Monday, September 21, 2015

Displaying images of poets and their publications

I'm sure there are more black books and poets in print today than there were in the late 1960s and 1970s. But Negro Digest/Black World celebrated the production of black books and presence of black poets in such ways that makes that fact hard to tell. The publication regularly included an assortment of books on the front covers, and poets were featured on the cover as well. Those are practices you're less likely to see today.

Managing editor Hoyt Fuller wanted you to see the books and the authors. The Sept./Oct. 1968 annual poetry issue of Negro Digest, for instance, includes an image featuring several volumes of poetry. The headline reads "The Annual Poetry Issue" and "Black Poets and Their Publications."

"Nowhere is the new Black Renaissance more evident than in the number of talented poets who are emerging on the scene," wrote the editors in that Sept./Oct. 1968 issue. Throughout the late 1960s and mid-1970s, they often displayed this idea through the images that they projected. 

Related:
Blogging about Black World magazine

1 comment:

jward said...

We still see many images of writers and their publications in social networks and in the aggressive advertising done by Amazon.com, but the content of the captions is remarkably different from those one found in Negro Digest/Black World. Continue to make annotations about difference.