Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels over the years, a shot of a sensationalist newspaper headline displayed outside a shop near my first flat in London. The paper is the Camden Chronicle, whose headlines often included the word "pervert" or reference to some kind of slaughter, beheading or similar. London newspapers are locked in a kind of hypercompetitive fever that leads them to ever-greater excesses of giveaways, gimmicks, and catchy headlines. For some reason, I assumed at first that the signs bearing the day's headlines were hand-lettered by each newsagent, mentally explaining away the eerie similarity in handwriting by inventing an exhaustive newsagent's training program (similar to the gruelling years-long training undertaken by London's Black Cab drivers). Later, my friend Danny O'Brien clued me in — the newspaper prints the "hand-lettered" signs and ships them out to all the vendors with the day's papers.
