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‘Out-of-the-Rut’: Sparling Cut Catalogues and the Fun of Fashion — by Daniel Haynes

Photomechanical Printing in Colour

Sparling Cut male catalogue [c. 1926] JJColl: Men’s Clothes 5 (2)

In the 1890s, after decades of experimentation, colour and photography came together in the form of photomechanical printing in colour. The constituent hues of the original to be reproduced were separated by means of colour filters (red for cyan, green for magenta, and blue for yellow). A combination of three colours could produce an acceptable colour image. Black was sometimes added to produce what would be called CMYK today, but printing in three colours remained the norm for the first few decades of the 20th century. Such methods of colour printing were applied to lithography a little later than to relief printing.

The Sparling Cut Male

The rise of online shopping has changed the way we browse brands and products completely. Wholesale catalogues are increasingly rare, with the whole thing replaced at any rate by an online search. That’s not so much a bad thing — online catalogues are great in many ways. But I can’t shake that nostalgia for the real thing, and I remember fondly the excited flick-through of an Argos catalogue in the run-up to Christmas, and all those glossy, enticing pictures in that ‘laminated book of dreams’, to steal a phrase from Bill Bailey. Argos stopped producing physical catalogues around 2018. But it was all very fun.

Recapturing transient cultural moments like these is at the heart of The Art of Advertising, which explores the production and dissemination of advertisements from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Catalogues are valuable compendia of advertisements in their own right (the oldest date to 15^th century Europe) and yet their survival rates are slim: generally speaking, ephemera repositories considered catalogues to be books; libraries saw them as ephemera.[1] Adding to this, mail-order catalogues and advertisements were profuse: ‘junk mail’ of this kind is rarely treasured. Not infrequently, the quality of mail-order items themselves was brought into question, even with the zenith of the department store and the upsurge of ‘reach-me-down’ clothing in the early twentieth century. Accordingly, the catalogue’s status as ‘literature’ has been questionable at best, despite evidence of essentially literary endeavours from at least 1863.[2] To add to this ongoing discussion – and to argue the case for a literary revaluation – I am going to focus on one particular example from the exhibition: The Sparling Cut Male menswear catalogue.

The front cover of The Sparling Cut Male is displayed in the first case of The Art of Advertising, representing contemporary developments in photomechanical printing in colour and the advent of the colour-printed catalogue that is so familiar to us today. A full-colour printed catalogue was uncommon in 1926: it was more normal to have art paper covers printed in colour and the rest of the catalogue in black and white on inferior paper.[3] Sparling Cut was by no means the first company to take advantage of the printed catalogue, and certainly made no revolutionary impact on catalogues and consumer culture at large. In fact, it’s hard to find out anything about Sparling Cut: all evidence suggests a small-to-medium-sized business operating out of two premises in the City, arriving on the scene sometime following the First World War[4] and continuing to occupy advertising space until at least the Second World War[5], before winding up in 1974[6]. The Bodleian holds only two issues: Vol 1. No. 5 and No. 6, which features in The Art of Advertising. No. 5 has colour wrappers, but is printed in black-and-white, making No. 6 even more unusual. As an exemplar of the technical possibilities of the three-colour process, this Sparling Cut catalogue provides a window into the fashion culture of the early twentieth century – a period of rapid sartorial change and development – and these publications are unique, even by modern standards, for their stylish design, comic vision and emphatic textuality.

With this gorgeous front cover for No. 6, Sparling Cut sells before anything else the feeling of wearing a Sparling suit. There’s a touch of Bright Young Things tempered with a pecuniary pun on ‘figures’. And note that twee attribution: ‘Edited by Old Man Sparling in his Sanctum’. Where many catalogues of the period offer little more than descriptive lists dressed up in sales jargon, The Sparling Cut Male distinguishes itself with lengthy interpolations of prose and poetry. Upon opening each issue, the reader meets with a reflective address from the ‘Old Man’ on his literary labour of love. Just look at the foliate capital that crowns the first sentence of this issue:

