Eyeball Cards

Back in the mid and late Eighties, I was an unemployed youth in a seaside backwater. Being a recent migrant into the area – I’d been at boarding school and my parents had retired to the town – I was nervous and yet eager to try to socialise.

Enter the old CB radio, inexplicable to the generation growing up with online social media. I joined the local CB club, spent hours (months collectively) on air, chatted, socialised, debated, fell in and out of friendships. I can definitively link my presence on CB radio airwaves with meeting my first wife... but I don’t hold a grudge.

This all came back to me when I saw Etienne Gilfillan’s review of Eyeball Cards by William Hagan and David Titlow [ FT360:64]. As I said to myself when I turned the page – “Wow! A real blast from the past!”

Money was tight, time was on my hands and I was immersed in the culture. I set about creating and making eyeball cards. It’s hard to explain to a generation that can easily create such things on a large scale, even with a basic word processor, but I had to hand-draw each design, lay it out actual size and pay for a local print shop to print and guillotine the cards.

I was a creator of the very eyeball cards featured in this book, including the “Shy Fox” one reproduced in FT’s review. I was living in Herne Bay at the time; Shy Fox was my first girlfriend. I made Gonzo’s first eyeball cards, and I posit that the copyright for the image (BWD) stands for “Bookworm Designs” – Bookworm was Shy Fox’s mum and I assume she took over eyeball card production when I left the area. Alan Cassady-Bishop By email