Meccano Magazine

This is a small selection of cover art from Meccano Magazine (1925 – 1930) celebrating the world of heavy engineering. Aimed squarely at a schoolboy audience with a keen appetite for images of heavy lifting, tunnelling, bridging and constructing in steel, the underlying purpose was to generate interest in the engineering and model making sets made by the Meccano company. These activities had a certain glamour about them that today is almost completely absent. The visual conventions include a preference for large areas of flat colour as employed by the poster artists of the LNER (London & North Eastern Railway), most notably, the great Tom Purvis. Yellow and orange skies are typical Purvis devices. The images probably began life as photographs before the retouch artists applied their skills with a veneer of high intensity colour values.