It’s helpful here to adopt Clare Rose’s conception of the ‘frustrated author’ to describe Old Man Sparling (if indeed he is a real person, and not the creation of a penny copywriter).[7] In the introduction to No. 6, Old Man Sparling has ‘[laid] down the shears in favour of the pen’ and welcomes ‘this editing business’ from his ‘Editor’s chair’. He directs us to ‘my special article on page 4’. Every employee has been ‘schooled in a unique method peculiar to my business’; if anything seems a bit complicated, simply consult ‘your friend’ Sparling. From these first pages alone, Sparling catalogues are evidently a playfully erudite affair.[8]

Its literary contributions are a mix of poems, letters of thanks, musings on fashion, jingles, and satirical fiction. The best of these is a ‘Day in the Life of a Sparling Cut Male’, attributed to an ‘ardent supporter’ of the ‘Sparling Cut cult’. In this page-long story, a young man recounts the life-changing power of a Sparling suit: he arrives at work to be immediately summoned by his boss, who offers ‘my salary doubled’, ‘a seat on the board’, and ‘his youngest and prettiest daughter with an income of £10,000 per year’ — all thanks to Sparling Cut! In a similarly ironic fashion, the front cover for Vol. 5 shows a dapper young man (we assume wearing Sparling) utterly failing to win the attention of a woman. In the article ‘—Then I Woke Up’, Old Man Sparling receives a knighthood for ‘making England the best-dressed country in the world’ but (you can guess from the title where this is going) it is revealed to be a dream. In any view, self-deprecation is an audacious marketing strategy. Somehow, Sparling Cut makes it work. This dry, urbane humour is reminiscent of the Fortnum and Mason catalogues praised by George Bernard Shaw.

Complementing the text are vibrant, full-page colour images. Old Man Sparling explains:

The illustrations in this edition of the “Sparling Cut Male” are from living models wearing “Sparling Cut” clothes, and are the work of that brilliant artist, Mr. Wilton Williams, and to whom we are much indebted for his faithful reproductions.

Wilton Williams (fl. 1915-1930), perhaps best known for his ‘Blackpool’ poster for Great Central Railway, brings here the same vibrant energy to the fore. Thinking about modern catalogues again (I think particularly of the Argos catalogue), part of the magic of those catalogues is not only the visible representation of objects, right there in all their glossy glory, but a kind of emotive mimesis: staged actors bounced with delight on that trampoline you wanted, played the latest games console, built that Lego set you were dying for. Likewise, when you flick through a volume of Sparling Cut you are struck by the sheer activity of its models, who are visibly social, energetic, and (perhaps most importantly) enjoying demonstrable degrees of personal and societal success. Sparling Cut men (and women, too) look like they’re having fun, both at work and at home.

The John Johnson Collection has many menswear catalogues to choose from. By considering how Sparling Cut advertises its products compared to its contemporaries, we learn a lot about changes in fashion in the early twentieth century. As the stuffy formality of Edwardian dress fell out of favour, and a freer sense of style developed alongside relaxed delineations of dress, white-collar men of older dispositions responded with what Maria Constantino calls ‘a mechanised and industrial order’: strictly practical, multi-purpose business suits, in a limited range of dark, muted colours. (One thinks of T. S. Eliot’s crowd over London Bridge in The Waste Land.) For reference, here is a second menswear catalogue from this period, for Clement H. Sunderland, which in contrast to The Sparling Cut Male is practically funereal:

Clement H. Sunderland catalogue, 1921 – John Johnson Collection Men’s Clothes 5 (3).

The hallmarks of a more conservative style are evident here, right up to the neoclassical backdrops: double-breasted jackets, a restricted range of trouser pairings, and spats. However, the ‘speeding up of life’ — strongly associated with the rise of the department store, ‘reach-me-down’ mass produced clothing and, for men, a slim, ‘youthful’ body shape — meant that savvy retailers responded with an emphasis on style and colour, sparking ‘the struggle between youth and age’.[9] Single breasted suits with two or three buttons (slightly in at the waist) became fashionable, in a range of colours and patterns. The Sparling Cut Male locates itself firmly on-trend against ‘the Dullness of Yesterday’:

‘Mass-produced’ did not need to mean ‘ill-fitting’, and many outlets provided tailoring services as standard. And just as well: ‘a perfect fitting around the hips’ repeats the assertion that a 1920s suit is not only for working – it is also for dancing.

