CHAP Issue 1, First Printing

Description

Before official publication of The Chap’s first edition, a trial issue was produced at a Photocopy shop in London called Prontaprint. The cover was copied in coloured ink and the inside pages in mono. These 100 copies were distributed to various potential outlets and to specific journalists, in the hope of securing media coverage. The resulting storm of interest in the broadsheets led to a second print run of 1,000 of the same edition at a magazine printer. Few of those printed editions remain in circulation, and copies of this original first printing are extremely rare, especially as this is a brand-new, unread copy from the Chap’s own archive. Contents include The Semiotics of Smoking, Dressing for Tennis, a time-travelling biography of fin de siecle aesthete Comte Robert de Montesquiou (complete with misspelled title on the front cover), a celebration of the Discreet Pleasures of the Enema, Sister Millicent Fond’s Gentlemanly Ailments, The Singular Adventures of Cecil de Cashmere. This being the very first issue, the Letters page was composed of genuine letters found in vintage men’s magazines from the 1940s.