Today we’re looking at two classic American magazines: TIME and LIFE. Published weekly for most of the 20th century, these sister periodicals offer complementary perspectives on the biggest stories of the era, with LIFE’s vivid photojournalism bringing immediacy and emotional resonance to TIME’s in-depth reporting. They’ve always been popular items at the shop, but while past collectors sought out issues that commemorated special events or milestone dates from their own lives, a younger generation of readers are embracing these magazines for the design language they helped define—as archives of iconic mid-century modern fashion, architecture, typography, and consumer goods. Explore the way that objects slip from personal nostalgia into cultural history as time and life march irrevocably forward on this new-for-now #brattlecast.
Brattlecast #68 - Reading it for the Articles
It almost sounds like a joke: a braille Playboy. Although the magazine is arguably most famous for its photography, it also publishes serious literature, journalism, and interviews. In the 1970’s, when the Library of Congress began translating magazines into braille, Playboy quickly became one of its most popular offerings. The braille edition contained no descriptions of Playboy’s photos, but it still featured enough explicit romantic advice and off-color humor to earn the ire and censorship efforts of a handful of conservative congressmen, leading to a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of its vision impaired readers. All this fascinating history is here in the studio with us today, at a time when, poetically, the internet and new technologies are in the process of rendering both adult magazines and braille itself obsolete.