To finish up, here are two phrases from The Sparling Cut Male. The first is “it’s colour we want in the hum-drum of everyday life.” The second is “express your personality” — a provocatively modern slogan, printed on the back pages. There’s no doubting that Sparling Cut offered a wide range of patterns, colours and style for the fashion-conscious male. However, it’s important not to overstate Sparling’s apparent uniqueness. To understand its place in men’s fashion in the early twentieth century (and also in the history of catalogues) it is useful to think about The Sparling Cut Male in terms of what it is not. Despite the dapper outlook, Sparling Cut never strays into the territory of the dandy or the aesthete. Its branding and artwork are definitively not art-deco or modernist, and its male models preserve middle-class decorum and to all extents and purposes ‘fit in’. In this sense, Sparling Cut toes the fine line between the practicable reality of the suit and the freedom of personal style, without veering wildly in either direction. It emerges as a dual compromise — on the one hand, between the price- and fashion-conscious individual; on the other, between the two aesthetic extremes of the avant-garde and conservativism.

Footnotes:

[1] See Clare Rose, Making, Selling and Wearing Boys’ Clothes in Late-Victorian England (Ashgate, 2010), pp. 90-2.

[2] See the pamphlet On Modern Costume, ‘honestly and avowedly published’ by E. Moses and Son, Ready-made and Bespoke Tailors, London and Bradford, 1863. John Johnson Collection Men’s Clothes 2 (8), online here: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:jjohnson:&rft_dat=xri:jjohnson:rec:20071127120131dt.

[3] With thanks to Julie-Anne Lambert for this information.

[4] Surviving records are slight, and runs of The Sparling Cut Male are undated. Vol. 1, No. 5 can be dated confidently to 1926 from a reference on its introductory pages. This places No. 6 (the exhibition copy) within a year at most, given the pace of fashion. Vol 1. No 14 was sold at an online auction at an unknown date. https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/original-vintage-1920-1930s-mens-218962059. It is worth noting that No. 14 reprints the same illustrations used in Nos. 5 and 6.

[5] A full-page advertisement in Air Force List for May 1940 (https://digital.nls.uk/british-military-lists/archive/96058150?mode=transcription) still utilises the slogan ‘Out-of-the-Rut’, juxtaposed with merry-looking Navy men, perhaps as morale-boosting propaganda in the face of World War II.

[6] https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/46395/page/10795/data.pdf. This is not to say that Sparling was still in production in 1974.

[7] See John Johnson Collection guest article by Clare Rose, ‘Elias Moses and Son, Minion of the Million 1849’: http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.co.uk/search/displayEssayByID.do?ItemID=66666666666666cr

[8] For an overview of menswear catalogues juxtaposing advertisements with prose, see Clare Rose, Boys’ Clothes, pp. 90-1.

[9] This is an oversimplification of a complicated several decades (see Constantino, Men’s Fashion in the Twentieth Century, particularly page 25 for references to body shape).

Two technologies: the Baird Televisor and Photomechanical printing in monochrome — by Daniel Haynes

Photographic methods began to influence commercial printing in the closing decades of the 19th century. They depended on two developments. One (affecting relief printing only) was controlling the etching of the metal when lowering the unwanted parts. The other was the manufacture of crossed-line screens that could break down the continuous tones of an image into binary dots of various sizes, small ones in light areas, larger ones in dark areas. The main limitation of photomechanical printing in relief was that the resolution of the grid of dots limited the kind of paper used, the commercial norm being 133 dots to the inch (52.36 dots to the cm). From A Brief Guide to Printing Processes in the Exhibition.

The Baird Televisor, leaflet c. 1933 — The Baird Televisor, leaflet, c. 1933. JJColl: Television 1. Relief printed halftone block, printed in blue.

