Courtesy of this months ' Uncut ' magazine and the article on the 60's underground press, I have at last come across the archive site for the International Times - http://www.internationaltimes.it/ - the newspaper for the Counter Culture and all those students in the later part of the sixties who really did believe that they - we - could change the world.
Apart from the content , which was always ' alternative ' if not downright subversive , what I remember was the visual dynamic of the layout - the couple of double-page spreads shown here are from around 1965 / 1966 and are still eye catching , and all done without recourse to anything more technologically advanced than cut&paste.
I suppose that to take a stance as an ' alternative ' press you needed a well-defined / conventional / clearly defined society to be alternative to, and this was certainly the case in the sixties . These two spreads date from around 1965 as I said ; to put this into some form of social context , until 1964 in the UK , when BBC 2 was launched , there were only two terrestial TV channels , and the pirate radio stations didn't start broadcasting again until the mid-sixties. Strange times indeed ......................nowadays everything is diversified, pretty much anything goes , anywhere , anytime , and what underground / counter-cultures there are , are assiduously targeted and courted by the marketing departments.
..............and a nice touch too , to register the web-site out of Italy. As far as I can see pretty much all of the editions are on the site. Memories are now historical archives.
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