Book Review: Nova 1965-1975

A bright star monthly

The book's Product Description above will give you a very brief idea about this influential British monthly. The title is a lavish coffee table visual history of the magazine with page after page of spreads from its eleven year life. Art Editors like Harry Peccinotti, David Birdsall and David Hillman created stunning spreads month after month. Helped, of course, because back in the days before the pc, page design was much more considered and designers couldn't just add personal graphic whimsy to their work at the press of a keystroke.

The first pages reproduce all the Nova covers and then, nicely, you'll see some spreads from other leading consumer titles which had an influence on publication design. Harper's Bazaar, Show, McCall's, Eros, Elle, Town, Queen and especially Twen led the way with stylish looking pages in the Sixties.

Nova faded away in the Seventies, an increase in paper costs reduced it to a digest size monthly, advertising decreased and so did the circulation, the last issue was in October 1975. Even with a smaller size the spreads shown in the book for the last years are visually as fresh as any from Nova's start.

There's an interesting Appendix over fourteen pages listing the Contents and staff for each issue, followed by an Index. The book's large page size allows plenty of photography and graphics to be shown almost the same size as it appeared in the original pages.

Nova 1965-1975 is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

Nova 1965-1975