The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Heaven for magazines is in this English archive
LONDON — When James Hyman was a scriptwriter at MTV Europe, in the 1990s, before the rise of the inter- net, there was a practical — as well as compulsive — reason he amassed an enormous collection of magazines. “If you’re interviewing David Bowie, you don’t want to be like, ‘OK, mate, what’s your favorite color?’” he said. “You want to go through all the magazines and be able to say, ‘Talk about when you did the Nazi salute at Pad- dington Station in 1976.’ You want to be like a lawyer when he preps his case.”
Whenever pos s ible, Hyman tried to keep two copies of each magazine he acquired. One pristine copy was for his nascent magazine collection and another was for general circulation among his colleagues, marked with his name to ensure it found its way back to him. The mag- azines he used to research features on musicians and bands formed the early core of what became the Hyman Archive, which now contains approximately 160,000 magazines, most of which are not digitally archived or anywhere on the internet.
It was frigid inside the archive during a recent visit — a good 10 degrees colder than the chilly air outside — and staffers were bundled up. Space heaters illuminated a nest that Tory Turk (the creative lead), Alexia Marmara (the editorial lead) and Hyman had made for themselves amid boxes of donations to the collection. It lines more than 3,000 feet of shelving in a former cannon foundry in the 18th-century Royal Arsenal complex in Woolwich, a suburban neighborhood abutting the Thames in southeast London.
The Hyman Archive was confirmed as the largest collection of magazines in 2012 by Guinness World Records; then, it had just 50,953 magazines, 2,312 of them unique titles. Now, a year and a half after Hyman was interviewed by BBC Radio 4, donations are pouring in, and amid them Hyman and his staff have carved out space for an armchair and a snackladen desk. (The rest of the foundry is a storage facility used mostly by media companies to house their film archives and the obsolete technology with which they were made.)
At a moment when the old titans like Condé Nast and Time Inc. are contracting, shape-shifting and anxiously hashtagging, herein lies a museum of real magazine making, testament to the old glossy solidity. The price of admission, however, is stiff: Visitors can do research with a staffer’s aid for 75 pounds per hour (about $100), with negotiable day rates (and a student discount of 20 per- cent), or gingerly borrow a magazine for three working days for 50 pounds.
“I always knew it was a cultural resource and that there was value in it,” Hyman said of the archive. But having the collection verified by Guinness was about validation, he said, “because then people might take it more seriously than just thinking: ‘Some lunatic’s got a ware- house full of magazines.’”
Turk has a knack for repackaging Hyman’s animated monologues into what in the trade are called sound bites. “I maintain that James always had the foresight that this was going to be some- thing else, more than just a sort of collector’s dream,” she said. “The archive is all about preserving and documenting the history of print.”
Each member of the team has a particular familiarity with the archive’s con- tents and has an institutional knowledge of certain titles a nd the i r whereabouts. Hyman is great on mus ic, with a particular fondness for New Musical Express. Turk is strong on fashion, and Marmara is especially good at unearthing what Hyman calls “visual gold” — weird or unsung design elements, photo shoots or ads.
“If we all died tomorrow, it would be over,” Turk said.
No donation is turned down, and Hyman described the archive as a final resting place for printed mat- ter. “We’re heaven for mag- azines,” he said.
The archive, for example, recently accepted a “loan” of around 2,680 British, Italian, French and U.S. fashion magazines dating back to the 1930s from British writer Colin McDowell, the author of 25 books on fashion. McDowell said his magazines were becoming “unmanageable in my Soho pied-à-terre and overwhelming in my house in the country.”
McDowell said he saved the magazines because they were “the quickest and most memorable source of informa- tion,” and that he was “more interested in how clothes are featured in magazines than in their catwalk life,” as well as in fashion photography and illustration trends. Hyman accepted the magazines on the condition that McDowell can recove r them from the archive should he need them and that his collection remain intact.
Jeremy Leslie, the owner of MagCulture, a magazine shop in London that serves as the locus of a boom in independent magazine pub- lishing in England, said that because magazines by their very nature were rushed to press, they reflected the par- ticular quirks of society dur- ing short intervals of time.
“In order to understand the value of the Hyman Archive, you have to understand the value of magazines above and beyond their contemporary pur- pose,” he said. “There is a canon of grea tm agazines that is forming, but actually when you look through even magazines that are central to that canon, you see the pages you don’t get shown. subplots There to this are bigger so many picture that don’t get spotted unless you have the whole thing.”
This is especially true of niche magazin esoronesthat aren’t widely thought of as classics, Leslie said. “When youc ome to look at something from 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, there are obvious kinds of historical archiveworthy elements, but they are also a great record of design trends, typefaces, photography, writing and technology, so they are fantastic records of time gone.”
Hyman isn’t a completist, at least not anymore. “I used to be,” he s aid, “but it will never end.” Instead, he is seeking funding to finish meta-tagging and digitizing the entire archive for use by academics, curators and researchers. He still tries to get two copies of each magazine, but now it’s because one needs to be unbound for faster scanning. An archivist has examined the setup at Cannon House and determined it will be safe for another five years or so before needing to be housed properly, ideally as the permanent collection in a proper museum of magazines.
“The style of exhibition is changing, it’s becoming more populist, more based around contemporary culture, so therefore magazines are becoming important objects,” Turk said. “They show the period, they’re great objects.” Still, there are titles Hyman covets. He recently attended a lecture on Japanese magazines, and his mind was somewhat blown by the Tokyo-based Popeye, the nearly unclassifiable “magazine for city boys.” “My jaw just hit the ground. It was ridiculous. I was like, ‘I can’t wait for the crate to arrive with every issue of Popeye,’” he said. The speaker “had another magazine that was just about businessmen who’d gotten too drunk and went to sleep in the middle of the night in weird places. And he had two different magazines just about pigeons. I was like, ‘Whoa.’”