Christmas day, 1982. Stomach heavy with the contents of her Cadbury selection box, swaddled in the acrylic comfort of her new Argos pyjamas, the typical tween’s thoughts have naturally turned to the god-like powers of creation afforded by the inevitable coloring section of the holiday Annual. Look-in’s 1982 offering is fashion-based, with four pages featuring the year’s hottest trends for our eager youth to adorn in felt tip…
The Italy of the early 1980s was a country in a state of transformation. The post-war economic boom which had been particularly strong in the industrialized North of the country was peaking, and a generation of young people were rejecting the factional politics that, through the unresolved legacies of Fascism and Communism, continued to inform, and to some extent dictate, life in the country…
Ed “Big Daddy” Roth was a central figure in the hod rod and custom car scene that flourished in 1950s and early 1960s Southern California. Born in Beverly Hills to German immigrants, Roth grew up in Bell, California, home of “speed shop” Bell Auto Parts and nearby Slauson Avenue, a popular drag strip. After a stretch in the Air Force, Roth became a sign painter at Sears and, in 1958, starting designing cars out of his garage…
By the early 1980s, TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons had fully taken over the rec rooms and breakfast nooks of North America. The release of the three Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks between 1977 and 1979, along with countless AD&D adventure modules, codified optional and advanced rules that had been growing throughout the mid-1970s…
Though nominally providing undemanding weekly amusement for children, British children’s comics from the late 20th century provided a platform for many artists—and writers—with distinctly idiosyncratic and obsessive sensibilities often bordering on what, in a different context, might have been considered “underground”…
Hundreds of books on various psychic phenomena—both surveys and how-to manuals, sometimes both—were released throughout the 1960s, as the paranormal, especially ESP, began to be taken seriously by academics and the American and Soviet intelligence communities. What makes Sixth Sense notable, apart from a convincing cover illustration, is that it’s essentially a kid’s book…
These two odd little volumes were discovered a few months ago in an antiquarian book shop in Canterbury, UK. Published by the British Society of Dowsers in 1980, Dowsing and Archaeology and Site and Survey Dowsing collectively offer a few dozen short articles, culled from the annals of the Journal of the British Society of Dowsers over the half-century leading up to 1980. As the book titles make clear, these articles take dowsing past its usual folk magic remit of finding sources of water and into territory usually ceded to archeologists or metal detectorists: finding ancient objects and the outlines of ancient structures…
A recent spate of books have sought to analyze the visual culture of 20th-century ufology. 2016’s Flying Saucers Are Real!, which featured the archive of science fiction writer and amateur UFO material collector Jack Womack, offered richly-drawn, full-color images of UFO culture from every decade of the phenomenon. What Flying Saucers Are Real! did for American ufology, David Clarke’s UFO Drawings From The National Archives does for the United Kingdom…
In one of the first episodes of BBC Scotland’s epochal 1979 paranormal drama series The Omega Factor, the program’s psychic protagonist can be seen sitting in his modish Manchester flat, leafing through a magazine with an aquamarine cover. The cover illustration shows a trombonist, the tubes of his instrument drooping in an evocation of psychokinetic metal-bending. That magazine was Alpha…
Brian Bennett’s career started in grand fashion; while barely out of his teens, he became the drummer for one of the UK’s biggest pop groups, Cliff Richard’s backing band, The Shadows, taking over from original drummer Tony Meehan. Bennett’s 1978 solo effort, Voyage (A Journey Into Discoid Funk), marked his first solo effort…
We Are the Mutants 