Introduction

Summary

This edited collection focuses on movie magazines: magazines produced for movie fans from the 1910s onward. Although the first magazine of this type began in the United States, with the publication of The Motion Picture Story Magazine in 1911, the phenomenon soon spread around the world. This collection aims to emulate this diversity by bringing together scholars working in a broad range of disciplinary and international contexts, and above all, in joining film history and magazine history, fields which cover similar ground but have nonetheless largely operated in separate spheres before now.

While work on movie magazines is still relatively rare, even rarer is that which focuses on the magazine as an object of material history. Most articles and full-length monographs that examine these colourful and fascinating publications are content to quote from isolated articles, rather than studying items in their full printed contexts. Yet, we contend, the full meaning of any article, editorial, photograph, reader's letter or advertisement can only be grasped when considered in situ: the juxtaposition of these different contents inevitably impacts on their meaning.

Our volume, then, builds upon previous work, but adds a greater emphasis to the visual rather than textual aspects of the magazine. A few scholars have previously addressed design in fan magazines but our edited collection's core focus on the visual aspects of these magazines – one of their key pleasures for contemporaneous and contemporary readers alike – both underlines the importance of studying the fan magazine holistically and provides new and detailed examples of the various ways in which design was employed to engender desire. For these movie magazines use the whole of the designer's toolkit to seduce the reader: with text, they made use of font choice, size and colour, as well as varieties of all of these; with illustration, they engaged line drawings, photos, colour and blackand- white to create interest. Wrapped around the contents, the front and back covers stirred excitement and longing, with their usual combination of glamorous star on the front and full-colour advertisement on the back. And throughout these publications, clustered in the first few pages, accumulated in the rear ones, and interspersed throughout, advertisements invoked yearning and aspiration.