Spotting old books and magazines and dummy newspapers in TV, movies and old photos

Toby Frost said:
On a sort-of-related tangent, I make quite a few models with various different parts with an SF theme. Over the years, I've ended up buying a few books of design art from computer games, from which I steal visual cues and inspiration. One of the best such books is for Bethesda's Fallout 4, which includes a range of super fake magazines from a 1950s-styled future. Magazines can be collected and "read" (essentially, consumed in the same way as food) to provide bonuses in the game, but I think the design of them is great in itself.

2970091-guns_and_bullets__10_book___fallout_4_by_plank_69-d9hqbx5.png


More can be seen here: Fallout 4's Complete Magazine Collection Published Online
Click to expand...
You should write that story.
 
From the fourth series of Endeavour, the earlier years of Inspector Morse, the teleplay "Game," this shot of some of his books. I spot Joyce Cary's novel Mister Johnson, Dickens's Bleak House (a worn Everyman hardcover in red cloth, isn't it?), something called You and Music, and, of course, Arthur C. Clarke's Earthlight, all of these books that might well be on someone's desk in the mid-1960s -- assuming the Pan Books design for the Clarke isn't an anachronism -- anyone have anything to say about that? I'm a little uneasy about that one.
Endeavour episode Game books.JPG
 
I think you may be right to question Earthlight, Extollager, but I'm not certain. The only 1960's Pan editions according to ISFDB, were these two:

51953
51951


The one on the left (1963) looks wrong for the edition in the picture. The one on the right looks much more likely, but in these Pan impressions (1966), the titles tended to be written in green on the spine, just after the author name. I have Way Station by Simak in the same SF edition from Pan, as well as a Heinlein, and these have green text for the titles and not spaced as in the picture, so this suggests it may not be the same edition. However, the well known later Pan editions tend to have white spines. So, we cannot be certain. It could be this one below from 1971, as I don't know what its spine looks like, but it looks like it could be black in one image I found:

51954


But, someone here must have the edition with this spine shown on the TV show?
 
Addendum - I've noticed the Pan logo at the bottom of the spine on the book from Endeavor is the newer logo, not the one still used in the 60's (see the cover use of the logo in my images). So, I feel sure it is probably the 1971 edition posted last, above.
 
The most recent episode of Blacklist shows a young woman in a cafe reading a book; I think this one.
51969


You could read the author's name, Andrew McCarthy, the same Andrew McCarthy who starred in Pretty in Pink; he's also guest starred on Blacklist. Oh, and the name of the director of the episode is Andrew McCarthy.

I think it all ties in.

Randy M.
 
I saw Avengers Endgame yesterday. In which a security guard is reading Terminal Beach by JG Ballard. Not sure which edition.

Apols for the spoiler if you havent seen it yet.
 
I sotched off my iphone in the cinema like any good citizen. Bah humbug.
 
Of course Terminal Beach contains the story "End Game". As any fule kno.
 
In the third season Get Smart teleplay called "Don't Look Back," a parody of the long-running Fugitive series, Milton Berle has a cameo role as owner of a sketchy hotel. He is reading a comic book. The comic is DC's magazine Tales of the Unexpected #104 (Dec. 1967-Jan. 1968). We get a pretty good look at the story called "The 24-Hour Nightmare," unimpressively illustrated by Jack Abel. The issue would have been on sale in October 1967.
 
I never was a huge fan of Jack Abel. Not sure why, his style just didn't click with me like many of the others at DC at the time.
 
One could also look out for LP record album covers in old TV shows and movies. In the first show of the 4th season of Get Smart, in a scene in a record shop, all of the album covers are, I think, dummies except one, which looks like this -- Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits (1967).
53015
 
smart.JPG


There's a shot from that episode. Maybe some of the other "album covers" are genuine, but I doubt very much that they all are. The TV people seem to have covered up the lettering on the Dylan album.
 
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Here is the comic book image to which I referred in #50 above:

get smart DC.JPG
 
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The image below is from Decoy, a movie from 1946 with Jean Gillie, who didn't live very long, I'm afraid. But enjoy the "Earth Forces" headline. Whaaat? If you can, too, read some of the text for the stories.

Decoy.JPG
 
As I understand it, Ken Cosgrove, a fictional character in the TV show Mad Men wrote science fiction under the penname Ben Hargrove. Here's the doctored cover:
BenHargrove2-small.jpg


Here's the original:

c09e7c7aceaa50205ab36135432f314d.jpg
 
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