Once you get over a certain number of pages in your magazine, it becomes impossible to saddle stitch the pages (where staples or a thread goes through the spreads to bind them together) and you have to move to what’s called ‘perfect binding’. Here, the pages are trimmed flush and the ends glued (with the cover glued on top). This creates the trademark square spine of the magazine. As soon as we started doing this on Issue Five we knew that we had to come up with some witty sayings to print on the spine. Every issue (with the exception of our ‘minimal art’ issues around issues 72-82) has had a witty spineline culled from normal day to day office conversation and taken rudely out of context. In many cases there are two different ones per issue (the Subscriber’s copies and the newsagent copies have different cover plates).
PICTURE BY ROB
So here are a few of our favourites from the last few years, along with the explanations - where we can remember them. (And when we couldn’t, we just made them up…)