We’re proud to introduce our newest project, one that we’ve been beavering away at for over a year now: Four Corners Irregulars, a series of books presenting a new look at the history of modern British visual culture. We have chosen a wide range of different subjects, ranging from politics to hobbies, and stretching from 1945 to the present day. All are linked by the remarkable visual creativity that has happened in Britain outside of art galleries and museums. Some of the artworks we will...
We’re proud to introduce our newest project, one that we’ve been beavering away at for over a year now: Four Corners Irregulars, a series of books presenting a new look at the history of modern British visual culture.
We have chosen a wide range of different subjects, ranging from politics to hobbies, and stretching from 1945 to the present day. All are linked by the remarkable visual creativity that has happened in Britain outside of art galleries and museums. Some of the artworks we will feature were made by people who wouldn’t have considered themselves artists, many more were, but who nevertheless chose to make their work seen outside of a traditional gallery context.
Each book will provide an overview of its subject, and together the books will add up to a portrait of our own histories – at times passionate, at others frivolous, but more complex and multifarious than the myths we sometimes tell ourselves about being British.
The first volume is by William Hogan and David Titlow, about Eyeball Cards, the mysterious business cards created by CB radio enthusiasts in the late 1970s and early 1980s. CB radio ‘breakers’ would chat over the airwaves at a time when the technology was yet to be legalised and, taking a lead from US CB culture, would create handles for themselves to help keep their identity a secret. It’s these invented identities that the Eyeball Cards immortalise, calling cards for ‘Lollipop’, ‘Rubber Duck’, and ’Blue Eyes’. These are amusing, occasionally mundane, dark or bawdy, but always personal creations — flotsam from a more innocent analogue world. The result is a window into an outpouring of creativity that prefigures online identities — social media handles before there was even an internet.
The book presents hundreds of the funniest, strangest and most intriguing Eyeball cards from across the UK. In addition, photographer David Titlow has taken portraits of some of the breakers who owned the cards, and writer William Hogan has written a lively history of how and why these cards came to exist.
Eyeball Cards will be published on 12 September, priced £14. It’s a hardback, with 192 pages. It’s Four Corners Irregular #1, and we’ll be announcing details of further books in the series over the coming weeks.
