The Thrasher. Volume 1. February 1982.

This rough student magazine was produced just a few years before the Chapels of Fleet Street were ravaged by Messers Murdock and Maxwell. We, of course, using our own cutting edge publishing technology, produced this fine edition and plastered it across the streets. Yeh! Actually, it was initially produced for the Portsmouth Polytechnics Rag Week, but ended up being a longer running item.

The text was typed up by Adam's Girlfriend, Carole, on a typewriter (remember those things? They came before PDA styluses). The cartoons were hand drawn, photocopied several times to get them to the correct size for publishing - and to give that slightly unreadable quality, then pasted into place on an appropriate page. Headings and other text we added with Letraset and put where needed. The whole ensemble was laid out as facing pages, page numbered, then taken down and photocopied onto A3 paper. The slightly wobbly look to the pages was deliberately photocopied in, for aesthetic value. Uh-huh! The finished tabloid was produced in editions of about 100 copies. This required a lot of double sided copying - a process of copying to one side, then putting all the paper back through the copier machine and putting on the backside copy. We lost a lot of paper in this harrowing process. The complete magazine was collated, and stapled by the lads.

Selling at 10p a copy, I believe we almost broke even on the first run.

We did the first edition with sufficient material (if you can call it that) for at least two more editions. I believe we produced 6 editions in all, spread over a couple of years.

More recently, Tony photocopied the 1st magazine as you see it here, saving the individual pages to PDF's. He emailed them to me here in the Mansion, where I imported the PDF's in Adobe Photoshop. I then sized the pages (A4 is a bit big to display on a computer monitor). I tried a couple of versions before settling on the images you see here. Many pages had to be rotated one or two degrees, at least to straighten up the edges. I enlarged Tony's cartoon of the two kids, so the writing was more legible. The missing corners were missing on the originals (we did such a fine job producing these!) The pages are laid out here across the screen to replicate the side by side look of the original. Sorry if it confuses your browser.