Baird Televisor detail showing binary dots

From cars and aeroplanes to telephones and domestic gas stoves, The Art of Advertising showcases many great inventions of the early 20th century. The Baird Televisor was the first commercial television, manufactured by Plessor (now BAE Systems), and marketed as ‘the very latest marvel . . . Not a photograph, nor yet a shadowgraph, but an actual moving image’. Its inventor, the Scottish engineer John Logie Baird (1888-1946), was a pioneer of early television who had demonstrated the first live television broadcast in 1926, the first cross-country broadcast in 1927, and the first transatlantic television signal in 1928. The Baird Televisor, sold to the public from 1929, brought ‘the very latest marvel’ into the home for the first time.

The Televisor was a mechanical television — the precursor to analogue. Its black-and-white ‘moving image’ was the result of decades of experimentation and invention, adapting the image-scanning ‘Nipkow disk’ patented by the German inventor Paul Gottleib Nipkow in 1885. As the diagram below demonstrates, a bright light was projected onto the subject through a Nipkow disk. The reflected light was then captured by photo-sensitive selenium cells and converted into an electric signal, which was displayed on the home receiver kit via its own Nipkow disk (the upright drum on the model shown above). This YouTube video from Technology Connections provides an excellent breakdown of the complicated science behind mechanical televisions — though Baird’s 1923 prototype ran on just a few bike lights, old cardboard, and glue — but if you want to skip the science, just know that the earliest screens produced an image not much wider than an inch and a half.

Diagram showing the transmission of sound and image for early televisions (Public domain: Wikimedia Commons). An adapted ‘Nipkow Disk’ is seen attached to the ‘Driving motor’, top-left.

Baird Televisor screen, showing the 30-line image (courtesy of the Early Television Museum).

The Baird Televisor had a resolution of 30 lines, corresponding to the 30 holes in its Nipkow Disk. The higher the resolution, the bigger the Nipkow disk needed to be, and this was impractical (and incredibly noisy) for home systems. Although the Televisor is certainly bulky by modern standards, it is important to counter our sensibility for thinner, sleeker appliances by drawing attention to the Televisor’s biggest rival: the cinema, which predated television by over a decade. As Donald F. McLean writes in his re-examination of early television, Restoring Baird’s Image: ‘it is hard for us to appreciate how significant a hold cinema had when television first started.’ That Baird managed not only to capture moving images without conventional film and transmit them over great distances but achieved this in a device no bigger than a moderately-sized CRT is a marvel in its own right, remembering that cinema was not required to transmit beyond the walls of the movie theatre — and it didn’t project ‘live’.

Understood in this context, the ‘DAILY BROADCAST’ detailed bottom-right in our advertisement for the Televisor takes on critical importance as a persuasive device. To justify its high cost and position itself as a valid competitor to the cinema, the Televisor had to give people a reason to stay indoors. Enter the British Broadcasting Corporation, and its first foray into television. On the face of it, the Televisor schedule is conspicuously limited to a half-hour slot on weekday mornings. In fact, the first BBC broadcasts in 1929 didn’t include sound — but a complete broadcasting schedule from 1930 digitised by the Early Television Museum reveals that an additional evening transmission was broadcast from midnight to 12.30am on Tuesdays and Fridays. The schedule is viewable here (content warning: one programme contains the use of a racial slur). These early programmes have more in common with theatre than cinema, with vocal or instrumental recitals and solo comedic entertainers dominating the line-up. While it’s true that ensembles such as ballet troupes occasionally feature, early television favoured the lone performer.

Look back at the advertisement and notice the shape of the screen. Unlike modern televisions, it is portrait-oriented: allegedly, John Logie Baird initially conceived of his invention as a real-time communication device, much like the modern video call, and devised screen-space optimised to the dimensions of the single caller. And, like video calls, it’s more difficult to fit a crowd into a portrait rather than a landscape screen. Whatever the reason, Televisors, and all subsequent models including the 1933-4 Mirror Drum, retained this odd orientation.

So what was early television actually like for contemporary audiences? As this 1928 review of a Televisor demonstration suggests, the answer is perhaps ‘not great’:

1928 review of the Televisor’s image quality (courtesy of the Early Television Museum).

