Goya and Degas to spend time viewing an exhibit of magazine covers. I was early for a business meeting near the White House so I detoured to a new show in the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, “July 1942: United We Stand.”
The exhibit is a three-room gallery of July, 1942 magazine covers, all featuring the American flag. During that month “some five hundred publications waved the stars and stripes to promote national unity, rally support for the war, and celebrate Independence Day,” according to the exhibition notes. Putting the flags on the cover was an idea of Paul MacNamara, a publicist for Hearst, and grew into a nationwide collaboration between the National Publishers Association (now the Magazine Publishers of America) and the U.S. Treasury Department (which still has its original 1789 name).
For an un-recovering magazine geek like myself, the exhibit is straight tequila.
While I’ve never been a flea-market collector of old magazines, the exhibit made me grateful some folks are. Viewing nearly 200 covers of a wide variety of time-frozen covers gives one a renewed appreciation of the role magazines play in recording and shaping our history and culture. (The full collection contains over 300 covers.)
The displayed magazine covers, of which around 65 are framed “originals” and around 100 more are digital scans, are hung by categories, helping the viewer understand the intentions of the cover designers, illustrators, photographers, editors and publishers.
If I had been “blogging” the exhibit, here are some of the thoughts I would have recorded:
I recommend all magazine geeks visit the exhibit, or at least spend some time on the excellent website accompanying it.
(Permanent link: http://rex.weblogs.com/stories/storyReader$348)
OK count me in the magazine geek category. I just went to the website that accompanied the exhibit….That is an awesome exhibit!! The website is also quite good although I wish it displayed all the covers for those of us not visiting D.C. sometime soon. However, it does a nice job of replicating quite a bit of the curator’s work of the museum experience — the who, why, how, etc. behind each magazine cover, a nice amount of detail on the entire magazine cover project, and giving you a sense of what a big-deal decision it was to change some of these magazine cover designs.