About Us

 

    

 

Since 1975 Vintage Magazine Company and Vinmag Archive Ltd has been building up what is now one of the most diverse commercial archives in Europe.

Our collection is based on original printed material – magazines, newspapers, posters, adverts, books, ephemera, photographs, movie material etc – and it’s unique source of millions of images covering just about any subject, period, theme, name or location.

HISTORY OF VINTAGE MAGAZINE COMPANY

In March 1974 magazine collector Danny Posner entered Foyle’s bookshop in London’s Charing Cross Road to get his fix of the smell and feel of old magazines which Foyle’s kept in a big cardboard box in their rare books department. It was the only shop he knew which sold them. But this time there was to be disappointment.

“We aren’t selling them any longer“ he was told. “Why?” “Because people keep going through them and we end up with a box of confetti”.

So Danny sought satisfaction at a stall in Earlham Street, Cambridge Circus in the heart of London’s theatreland where Rocky the stall owner sold a small variety of mostly American magazines. The stall was pitched in front of a pornographic book shop which now stood empty after a police raid.

“The landlady's looking for a new tenant said Rocky.” She offered it to me but I can’t afford it”.

It was an opportunity and Danny was quick to recognise it. He had been a lifelong collector of magazines and at the time headed up a London Public Relations agency, Posner Cox, and was involved with rock bands (Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Cliff Charles and Colin Smith, Rocky Rhodes Show etc).

Here was a place which could provide evening band rehearsals with somebody’s girlfriend to run it as an old magazine shop by day. He took it , called it The Vintage Magazine Shop and started trading in May 1974.Fellow collectors pooh poohed the idea – six months was the most they gave it . Supposedly there were only a limited number of eccentric comic and magazine collectors in all the land – but the shop took off attracting an international clientele of collectors, picture researchers, interior decorators and publishers. As well as magazines the shop spread its interests to include posters, photos, programmes, newspapers and comics and just about anything printed. Growth followed. First it expanded into the shop next door where Celebrity David Baddiel records that his one and only job in commerce was working for Vintage knocking down the party wall between the two shops.

The press found the whole concept a scream. Formerly this stuff had been rubbish, now It was commanding high prices. They wrote endless screeds about it.Within 5 years Danny had opened eight Vintage Magazine shops including one in San Francisco. 

David Bowie built his collection of Eagle and Private Eye through us.

Singer Mel Torme called it ‘the best shop in the world’. 

 

Address: Vinmag House, 84-90 Digby Road London, E9 6HX

Tel: 020 8533 7588