Book dips into the past to discover some Brand New Retro

One of the more striking book covers of recent years, Brand New Retro’s image of an old-fashioned newspaper stand catches your eye immediately, with its array of magazine covers familiar to those who were frequenting newsagents in the ’60s and ’70s.

Brian McMahon got the idea to digitise print ephemera a few years ago on his website, www.brandnewretro.ie, and now, with Joe Collins, he’s produced a book which features over 700 classic advertisements, articles, and photographs from 50-odd Irish publications.

Fashion features prominently in the book, as does sport.

“We tried to get lightness into the sports part of it, because sports is so well covered,” said McMahon.

“Because of that, I went for the likes of Shoot magazine back in the ’70s, which carried a profile of Frank Stapleton, right up to the cartoon Arthur Mathews used to write in the ’80s, ‘Jimmy’s Boots’, which was a pastiche of the old comic strip ‘Billy’s Boots’. Arthur was great to give permission for that.

“It wasn’t all strictly sports magazines, either. Stuff like the Eamon Dunphy profile came from New Spotlight magazine.”

Was it difficult to get permissions from so many magazines, particularly when most of them have closed down?

“That was a bit tricky, but we’ve been doing this for over five years and in that time we’ve built up good relationships with the likes of the Coughlan family which ran Spotlight,” said McMahon.

“They appreciated what we were doing because we did what we did with respect, we don’t have any ads on the site, and we certainly weren’t making fun of any of the material.

“The cover of the book was one of the first things we did and that conveyed that it was going to be a quality production. If they didn’t want to be part of it, fair enough, but the likes of the RTÉ Guide and Woman’s Way, which are still going, gave permission right away.

“There’s funny content in there, but we let that speak for itself, there’s no need for us to do that. And the serious stuff, people were happy to give it to us. There was a photograph of Steve Staunton playing Gaelic football for a local team in Louth, and once I got in touch with the photographer he said yeah, to go ahead and use it.”

In some cases the process was reversed — publishing a picture clarified identities.

“What we’ve found is that people are saying now, ‘that’s me’, or ‘that’s my Dad’. There was one picture, an ad, of men wearing bri-nylon shirts and it turned out that a guy who works with Joe, who collaborated on the book with me, recognised one of them as his dad — who hadn’t seen the picture since it was done 40 years ago. He’s retired now and started crying when he saw it.

“Some of those ads from the ’60s are brilliant, Irish agencies and artists, and they’re lovely to see, and I’m sure people are getting inspiration for modern design from them even now.”

Brand New Retro by Brian McMahon and Joe Collins (Liberties Press, €29.99).