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Fans of highbrow ephemera should check out the new issue of Aperture, which features selections from Village Voice arts editor Vince Aletti's voluminous magazine collection.

According to the accompanying article (not online, sorry) by Philip Gefter, there's a:

[M]aze of waist-high stacks of neatly piled magazines in Vince's living room. They range from the earliest issues of Vogue to Interview to U.S. Camera to Flair... From this deep reservoir of printed matter, an inevitable progression can be charted in the current state of photography, fashion, graphic design—in effect, to culture today.

Aletti's collection is an amazing glimpse at what magazines used to look like before they were merely glossy celebrity promotional brochures with the occasional article thrown in to separate DKNY ads.

Recent talk of magazines going through redesigns (see Cargo, third item) or top-down overhauls (see Radar) and fond looks back at brilliant magazine art of the past all point to dissatisfaction with the way magazines look right now. The point is driven home even more by the death of groundbreaking Harper's Bazaar and Show art director Henry Wolf last month. If legends like Wolf or George Lois (still alive, still crackling with ideas ten times better than you're likely to find on the stands today) looked at the average magazine, would they like what they see? Probably not.

At the end of the Aperture piece on Aletti, we're told that he'll be writing a series "on the relationship between magazines, art directors, and photographers." If the samples provided are half as good as the ones in the current issue, we'll be all over it. Frankly, with all the "multiple entry-point" riddled, post-literate junk we skim on the train and in the bathroom every day, our eyes could use a little candy.

Aperture
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