“Through the eyes of poets”: View magazine

Charles Henri Ford’s avant-garde magazine has been a sporadic visitor to these pages over the past 20 years, the subject of occasional posts as well as my complaints about the difficulties of finding online sources for important magazines and journals. The difficulties are now over where View is concerned…or almost over because this cache is an incomplete run, with the last seven issues absent. That still gives us 30 complete issues to look through, however, so I’ll temper my complaints. The run is further compromised by being taken from a single-volume reprint which has reduced all the colour to black and white, but the covers at least are easy to find elsewhere. The first few issues of View were simple newsprint affairs, but the design soon became more ambitious and properly magazine-like, with coloured paper used for interior pages. Vol 2, issue 1; April 1942. View (1940–47) was an important arts magazine for a number of reasons, chief among them the title’s status as the leading…