Stars, Fan Magazines and Audiences

Abstract

This edited collection focuses on movie magazines, publications first produced for film fans in the United States in 1911, but soon spreading around the world. Bringing together scholars working in a broad range of disciplinary and international contexts, the book unusually considers the magazines as objects of material and visual history.Movie magazines used the whole designer’s toolkit to seduce their readers; font, illustration, photograph, colour and black-and-white were all plied across both editorial content and advertisements, subtly designing issues to create desire in readers and moviegoers alike. The edited collection’s focus on the visual aspects of these magazines – one of their key pleasures for readers both when they were first printed, and now – provides detailed examples of ways visual elements were employed to engender aspiration and longing. The book thus puts the visual contents of the fan magazines at the heart of every chapter.While focusing primarily on Anglophone, UK and US, fan magazines, the book also aims to add geographic diversity through the inclusion of magazines from France, Poland and Chile, as well as diversity in terms of the types of periodicals featured, for example through the inclusion of British fan club magazines, and American industry publications.