An exciting, totally nuts new publication, meet Scamp Magazine

Anyone who’s into niche magazines of yore will perhaps have heard of Scamp – the racy 1950s gentlemen’s magazine that has since become something of a collectors’ item. Fast forward 64 years and a very different Scamp has been born, and this one is “a brand new magazine full of chit-chat and arty-farty editorial projects.” We were intrigued by this odd-sided, floppy publication, so we decided to speak to the editor Oskar Oprey to find out a little more about it.

“Scamp isn’t the first publication I’ve worked on, in fact I’ve been producing independent zines for a few years now, and started when I was still a student at Glasgow School of Art,” Oskar told us. “Between 2010 and 2012 I did a glossy underground queer zine called Dragmag, which was sponsored by Diesel and distributed across the UK. The first issue was very willy-centric, but by the third issue there was nothing gay about the content. My interests and audience were much wider and the title was misleading (‘Oh no it’s not actually a magazine about drag queens’) so I decided to launch a new project.”

Scamp is a pastel-coloured punch-in-the-face publication whose first issue features a fashion editorial inspired by an anonymous suitcase of clothes the creators won in an auction. Charming in its irreverence, for me Scamp is a welcome two fingers up to trendy art and design magazines we all know and love. So what’s the inspiration behind the name?

“Scamp was inspired by a fairly unknown novel of the same name by Roland Camberton, published in 1950. It tells the story of a poor, down-on-his-luck writer called Ivan Ginsberg, who lives in a rat-infested Bloomsbury slum and spends his nights drinking in Soho with a motley crew of Bohemians, all the while he’s trying to scam money to fund an ambitious new literary magazine he wants to launch called (you guessed it) Scamp. In the end, his publishing dream sadly fails to materialise (although he does marry one of his would-be contributors) so I decided to make Scamp come true instead.”

Hilarious and unique, Scamp is pushing boundaries and going in directions most publishers wouldn’t conceive of in their their wildest dreams (or darkest nightmares). When it comes to being a crowd-pleaser, Oskar doesn’t seem too fussed.

“We’re billing it as an adventure magazine for the art and fashion crowd, full of chit-chat and arty-farty editorial projects. A cross between Viz and Vanity Fair. I prefer to use the term superfine; we don’t have the budget of other magazines, but I like to think it’s better looking than a fanzine. The main focus of our first issue was identity crises, not really knowing who you are. I bought a suitcase at a lost property auction in Tooting, without knowing what was inside; our fashion director John William then used the contents to create not only a fashion editorial, but a whole family of imaginary characters, including our cover star Audrey Carpetburn.”