A large collection of these Scientific Book Club editions, dating from the later 1950s and early 1960s, appeared one Sunday morning at the Colwick car boot sale in Nottingham, and covered many more subjects than are represented here. The truth is, while the books were plentiful, some selection was necessary in order to carry those chosen home on foot. In the end, with the ongoing Robert Holcombe project in mind, I selected those titles I thought would most interest my fictional character (though his interests, inevitably, also reflect mine) and some of these were presented as screenprints during a performance purporting to give an account of Holcombe’s life and work back in 2010. Yet aside from their part in this one project, they’re fascinating books on their own terms, catching something of the zeitgeist of their era (sitting, as they do, close to the mid-point between the first use of Atom Bombs on civilian cities in 1945 and the lunar landings of 1969) and inevitably reflect a high Cold War mentality: titles like Men And Atoms, Recent Advances in Soviet Science and The Birth of the Bomb are evocative of all this in themselves, and the addition of studies in ant behaviour, meditations on time and the long story of human ancestry, all reflect the concerns of their day. There’s a technocratic and progressive flavour that is in contrast to a more humanistic tone elsewhere, and interestingly, the differences are visible in the dustjackets, with the more abstract designs housing the more technocratic texts, the more archaic illustrations the philosophical and reflective writings. Not all the designs are credited, but it would seem Leslie Wood, R.W. Woolley and Eric Fraser are responsible for most of those seen here, with Woolley mainly designing the more spectacular abstractions and Fraser the quirkier, illustrative Modernist designs, though there some exceptions even here. Given their origins as bargain reprints, these are beautifully made and designed objects, and a previous example of the Scientific Book Club’s work featured here, Stafford and Golightly’s 1970 study  LSD In Action, shows the standards were maintained through the next decade, at least.

These are mainly library and archive photographs, all featured in How Things Work, an early 1980s part-work published by Marshall Cavendish in the UK to create a week by week encyclopaedia of (then) current and recent technological developments. In some respects it’s a publication that sits somewhere between the same company’s seventies home-making and DIY material of a few years earlier (an issue of this was featured here last month) and the interests of Military Technology Magazine at the same moment (literally so, as the issues of that publication and this one were found together, so presumably collected by the same reader back in 1982). There are also, of course, the usual propaganda elements we’ve seen before, whether in Soviet Union magazine’s celebrations of big infrastructure projects and consumer electronics or the likes of the USSR Academy of Science’s 1961 exhibition catalogue about achievements in rocket engineering. That we think of this propaganda function as synonymous with one system rather than another, despite the publications of both drawing from the same well of formats, devices and strategies of persuasion throughout the Cold War, just shows how effective propaganda can be in achieving its objectives. Here, the scientific accomplishments of Apollo and commercial satellites are used to promote the idea of aggressively militarised space (something of a contrast to the wider-eyed approach taken in the later sixties ABC of Space) while the undeniably impressive automation in a high-tech warehouse is used to sell an idea of a future with minimal workforces, an idea that in the years after 1982 quickly eroded much in the way of employment security and economic influence for large sections of the Western workforce. In other words, selling the idea of technology as our saviour from labour is one thing, implementing it in ways that lead to mass unemployment and the use of that pool of discarded labour to drive down wages, terms and conditions is quite another. The most potent propaganda element lies in the promotion of an idea of inevitability, that technology, by itself, defines the manner of its own implementation, making such side-effects regrettable but unavoidable. We’d do well to bear this in mind whenever current arguments about the digital and networked realms of the WorldWideWeb and mobile communications raise their invariably utopian or dystopian heads: the social, economic and political consequences of such developments are neither inevitable nor even especially complicated to deal with. That there are many ideologues with powerful motivations to suggest otherwise is what ensures the mark of propaganda remains much as it’s always been: that whenever the phrase ‘there is no alternative’ gets uttered, we’re knee deep in its construction.

I don’t know if the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (or, at least, one of its associates) was involved in the making of the various electronic sounds that feature on this undated (probably mid to late 1960s) promotional 45 for an industrial cleaning company, but the sounds it uses certainly fit the template established by the likes of John Baker, David Cain and Delia Derbyshire, as used on BBC radio and television at the same time as this was being recorded. The 45 itself is a plain-sleeved black vinyl 7″ whose a-side features a kind of Science Fiction warning to dust, dirt and bacteria about the invasion of new, super-efficient Cimex cleaning machines coming soon to your workplace, office or factory, while the reverse – labelled as not to be played – features a single continuous test-tone. No information on who the voice-over artist might have been, who created the sounds, or when the thing was made, is included. More unusually, there’s nothing to tell you, as a potential customer, how you might contact Cimex themselves, either. This suggests either that the 45 was distributed with a handout or printed sleeve that has long since parted from the record and been lost (has anyone seen a copy with a picture sleeve, or the ‘enclosed enquiry card’ mentioned near the end?) or perhaps that it was intended to be circulated to radio stations for play during advertising breaks. In fact, after looking at the scans of the record’s labels above and below, and listening to the contents of the a-side on this link, you’ll know pretty much everything I do myself about this one.

