Joshenilia (11)
By:
March 6, 2016
One in a series of posts exhuming the juvenilia and significant objects of HILOBROW’s Josh Glenn.
In the winter of 1997/1998, Hermenaut — the zine/journal I’d been publishing in my spare time since 1991 — went “perfect-bound.” Instead of a photocopied and stapled zine, that is to say, I published issue 11/12 in a journal format. Its pages were arranged in signatures and glued together in a text block; and it boasted a spine. Hermenaut‘s creative director, Jennifer Engel, and I wanted to do something special with the cover illustration, too. But what?
The cover illustrations for the previous issues of Hermenaut had been torn — literally — from teen magazines like Tiger Beat and Teen Beat. We’d mostly favored big, kissable photos of Beverly Hills, 90210 stars Shannen Doherty, Jennie Garth, Luke Perry, and Tori Spelling. So we wanted to keep that theme going. But Hermenaut‘s other ongoing design theme was a midcentury astronaut vibe. Jennifer’s idea: combine the two themes. She bought a Shannen Doherty doll and crafted an astronaut outfit for it, using scraps of this and that. The photo shown here is a remnant from our first-ever shoot.
PS: As I’ve recounted elsewhere, one of the inspirations for Hermenaut’s trim size was “digest” magazines like Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and sf digests like Worlds of If, Analog, and Galaxy. I was also inspired by literary and intellectual “reviews” like Partisan Review, Evergreen Review, and Paris Review. So it was a thrill to finally slap a perfect binding onto Hermenaut.
Contents: “Their America” column and “Hatebath’s Mailbag” by Slotcar Hatebath, “The Way of Etiquette” column by Mr. Way, “Travels with Smith” column by Patrick Smith [of the zine Stargreen Review], “The B Side of Paradise” column by Chris Fujiwara, Ingrid Schorr’s celebrity biography review column. “Camp: An Introduction” by Joshua Glenn, “Hermenaut of the Month: Oscar Wilde” by Joshua Glenn, “Apocalypse Already” by Clarke Cooper, “Learning from Miami” by Margaret Blonder, “Leather and Lace: My Closet” by Ernest Pascucci, “Dr. Exstaticus, Master of Irony” by Joshua Glenn, “Semi-Precious Moments” by Al Hoff [of the zine Thrift SCORE], “Nancy & Lee and Sonny & Cher” by Phil Milstein, “Viva Liberace!” by Scot Hacker, “The Irony Age” by Jon Spayde, “I, Robot” by Chris Fujiwara, “Death of a Soul Man” by Heidi Olmack, “Earnestness Goes to Camp” by Jerry Jaguar, “The Art of Being Uncomfortable” by Lisa Carver [of the zine Rollerderby], “Model Urban Communities for Communist Urban Models” by Eric Fredericksen. Plus reviews.
READ MORE essays by Joshua Glenn, originally published in: THE BAFFLER | BOSTON GLOBE IDEAS | BRAINIAC | CABINET | FEED | HERMENAUT | HILOBROW | HILOBROW: GENERATIONS | HILOBROW: RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION | HILOBROW: SHOCKING BLOCKING | THE IDLER | IO9 | N+1 | NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW | SEMIONAUT | SLATE