SMS was intentionally designed without editorial commentary, yet founder William Copley’s The Barber Shop can be viewed as a statement on the core concerns of the publication. A bright orange dossier enclosing newspaper clippings, postcards, and legal documents presents Chicago barber Maestro Gerhard’s controversial fight with city hall to reproduce a drawing of the city’s iconic Picasso Sculpture. The Barber’s Shop reads like a legal brief on art copyright, a case study on the nature of image reproduction so central to the magazine’s own “original reproductions.”

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