John Logie Baird in his laboratory with ‘Stooky Bill’ (Public domain: Wikimedia Commons).

For however groundbreaking it was, mechanical television could not match the high definition and manoeuvrability of the film camera, and a clear display could be difficult to achieve. The Baird receptor could not move (i.e. it could not pan), regular synchronisation was required, and its reliance on bright artificial light confined it to dim indoor studios; as such, a static actor or performer aided by high-contrast makeup and lighting produced the most reliably watchable content, especially on early Baird models. In fact, the first television image, transmitted in 1925 from John Logie Baird’s laboratory, was a heavily made-up ventriloquist’s dummy called ‘Stooky Bill’.

The first British radio play, Luigi Pirandello’s The Man with a Flower in His Mouth, was staged in July 1930 on a Baird Televisor. This incredible 1963 recreation by the original producer using a refitted Televisor demonstrates the slow, characterful acting demanded of 30-line resolution:

By 1930, higher-definition electronic analogue televisions were in commercial production, and Baird himself demonstrated 120-line projection television in colour at the Dominion Theatre in 1938. By the 1940s, electronic analogue television had completely replaced the inferior mechanical systems (the BBC switched to electronic Marconi-EMI systems in 1935).

Despite its short lifespan, the original Baird Televisor achieved something extraordinary. It introduced televisions and broadcasting to the public, and paved the way for greater invention and competition. The Televisor promised technology ‘only dreamed of by writers of fiction’: live, moving pictures, transmitted near-immediately across land and sea. Its futuristic claims were supported in its advertising material by the use of photomechanical printing which, just like its product, brought a true-to-life image before the viewer’s eyes.

In an age where even 24-hour cable seems antiquated, and media is increasingly mediated by our own schedules, it’s mindblowing to consider the technological effort that went into making audiovisual entertainment possible. Next time you’re bored of Netflix, remember poor John Logie Baird working overtime just to make a blurry face flicker on a monochrome screen…

Exploring Shakespeare in performance through the John Johnson Collection – by Daniel Haynes

Daniel Haynes is Quaritch Graduate Trainee in Rare Books & Ephemera at the Weston Library.

NOTE: hyperlinks to resources in this article require the John Johnson Collection Archive of Printed Ephemera (ProQuest project) to be open in a separate tab.

Shakespeare’s plays have enjoyed relatively uninterrupted performance since the Restoration. Although eighteenth-century dramatists liberally adapted many of the plays (the infamous example is Nahum Tate’s The History of King Lear) and shortened or restructured them to suit the tastes of the day, the later decades were marked by a renewed interest in the original texts. Bolstered by star turns from famous actors such as David Garrick and Edmund Kean, Shakespearean drama continued to rise in prominence. But as its popularity increased, so too did its theatrics: elaborate sets, musical interludes, tableaux, and other dramatic effects dominated the ‘Acting Editions’ of the Shakespearean nineteenth century, for better or for worse. W. S. Gilbert (of Gilbert & Sullivan fame) railed against these ‘trimmed and docked and interpolated and mutilated and generally desecrated’ versions of the plays. Nevertheless, the opening of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon at the end of the century solidified Shakespeare’s central cultural role in British theatre.

Left: Edmund Kean as King Richard. Trade in Prints and Scraps 11 (17).
Right: Drury Lane Theatre ‘In Garrick’s Time’. London Playbills Drury Lane box 1 (4).

The John Johnson Collection Archive of Printed Ephemera (ProQuest project) contains over 20,000 pieces of theatrical and non-theatrical material relating to nineteenth century entertainment, many revealing the development and reception of Shakespearean theatre. In total, over 2200 items match a name search for William Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century Entertainment collection, showcasing the range and depth of Shakespeare’s popularity and permanence. Digital Bodleian contains 23 related items dating from the eighteenth century, including the earliest dated playbill from 1736. Twentieth century material (not currently digitised) can be found on the Allegro platform.

