Michael Erdman is Head of Middle East and Central Asian Collections at The British Library with overall responsibility for all manuscript holdings in Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Chagatai, Coptic, Hebrew, Kurdish, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Syriac.
I talked with him about my recent magazine hunting exploits in Istanbul, and how what we found fits into the overall history of magazine publishing in Turkey. Esoteric, I know, but hey, that’s where passion takes you.
Here’s a look at a few items discussed: this Ottoman magazine from the mid-late 1920s:
You’ll notice how it (and many of the covers below) features the face of a beautiful woman. This one in particular was puzzling. Why was the work of a Polish-American illustrator, W.T. Benda, on the cover of a 1920s Ottoman magazine?
A bit of googling revealed that it was likely first commissioned by Hearst’s International magazine
Michael explains that Turkish editors routinely swiped images from Western magazines which had made their way in the country. Same with the Greeks it seems. It’s highly unlikely they paid any kind of agency/copyright fees for these:
The image on the left appeared first on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine.
Michael and I talk about the Westernizing influence of this, and Hayat magazine, plenty of which we scored. Brigitte Bardot incidentally led the way with cover appearances
Of course she wasn’t the only blonde bombshell to appear
Notice those divots along the spine of the magazine? Evidence that it was defenestrated (I know this word choice isn’t quite right - officially it describes what Putin does to his opponents - but it works so well here that it’s going to stand) from a book it was bound in.
We also talk a bit about Hafta magazine
and too about the importance of caricature in Turkey. Ramiz Gökçe’s Chubby Aunt, for example, was a big hit in the 1940s (and today with you readers):
Ramiz was a frequent contributor to Karikatur magazine. Here’s one of his covers:
His work has been labelled by some as antisemitic. Michael unpacks the historical nuances of this prejudice as they pertain to Turkey.
For more images of magazines referenced during our conversation, check out his blog here.
Finally, although he doesn’t address the topic (because I failed to ask him about it) here are a few fun pieces of erotica we picked up while in Istanbul (for a primer on collecting this precious material, listen to my conversation with Tony Fekete, a famed collector in the field, here)
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