Listen here: The Cimex Invasion: Top Secret (3m 41s)

The cover and sixteen circuit diagrams here are all taken from Science Fun Experiments in Electronics, a sort of manual written by Hanna Hock for a Logix-Kosmos publication of 1973 in which the workings of a variety of electronic devices are explained alongside instructions in how to create your own versions at home: from police car flashing lights to electronic metronomes, moisture detectors for plant pots to morse code senders, from a lie detector to a timer. Each suggested project implies an application of electronics that will, in some way, increase control of the world around the nascent inventor: a series of spying tools and mechanisms that together automate many different aspects of housework and play. It’s the diagrams themselves that intrigue me most, though, since when looked at in sequence, in any order you might choose, they take on a very strongly abstract quality, like a series of constructivist graphics offering themes and variations on the basic structure of a grid form, the basic square overwritten with what might seem very like phrases in a language that might be utterly transparent – understood as an alphabet of transistors, connections and wires to be soldered together in these permutations so that precise effects can be generated – or every bit as opaque as Etruscan, or the heiroglyphs of Ancient Egypt before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.

There’s a curiously tangled story of image licensing behind the seemingly straightforward cash-in comic book on display here since even a decade or two after their cinema heyday (and the death of Oliver Hardy) the currency of the comic duo was still clearly sufficient to justify a fairly impressive range of tie-in products. Conscious of this, according to the information here, in 1961 a comics artist named Larry Harmon licensed the use of Laurel and Hardy’s image and onstage characters and recreated them as the cartoon figures seen in this strip (one of four in the comic as a whole). What’s intriguing, I suppose, is that in some ways these caricatures seem more like Laurel and Hardy than the two performers themselves seen on cinema screens – a result, perhaps, of the exaggeration and simplification of those onscreen personas and traits. It also struck me that across these twelve pages are around a hundred single drawings, yet the story itself is so breathlessly slight it barely takes a minute to read through it: the mismatch of craft and time expended to narrative created is alarming, even at the basic level on show here – and it’s definitely Hanna Barbera rather than Disney or Alan Moore, as far as comic artwork quality goes. Despite that, perhaps it does add something to an earlier post on the labour involved in washing for earlier generations, and for all the slightness there are moments here that could be snipped out and recontextualised to seem properly absurdist and profound: I’m especially impressed with the first four frames in panel nine, showing the two disappearing into white soap-suds and conveying a very literal ‘sinking feeling’ with a marvellously concentrated economy. We’ve all been there.

The target has become something of a design icon during the twentieth century though its origins – which seem largely mysterious – probably pre-date Modernism by several centuries, given that the form it takes (a series of roundels or circles of descending size) is likely to have evolved naturally from its purpose: that being to offer proof of accuracy in shooting, whether the projectiles of choice happen to be arrows, knives, darts or bullets. The idea that aim is improved as a marksman closes in on the smallest circle of all (the bullseye: does anyone out there know where that coinage came from?) dictates the form in a way that suggests that the target has evolved almost accidentally into perhaps the perfect Modernist emblem. The distinctive hard edges, restricted colour palette, sense of form entirely following function, would presumably make an object of some interest to the sensibilities that emerged at the Bauhaus, and since then – from Jasper Johns to sixties Mods, the Royal Air Force to an American supermarket chain - the target has become a kind of ubiquitous abstract sign. The examples seen above and below exist close to their source (in that they were printed as genuine paper practice targets to be shot with pellets from Webley’s own pistols and rifles) and utterly removed from it (in that neither has been used, and they now exist – as you look at them - in a non-physical form).  They are not identical, as there are almost imperceptible differences in the paper and print when they’re examined carefully, but they are as good as identical in most important respects. They were also found – for what it’s worth – inside the sleeves of two 12″ format 78rpm records featuring poems by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, as read (and read very well, it should be noted) by Carleton Hobbs and Hermione Hannen, which I suppose adds a further dimension: these particular targets were re-purposed to protect the delicate surfaces of shellac records rather than pinned to doors or trees and shot with pellets. I suppose there’s a certain ‘swords into ploughshares’ analogy in that circumstance and we can make of it pretty much whatever we please.

