Nineteenth-Century Nuts: The Anatomy of a Victorian Lad’s Mag (Part 1)
Nineteenth-Century Nuts The Anatomy of a Victorian Lad's Mag It’s all gone tits up. Nuts, the beleaguered lads’ mag, has finally cracked under the twin pressures of outrage (from those who didn't read it) and indifference (from those who once did). As a Guardian-reading feminist I should probably be quite glad to see it go, but the historian in me feels a pang of sadness. I work on the history of popular newspapers and magazines, so whenever a long-running publication closes its doors I feel compelled to mourn its passing. Even when the odious News of the World went to joing the great newsagent in the sky I couldn't bring myself to celebrate the death of a 160 year old publication, no matter how toxic it had become. Nuts doesn't have anything like this kind of history, but its death still feels like the end of an era. Front magazine closed its doors in February, the company behind Penthouse filed for bankruptcy last Autumn, and the circulation figures of most other men's magazines are in freefall. Now that one of the genre's flagship publications has sunk, titles like Zoo, FHM and Loaded seem sure to follow. For better or worse, the lad's mag is on its last legs. I was seventeen [...]
