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Are you being sexually aroused by this picture? If your first thought is "No, it's a vodka and tonic", Wilson Bryan Key would beg to differ.
This magnificently unhinged book once occupied far too much of our time as art students, examining Ritz Crackers for the word 'sex' baked into them and scrutinizing drinks ads for messages airbrushed on the ice cubes. All absolute rubbish of course, which credited ad-men with access to a cabalistic insight into human nature denied us ordinary mortals, but it's a fascinating comment on the times that a book like this could become the runaway success it did.
For the cold war generation raised on 'Manchurian Candidate'-style myths of Soviet brainwashing, the new savvy advertising bred suspicion. Too much marijuana and an almost pathological hatred of 'the man' made it but a small step for bedsit philosophers who found hidden messages in The Beatles' 'Abbey Road' to find them in whisky ads too. This was the year of 'The Parallax View', and also of 'A Clockwork Orange', so 'Subliminal Seduction' was by no means an aberration.
Key's book followed on from Lance Packard's 'Hidden Persuaders', but 'SS' took the idea of subliminal messages to its ludicrous conclusion. If you come across a copy it's well worth picking up, if only to relish the dodgy post-Freudian pop psychology and sample the almost palpable mood of post 60s comedown.
Okay, first let's state the obvious: the typography was never going to win any awards, and the Illustration is just comical – I've never seen a tamer pair of rats than the two menacing that bandaged hand. But for all that something made me pick up this twin cassette pack, and then buy it, despite not having owned a tape player for some years. Why? Partly nostalgia for a certain strain of naive and lurid packaging I suppose, but also because, for all its naivety, this box has an excellent feel to it. The heft is just right, the cases are firmly attached to the outer, and the whole thing opens and falls flat in a most satisfying manner. Having handled some music packaging recently where the design was fine but the materials were sadly lacking, this little case reinforced how important such decisions are. I think that observation is sufficient to qualify 'Tales of Horror' as inspirational.
As promised, here is more of Fact:, the political magazine produced by Herb Lubalin and Ralph Ginzburg before they brought us Eros and Avant Garde. The typography was always austere, always authoritative—and, like the serious newspapers of the day—always black and white. Where Ginzburg departed from the newspaper editors of the day however, was in his willingness to run scandalous and outright libellous headlines, as here, in his outspoken attack on Bobby Kennedy. This issue came out in August 1964. By November Bobby's brother would be dead and such a headline would be unthinkable, as millions pinned their hopes to a young man who would himself fall to an assassin's bullet before the decade was out.
The back cover was used interchangeably, sometimes for small ads, sometimes as a contents page or sometimes as a longer issue flag, to highlight more stories. Two versions are shown here.
