Eyeball Cards

From the hiss and crackle of Britain’s CB radio heyday, only Eyeball cards remain. These are the mysterious business cards of ‘breakers’ exchanged when British CB enthusiasts would meet up in person after chatting on the airwaves. These alternate identities are sometimes amusing, occasionally mundane, dark or bawdy, but always personal creations — flotsam from a more innocent analogue world.

This book is the first to document this late 70s and early 80s sub culture and 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.

The result is a window into an outpouring of creativity that prefigures online identities — social media handles before there was even an internet.

Eyeball Cards is part of the Four Corners Irregulars, a series about modern British visual history. Two books will be published in autumn 2017, with further titles to follow, presenting introductions to important but overlooked areas of creativity.