'No Bosoms No Bottoms, No Brashness No Vulgarity' - migration, modernism, mass media, pulp and pop in the mid-century British paperback.

With Owen Hatherley, marking the publication of The Alienation Effect - How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century (Penguin, March 2025).

The 'paperback revolution' of the middle of the century is often associated with the 'quintessentially English' Penguin Books and its imitators, as exemplars of restraint and order brought into the chaos of the commercial marketplace. But Penguin's design was rooted in that of continental Europe: from the start, as a direct imitation of the German English-language imprint Albatross, at their peak, in the design and typography of Jan Tschichold and Hans Schmoller, and in the later development into a high modernist aesthetic under Germano Facetti and Romek Marber. But also, there was a constant attempt to both adapt to competition from pulp publishers such as Pan - who employed their own emigre designers, like Val Biro - and from specialised art publishers such as Thames and Hudson, who were among many firms founded by German and Austrian exiles and émigrés. This talk will try to pull together these strands and explore how a distinctive British modernist aesthetic emerged out of resistance to the crassest end of capitalism and out of an unprecedented openness to the continental avant-garde.

Owen Hatherley is a writer based in south-east London. He writes regularly about aesthetics and politics for the Architectural Review, the London Review of Books, Sidecar and Tribune, and is the author of many books, including: Militant Modernism (Zer0, 2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010), Landscapes of Communism (Penguin, 2015), Red Metropolis (Repeater, 2020), and most recently Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects (Repeater, 2024), and The Alienation Effect – How Central European Emigres Transformed the British Twentieth Century (Penguin, 2025). He has a PhD in Political Aesthetics from Birkbeck College, is a commissioning editor at Jacobin, the presenter of the Inter-Cities podcast for Open City, and was the writer and presenter of The Story of Solent City, a one-off documentary for Radio 4.

ATTENDANCE FREE WITH ADVANCE BOOKING

image: Pulp Totalitarianism/Abstract Totalitarianism, from The Alientation Effect, Ch. 14