A set of advertising images from the pages of a 1966 issue of Everywoman magazine, which seems to have been adept at the age-old womens’ magazine art of presenting two quite contradictory faces to its readership: on the one hand, much is offered on the new freedoms of its era and an upfront espousal of female liberties. On the other? Well, a highly regimented notion of what femininity ought to consist of, how it should behave, and a powerful undercurrent that warns how those wonderful liberties depend, finally, on sticking to very traditional notions of what a youthful 1960s lady should want: as it turns out, something not all that different to what her 1950s mother had been expected to want, too, assuming she could afford it. The market for Everywoman must have been young women, probably in their early years of marriage and motherhood, if a glance at the mix of home-making, recipes, and budget-conscious fashion and beauty that adorn its pages are anything to go by. Perhaps the adverts themselves give the game away most starkly, as the David Bailey style fashion plates merely gloss an agenda that hadn’t much changed from earlier generations: the pictures might be sixties glamour, but the products are still hairspray and childrens’ clothes, sewing machines and stockings, hair removers, ‘younger skin’ and slimming techniques. That 1966 is still a pre-feminist era goes without saying, I suppose: but should we be more unsettled than we seem by the fact that exactly the same techniques, products and messages as those found here are embedded – perhaps even more strongly than ever – in pretty much every equivalent of this magazine you’d care to look at on a newsagent’s shelves in 2012?

The other day, we were walking back down Mansfield Road after dropping off some bags of vinyl, CDs and DVDs deemed surplus to requirements during an ongoing clear-out and swung into the retro shop, Daphne’s Handbag, along the way. Just inside the door was a plastic box full of old photographs, and a superficial rummage quickly drew out the image above, followed by nine more in a similar vein, all likely to be from the same family album.

What’s striking about these – even at first glance – is the quality of the photography, which has a similar feel to much that is better known in the realms of 1960s photo-journalism, a sort of post-Free Cinema aesthetic in which ordinary lives are caught on a knife-edge between formality and engagement. These are shots that don’t follow the standard formats of family snaps, but have an intimacy that isn’t quite detached or documentary either.

The characters emerge in ways that go beyond the usual smiling postures to convey (for example) the genuine wonderment expressed by the two girls in the picture above, or the unexpected jolt when we can’t help noticing the youth of the mother as she sits among the children while they eat ice-cream around a table: she holds a position of undoubted authority, yet is pushed towards the edge of the shot and betrays an engaging uncertainty about her role.

There’s no indication on the pictures as to who the family are or where the pictures were taken, though it’s probably safe to assume – given the place they were found – that there’s some local connection. Taken together, as a collective evocation of their era, and individually, as images that would often not seem out of place in an anthology of British photography of the 1960s, these are, by any standards, quite fascinating portraits.

The photograph here is a portrait of a woman only identifiable by her first name, Pat, as taken by Vera Richards in Nottingham: that is, assuming the small embossed name pressed into one corner of the paper refers to the photographer and/or studio, as I assume it does. The same corner has a faded inscription, partially overwritten across that embossed mark, and mostly legible (if not entirely clearly) from the imprint of the pen, as revealed when the photograph’s surface is tilted towards the light. It reads, so far as I can decipher it: “To Freda, all love and wishes and lots of love, Love, Pat, 1940″. The portrait itself duplicates the standard Hollywood Studio look of the day, with soft focus and strong shadows deployed to highlight the face and accentuate its features. But for all that, the question of who Pat was, or why she was sending such an effusively (and is the inscription as effusive as it appears? Are those repeated ‘loves’ a by-product of haste and carelessness or an underwriting of actual feeling?) signed photograph to Freda (whose second name is also missing) in the early years of the Second World War, must remain something of a mystery.

It’s no surprise these days to find monographs on the work of nineteenth and early twentieth century illustrators like John Tenniel, Beatrix Potter, Gustave Dore and Edmund Dulac, but for later practioners the process of recognition seems slow. A case in point might be the book represented here, on which the name of the illustrator is printed in such vanishingly tiny print that it took several attempts to track down the information in the slim volume before the words ‘Bilder von Gisela Gottschlich’ emerged from the blue skies on the book’s back cover, squeezed in just above the ISBN number and publication date (1979, though it seems on the stylistic evidence that the volume is almost certainly recycling illustrations made in the very distinctive manner of the mid to late 1960s). Like the subject of yesterday’s post, the American illustrator Rhoda Campbell Chase, Gisela Gottschlich’s publications seem to be on sale secondhand all over the internet, but information on her life and work is elusive.

Yet what’s so strong in these images is their sense of a period set to one side of itself, every detail revealing an origin in the post-war European context that produced innumerable German and Czech fairytale films, a worldwide vogue for Yugoslav painters like Ivan Generalic and Ivan Rabuzin and the very distinctive animation styles of the Oliver Postgate/Peter Firmin partnership and John Ryan. I suppose it might be called ‘pop-psychedelic kitsch modernism’ or something of the kind, a revisiting of Tenniel, Dulac and Rackham by way of Lotte Reiniger, Edward Bawden and Walt Disney, with all the colours and sense of optimism greatly intestified. Gottschlich’s images for Grimm seem very much in this vein, none of the darkness allowed to shadow the candy-coloured surface. This style seems to have been ubiquitous in its day and Gottschlich seems as finely whimsical an exponent of it as any I’ve seen. If anyone reading this has information it would be fascinating to know more about her.