The earliest digitised item on the ProQuest project is a playbill from 1802 for the Theatre-Royal in Chester advertising a performance of Othello:

John Johnson Provincial Playbills folder 1 (64)

Here we can see several typical features of the nineteenth-century playbill, notably a performance following the main show – a reflection of the impositions placed on theatres by the Licensing Act 1737, which theatre managers worked around by staging musical or comedic interludes. More often farces or pantomimes, these secondary or even tertiary performances could nevertheless be popular in their own right. Popular pantomimes included A World of Wonders, or Harlequin Caxton & the Origin of Printing, which rotated in several London theatres (London Playbills folder 9 (17)). Milton’s Comus enjoyed a revival, with the score of the masque on sale from the ticket office (London Playbills Covent Garden vol. 1814-1815 (185)). On the 1802 playbill above, Charles Macklin’s Love a la Mode is performed more than 40 years after its composition. Notice that the actors in Othello also perform in Love a la Mode, perhaps indicative of the standing of actors outside of London.

Within London the Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres dominated, with star actors in lead roles as demonstrated by this playbill for 1812:

London Playbills Covent Garden vol. 1811-1812 (202b)

John Philip Kemble (1757-1823), Charles Kemble (1775-1854), and Daniel Egerton (1772-1835) lead this performance of Julius Caesar (notice that, unlike their Chester counterparts, they do not perform in the farce and pantomime). The ‘favourite Comick Song’ between the play and farce is performed by the famous clown Joseph Grimaldi (1779-1837). Towards the bottom of the playbill is a notice of Sarah Siddon’s upcoming performances in five plays – four of these are Shakespeare, and the last, Macbeth, was indeed to be her last performance and emotional farewell.

Playbills could also advertise musical numbers for the evening, especially performances of familiar compositions, that formed part of the main play. Composers and musicians were listed alongside actors, and most likely commanded equal respect. At Covent Garden in 1814, ‘See, the Conqu’ring Hero Comes’ from Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabaeus punctuated Act II of Coriolanus (Provincial Playbills box Salisbury-Stratford (46)). Even more remarkably, in 1819 the same company staged The Comedy of Errors with lyrical interludes drawn from no less than eleven of Shakespeare’s other plays, three sonnets, and one ‘Come live with me’ pastoral (actually Marlowe’s) for good measure (London Playbills Covent Garden vol. 1819-1820 (80)).

Likewise, playbills emphasised exciting theatrical features to entice the prospective theatregoer:

Detail of London Playbills folder 10 (57) – Surrey Theatre

It was not uncommon to find Shakespeare-themed performances following the main event. This advertisement for the ‘Legendary National Drama’ Shakespeare’s Early Days indicates some measure of how Shakespeare fever gripped audiences (to say nothing of the live animal performance):

Detail of Provincial Playbills folder 3 (29)

With the completion of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1879, the bard’s preeminence in British theatrical history was cemented. The Theatre opened with an inaugural festival, and the first two plays performed were Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet, followed by ‘A Concert of Shakespearean Music’. Helen Faucit (1817-1898) returned from retirement to play Beatrice, with Barry Sullivan (1821-1891) playing Benedick (and Hamlet the night after). This was a far cry from the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1797 which, despite a programme full of orations and a grand closing Ball, in fact featured no performances of the plays themselves!

Our modern reverence for Shakespeare owes much to the developments of the nineteenth century. Our obsession with big names in lead roles is stronger than ever (Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet sold out in hours), likewise the belief that a good actor should cut their teeth at the RSC. Perhaps most importantly, the play’s the thing: like the later dramatists of the nineteenth century, such as William Poel (1852-1934) who pioneered the use of the open stage, we watch Shakespeare to be moved by his writing – not because we’re promised theatrics or a famous piece of classical music. Nonetheless, there are also many differences, and contexts alien to our own, which challenge our preconceptions of what staging Shakespeare could look like. Nowadays, who could imagine comic singing between acts, or a whole pantomime afterwards? While critics such as W. S. Gilbert and William Hazlitt bemoaned the bombastic performances of their day, perhaps there’s something to be learned. After all, who doesn’t want to see Mr. W. J. Hammond singing on a real donkey?